Tag: debian

Hiking Epic Rap : The Background

9 June 2014

So you've seen the Epic Hiking Rap, and now you want the background? Are you serious or is this a joke? I'll leave you to apply Poe's Law. Where did this start? For years, the University of Manchester Hiking Club had a tradition where a specific longstanding club member would write and present a poem […]

Think: blinklight

17 March 2014

Sometimes it's hard not be impressed by small hacks that seem so obvious, yet you'd have never thought of til you saw it. Lenovo/IBM's line of Thinkpad laptops have traditionally have a "ThinkLight", an LED, located on the top edge of the display, illuminating the keyboard to allow typing in poor lighting conditions. I blissfully used […]

Scaling my blog for high traffic – WordPress + Apache + Varnish + Nginx

12 November 2012

On the 3rd of October, after some quite high load, my website crashed and went offline. Given I'd just gone to Sweden, this was a bit awkward. Looking at the stats – on the 2nd of October it was getting on average 5 page loads *per second* – except it wasn't evenly spread traffic – […]

How to script the recording of your favourite online radio show

5 November 2012

I had a problem: I wanted to record my friend's online radio show – it happened at a time when I wasn't around to listen, but I was actually, genuinely interested in listening, and the station didn't have any kind of podcast, or "listen again" system. Linux/Ubuntu actually has a pretty nice gui called Streamtuner […]

#UnitySucks. Sorry buddy, it just ain't working out.

19 October 2011

*brrring* *brrring*. Today I got a call. It's my dad. "Hi Tim, I just had an update box pop up on our Ubuntu computer so I updated like you told me and it's all changed. WTF?" My parents have a Lenovo Thinkcentre with Ubuntu on it. It runs very nicely and has worked really well […]