I wanted to post this here in case someone else experiences the same problem. I have an NTFS-formatted external USB drive attached to a Linux (Debian Wheezy) server via USB 2.0 and the transfer speeds had been extremely slow. Excruciatingly slow. I’m talking in the range of 25 – 55 KB/s which is basically really…

Everyone has a right to a peaceful home. Everyone has a right to comport their self in public freely without harassment. When these rights fail there are serious problems that occur at multiple levels all the way from the individual physiologic and psychologic to the familial, community, and beyond. A human being is like a…

One thing that makes Debian great is the Debian Security Announcements mailing list, which every administrator should subscribe to and consider messages from to be high-priority. I also noticed today that Arch Linux has a similar list. Another great tool for Debian is a package called cron-apt which notifies an administrator if there are updates. …

Most people nowadays have so much data that they need an external drive. I recently upgraded to a 6TB hybrid drive (Seagate STBD6000100) which was an upgrade from a couple older external drives I had and I’m really happy with the decision to upgrade. For an enclosure I highly recommend the Vantec NexStar HX which…

This was an interesting feature about the old and new character systems for written Chinese both on mainland China and in Hong Kong.

Yesterday something rare occurred. I was sitting in a cafe and next to me there was a woman working on her computer. I know its not entirely 100% appropriate, but, out of curiosity, I briefly glanced at her screen and noticed that she was reading some page that had to do with programming. I was…

I love Debian for its stability and would not change it for anything. However there are instances when I would like to run an updated version of something and there does not exist a backport for it. One such instance is the Transmission bittorent daemon. Since I’ve started using Transmission I really love it. The…

The default user home directory in Cygwin is /home/user however a much more logical home is the actual home that is the same as the Windows home: C:\Users\user The way to change the home directory users is simple: edit /etc/nssswitch.conf and change the following line: # db_home: /home/%U – to – db_home: /%H Make sure…

Many people have reported a problem with the spacebar toggle for the hand tool in Photoshop (and Elements) not working under Windows. Normally, when any other tool than the hand tool is selected, one can press and hold the spacebar down which temporarily toggles the hand tool on. This is so useful when you need…

There is an extremely annoying issue that cropped up as of the Thinkpad W520 (and similar-generation models based on forums) in which an important feature of the UltraNav Trackpoint buttons disappeared. The UltraNav actually has five buttons – a left and right button below the touchpad, and then left, middle, and right buttons above the…