LizQuilty.com » Informative

Dell Studio 17″ 1749 – Ubuntu linux suspend and hibernate problems

Liz Quilty — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 03:03:10 +0000

I have a really awesome Dell studio 17″ laptop. It works brilliantly with Ubuntu since the day i got it, however during an upgrade at sometime, it suddenly stopped suspending and hibernating.

This was annoying more than anything, but still fine. I hunted for months high and low for an answer, and could find nothing in any log files. I saw many complaints and bugfixes of which non seemed to work.

The machine suspended fine, it just never came back from that. It sat with a blank screen until i power cycled it to get it going.

So, i had 4 days off work, and decided to get to the bottom of this silly bug. I could only assume that it was something preventing it from resuming, either kernel, module, or software.

Again, nothing in the logs anywhere. Finally i stumbled over this bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/748994

In the comments the following fix worked brilliantly for me.

Steps:

1. Create new file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-suspend.conf with the following two lines:

blacklist firewire_core
blacklist firewire_ohci

2. Run: sudo update-initramfs -u

3. Reboot and check that the modules were not loaded by running: lsmod | grep firewire

4. Suspend the machine and bring it back up.

5. Hibernate the machine and bring it back up.

Both suspend and hibernate work now.

Syndicating your Google Plus Feed into your WordPress Blog

Liz Quilty — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 08:02:20 +0000

Somebody mentioned that it was hard/impossible to do this, and i know that a few people will want to. So i figured i would hunt about and see if it was possible, and it is! It’s not even too difficult!

First of all, go to http://plusfeed.appspot.com/ – it gives you an rss feed of all your public posts (this will only work for public posts sorry). My URL for my rss feed is http://plusfeed.appspot.com/114228869493885222559 , yours will look similar, just grab the id number from your profile page URL and add it after the domain.

Now go to your WordPress , login, to go Plugins > Add New . Search for and find the plugin called FeedWordPress and install/activate it.
Now it should show you your feed in that syndication tab, you can click the ‘update now’ button to load the last few posts.

Now you will notice a new menu bottom left called ‘Syndication’, click on that, then add in the URL above from plusfeed.appspot.com into the box named “New source”. It will confirm the look/feel, and add it.
Now you can click the ‘update’

Updating

Now click on the Feeds and Updates menu below it, look for the drop down box and choose ‘Look for updates after page loads’. You can do updates before the page loads, but this means if a person comes to your blog they are sitting waiting for the page to load whilst it does background grabbing of data.
From here you are away working, feel free to fiddle with other settings.

I found i prefer the link to go to the blog post rather than link to the google+ link, so i go to Posts and Links menu, and scroll down to Links, then choose ‘The local copy on this website’

Google Plus – Shorter URLs of your own

Liz Quilty — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 09:44:15 +0000

Google+ is here, and its great! the only problem is passing out the link to your profile… its huge!
Mine looks like this https://plus.google.com/u/0/114228869493885222559/

However, with some small html i have now made it this http://velofille.com/g+

If you have your own domain, this is fairly easy to do. Open a notepad or html editor, paste in something like this

Change the url= part to match the URL you have on google+ . Once done, upload that page then go to http://yourdomain.com/pagename.html . Most servers have modules which allow you to drop the .html so you can go to http://yourdomain.com/pagename and it will assume the .html and just work (pays to test this, each server is different).

For another way, you can use PHP also. I entered into my text editor

I named this g+.php and uploaded to my webserver, this allows me to just link to http://velofille.com/g+ (it checks for the suffix and assumes the .php).

In case none of these work, try using any other URL shortening service, some let you choose the name you give your link. http://is.gd/velofille works for mine also. To be noted, there is a google+ short linker which has been setup here http://gplus.to

Finding a Flash video in chrome – Saving files open but deleted

Liz Quilty — Thu, 19 May 2011 01:20:07 +0000

Flash movies are online, but sometimes i want to save some for offline usage so i can watch them later or offline (laptops) etc.
Often there is no way to save/download these files, but they are not held in the tmp dir or cache as they used to be due to changes in flash. In Linux this is easy to overcome using the following methods. This also works for any file that’s been deleted but is still running in memory.

First, you need to find what or where the file is. For flash try

velofille@apple:~$ sudo lsof |grep Flash
npviewer.  8774  velofille   16u      REG                9,1 253092771     396153 /tmp/FlashXXDfgiS7 (deleted)
velofille@apple:~$

Bingo, i found my file! Of course the file /tmp/FlashXXDfgiS7 is deleted, so i cant just copy it like the good old days. Now i can copy that file from the proc filesystem using the following

cat /proc/8774/fd/16 > movie.flv

Now to breakdown where i got those parms from. The 8774 is the pid and 2nd number on the line, the 16 was from the ’16u’ which is the file descriptor . So when you do your lsof you can change those according to what you have open.
To find files open from a particular app, use ps to find the pid, then use

lsof -p 8774

Output is something like this

chrome  26572 velofille  mem    REG                9,1  1285536   1836431 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libX11.so.6.3.0
chrome  26572 velofille  mem    REG                9,1   141088   3146088 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ld-2.13.so
chrome  26572 velofille  DEL    REG               0,16           34257353 /dev/shm/.com.google.chrome.i96CPN
chrome  26572 velofille  DEL    REG               0,16           34257687 /dev/shm/.com.google.chrome.W9M2O5
chrome  26572 velofille  mem    REG                9,1   377352   4587538 /opt/google/chrome/libppGoogleNaClPluginChrome.so
chrome  26572 velofille    0r   CHR                1,3      0t0      5778 /dev/null
chrome  26572 velofille    1u   REG               0,20   953173   5767170 /home/velofille/.xsession-errors
chrome  26572 velofille    2u   REG               0,20   953173   5767170 /home/velofille/.xsession-errors
chrome  26572 velofille    3u   REG               0,20   953173   5767170 /home/velofille/.xsession-errors
chrome  26572 velofille    4r  FIFO                0,8      0t0  34257284 pipe
chrome  26572 velofille    5u  unix 0xffff88002c61f740      0t0  34257940 socket
chrome  26572 velofille    6u  sock                0,7      0t0  34257281 can't identify protocol
chrome  26572 velofille    7u   CHR                1,9      0t0      5783 /dev/urandom

The only ones you can take like this are the ones with a file descriptor to play with.

Good luck, an have fun!

KatiKati Ukulele Fest! April 1st-3rd

Liz Quilty — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 09:27:34 +0000

Found this today http://www.culturevulture.co.nz/blog/ukulele/festivals-events/katikati-ukulele-festival-2011/

After enquiring it actually looks pretty darned decent!, heres a few more details

A month out and planning is well advanced, to make the Katikati Ukulele Festival a fun weekend for everyone. A children’s art competition to decorate ukuleles is underway. Preparations for the festival depend on local support and willing volunteers, and so far we have had a good response.

Thank you to Creative Tauranga, who featured our festival in the February issue of Creative Beat.Also to Jacquie at Katch Katikati who has spread the message far and wide.Fundraising, to make the festival affordable for all, is still going on.

Let us know if you can help. We still need a sponsor to photocopy songs sheets for festival participants.Ukes-A-Plenty have been busy busking and performing at various functions. We busked for the Red Cross Christchurch appeal, at the weekly produce market on Friday evening.

We are making it a weekend long festival, to encourage people to come to town and stay overnight.Friday, April 1 we have a free music jam at Katikati RSA (on main highway, at south end of town.) Delicious meals are available from 5.30pm and music from about 7pm. Just join in, or get up for a number. Any instruments welcome.

Saturday, April 2. Main festival is in Katikati Memorial Hall, from 12.30pm till about 5pm. Gold coin entry. Bring your ukes along, for a sing and play long with Mr Ukulele, Kevin Fogarty, workshops from Big Muffin Serious Band on strumming then plucking, followed by an open mike session.Big Muffin Serious Band will be in concert from 5.30 till about 7pm. Entry $5, school children free. www.muffin.net.nz

Sunday, April 3 at Athenreee Homestead, Athenree, (just off SH2 on road to Waihi Beach.) There will be a morning tea, homestead tours and ukulele entertainment from Ukes-A-Plenty from 10am till about 12. A fundraiser for the worthwhile restoration of Adela Stewart’s homestead, with entry, tour and yummy morning tea just $10. See their website for details. www.athenreehomestead.org.nz

Comfortable accommodation is available at Sapphire Springs Holiday Park, www.sapphiresprings.net.nz/ Just a few kms from town in motel type cabins and with lovely clean hot pools, also at Athenree Holiday Park, or various B&B’s, Motels etc. See websites for KK info. www.katikati.org.nz or www.katikati.co.nz

The Children’s art fest is being organised by Linda Ojala, lindaojala@hotmail.com. Teachers at Katikati primary and year 7/8 at the college are participating with their students. All the ECE centres in town have the details, as well as Pahoia and Matahui schools. Any other children can pick up an entry form and ukulele template at the information centre. Entries need to be in by Wednesday March 16.

We have a lovely red Makala ukulele, (thanks to Music Oasis, Waihi) a designer uke bag, with tuner, two uke books and a free beginner lesson (if needed), which is being raffled, along with a spectacular food basket and laundry bucket raffle. Spot prizes, to make the day more fun for all ages, are being gratefully received.

Financial support is also very welcome.So if you can help we would love to hear from you.Please contact Christine Donehue phone, 0274 809 261, (07) 5495827 or camellia@pcconnect.co.nz if you would like to help, or for more information.