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A few nights ago I watched Avatar for the second time in 3-D, in an effort to qualify the difference between regular 3D and IMAX 3D. The difference was astounding, both in the picture quality due to the 10x resolution jump IMAX frames provide, the super-sound and the fact that many scenes seemed to [...]

Installing Google Gears is a piece of cake:
#apt-get install gears

This allows for offline blogging allowing you to make good use of authoring moments away from the Internet.

The interesting part is that Google nor Wordpress make it that evident that gears is available via the packaging system for Ubuntu.  The typical links on their respective [...]

Better to be upgraded and safe then sorry

Today I was following up on some harmless messages I have been seeing on some iSCSI Initiators I have setup that provide disk to a number of ESX servers over a Gigabit LAN. It appears that there may be some limitations running the newest flavour of ESX with current IET. One recent [...]

A few years ago Toronto Hydro replaced my household hydro meter with a digital one (aka Smart Meter). Since logging in initially a few years back, I receive periodic updates reminding me of the fact that I can review my consumption levels and the impact of Time-Of-Use (TOU) billing online. Out of sheer [...]

It seems that Virtualbox 3.1.x now implements a quick check to see if the hardware virtualization extensions are in use before launching AMD-V enabled guests. There seem to be two key issues with this change

Buggy BIOS’s that do not clear a VERR_SVM_IN_USE flag properly on boot
KVM modules that set the VERR_SVM_IN_USE flag when they [...]

Recently somebody asked me about key verification and signing after noting that emails from some sources (in this case, the Debian Security team) contain key signatures for verification, and that by default the Evolution email client was not validating them. The simple answer is that by default Seahorse, the default key manager for [...]

Some dialogue on steak took place at a recent family dinner with the brothers, wives and girlfriends. In my experience, when preparing steak for guests there is typically a confirmation of preference, even if it is previously known, as a matter of politeness and/or courtesy from the chef. If there is more [...]