Suggesting Changes to Google Places
This post explains how to update the categorization of a business in Google Places.
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Unmounting Time Machine Drives
I love Time Machine. I've been in the habit of doing full disk backups, but that won't save me from accidentally deleting a file unless I notice before the full disk backup is made. With time machine I'm protected. I still do a full disk back up from time to time so that I have something to boot from and then restore from Time Machine on if my main drive goes belly up. One thing I've noticed: most mornings when I close up my laptop and take it with me for the day, the Time Machine backup disk won't
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Fixing MacBook Pro Sleep Problems
One of the things I loved about my Powerbook was that it slept--and woke--reliably. I would go weeks without rebooting my machine and I bragged about it often to the poor saps who had to use XP on their laptops. I haven't been singing the praises of OS X stability as loudly lately because ever since I went to the Mac Book Pro (MBP), my machine has had issues with sleeping and waking to the point that it probably got rebooted once a day. Well, no more! I tried something a few weeks ago that has made my MBP
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Installing Rails on Fedora
I'm building a virtual machine (VMWare flavor) for use with Rails development. After installing Fedora, there were a few things I had to do to get everything ready. I thought I'd take a minute and document them in one play for the next poor soul. First, I don't know what I do wrong, but the GUI auto-update feature seems more trouble than it's worth. I like doing it manually. So the first thing to do is: sudo /usr/bin/yum -y update I've found that the Yum system can get corrupted and hang (I think I do this by force quitting
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P2V: How To Make a Physical Linux Box Into a Virtual Machine
Over the last four days, I've been exploring how to convert physical Linux boxes into virtual machines. VMWare has a tool for doing P2V conversions, as they're called, but as far as I can tell it only works for Windows physical machines and for converting various flavors of virtual machines into others. I've had a Linux machine that I've used in my CS462 (Large Distributed Systems) class for years. The Linux distro has been updated over the years, but the box is an old 266MHz Pentium with 512Mb of RAM. Overall, it's done surprisingly well--a testament to the small
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Building an Adapter for the iPhone Jack
As you know, if you have an iPhone, the headphone jack is recessed. This was apparently done for esthetic reasons: pulling it out would have resulted in a big bulge--not something Steve Jobs would approve of. I happen to have some accessories that don't work with the iPhone because of this little design decision. There are adapters, but they are bulky, stiff, ugly, and expensive. So, I decided to make my own. The results were OK--not perfect. Here's what you need: A pair of earbuds with a plug that fits into the recessed socket. I had an old pair
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How LCD Screens Work
The other day someone asked my how an LCD projector worked compared to an LCD screen on your laptop. Their general impression was that the laptop screen was like a bunch of LEDs, so how could you "project" that? I didn't really know. I knew that it was backlit and that's why you could project it, but had no idea how it worked. I asked Kelly Flanagan and he didn't really know either, but he sent me this really good tutorial showing how it works--interactive and everything. Apparently this is just one in a whole collection called Einstien's Legacy.
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