sewing machine timing

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.

disabling tap-to-click on synaptic touchpad in ubuntu

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        "MaxTapTime"        "0"

to the appropriate section of my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file so that it looks like this:

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier    "Synaptics Touchpad"
    Driver        "synaptics"
    Option        "SendCoreEvents"    "true"
    Option        "Device"        "/dev/psaux"
    Option        "Protocol"        "auto-dev"
    Option        "HorizEdgeScroll"    "0"
    Option        "MaxTapTime"        "0"
EndSection

notes for the week of 2007-09-24

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 then there’s the overhead of closing the issue.

The Allied Media Conference is taking proposals for some web development. Josh asked me about Drupal vs. Joomla, and I’m not that familiar with Joomla. This thread seemed to offer some insight.

kdenlive is the software I started using to play around with video editing on linux.

I’ve long wanted to be able to do a substitution or other command on a visual block. It turns out that there is a vim script called vis.vim to help you do this.

I read mail using a lot of different clients. So, I wanted to seperate my mail filtering rules from my mail client. Imapfilter does the trick and though it’s configuration language is daunting at first glance, it’s not too bad.

I was wondering how to drop all tables in a MySQL DB from the command line:

mysqldump -u username -ppassword –add-drop-table –no-data database | grep ^DROP | mysql -u username -ppassword database

worked fine.

potshots

When my friend Leanne was passing through town last month, we went for a short hike around Lake Griffey.  While we were hiking, she mentioned that she really liked a comic called Potshots and that she was disappointed that her local paper had stopped carrying the comic.  Luckily, the comics are available on the web.  Leanne isn’t super internet-connected, so I offered to compile some of the potshots and send them to her in the mail.  I used wget to download them, but I needed to find a way to print the images many-to-a-page.

I eventually came upon using ImageMagick‘s montage command.  This worked pretty well for me:

C:\Documents and Settings\ghing\Desktop\potshots>U:\ImageMagick-6.2.6-Q16\montag
e.exe -tile 2×5 -adjoin *.gif -geometry 300×190 sheet.png

Then I could just view and print the composite images in firefox, provided I made my margins small and zoomed in first.

Potshots is pretty interesting.  The artist who draws them was once called “history’s only full time, professional published eppigramist.” The black and white illustrations with clever phrases definitely have this feeling of antiquity to them.  The sayings have a strange tone as well, that can be heartfealt but also sarcastic.   So, they come off as a weird hybrid of Family Circle and Edward Gorey.

backing up my mail with isync

In the event that I switch mail providers, its good to have a backup. I found the isync program that seems like it will do a good job with this. Here is the command line I used to do the backup:

isync -1 -M mail_backup/ -L -s imap.myisp.com -u imap_username -a