the reality tunnel

As part of my work at the Center for Research Libraries, I am investigating different Constituent Resource Management (CRM) systems.  One of the options is CiviCRM, a popular FLOSS CRM.  As CRL is, in large part, a membership organization, I wanted to see if it was possible to represent the basic information that we keep [...]

There are some interesting backup tools for system backups (Time Machine) but I want to just be able to copy and verify a directory (and its children).  I’ve heard that the commercial product Retrospect provides copy and verify functionality, but I’m cheap.
This is the method that I used.  I’d be interested on hearing feedback about [...]

I got a new MacBook from work and need to migrate files from my old Dell notebook running Xubuntu Linux.  Luckily, I had recovered a drive from a bricked machine that was donated to pages that I could use to transfer the files.
I don’t like the Fat32 file system, so I formatted the external drive [...]

I’m running debian lenny/sid with  kernel 2.6.26-1 on my workstation and for a while, my audio hasn’t been working in most applications (I was most annoyed by the lack of sound in flash), though it has been working in amarok.  I was getting error messages like this when trying to do audio playback.  These particular [...]

Having a job at the university means that I have access to hardware that I can’t afford to buy for myself.  My coworker was getting a new video card for his workstation and they just ordered me one too.  The card is an Nvidia GeForce 8400 GS PCI Express card manufactured by Chaintech.
Downloading the Driver
I [...]

Chiara’s sewing machine is broken.  The needle seems to collide with the hook.  It looks like the timing and hopefully the internet can save the day on this one.  It costs $60 to repair a sewing machine and I’m sure not much more to buy a new one.
Link to sewusa.com page on adjusting timing.

I was leant a Dell Latitude D810 that has a Synaptics touchpad.  Eventually, I had to admit that the tap-to-click setting was a little to sensitive and kind of annoying (most frequently, I accidently clicked things in my bookmarks toolbar in Firefox).  I found that I could disable the tap-to-click feature by adding the line:

 Option   [...]

Search and Replace in Multiple Files

perl -pi -w -e ’s/search/replace/g;’ *.php

from How to do a search and replace over multiple files

Scroll Up/Down: Page Up/Page Down keys

Tim says to check out Kaati rolls while I’m traveling.
This wiki page has info on how to configure e-mail integration in eventum which Boxcar uses to handle tech trouble tickets. I wanted to turn off auto issue creation because we get a lot of e-mails that don’t neccessarily want to become issues and [...]