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Paul's Time Sink

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Moved XM Commander

Paul Westbrook | 08 May, 2005 20:42

Repositioned XM Commander The velcro holding the XM Commander display in our Odyssey got loose, so I reattached it with some stronger velcro. I also took the opportunity to position it better. Now the buttons are more accessible and the display is easer to see from the drivers seat.

Unfortunately, the strongest velcro that I could find is white, so it is a little more visible than I would have liked.

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Phone powered devices

Paul Westbrook | 08 May, 2005 20:06

These telco powered devices are pretty funny, but also interesting. These are devices that are powered by the electrical current on telephone lines.  I assume that most of these work by having a battery, and using the phone current to trickle charge the battery.

I think that the funniest product is the telco powered vibrator.

[via MAKE: blog]

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Make your own ring tones

Paul Westbrook | 08 May, 2005 19:22

The April 29th episode of the Make podcast, mentions smashTheTONES.  This is a free service that lets you upload your own music to use a ring tone for your cell phone.  It also lets you upload images as well.

I tried to use this with my Motorola T730c, but this phone only supports uploading images though this service.  Also, I am not able to see the images on my phone, but I think that this is caused because I don't pay for Verizon's GetPIX service

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Automatically install malicious Dashboard widget

Paul Westbrook | 08 May, 2005 18:54

This is an interesting web page that describes how a web page can automatically install a Dashboard widget.  It also looks like Apple does not provide a way for you to remove an installed Dashboard widget. 

This web page installs a moderately malicious widget.  In order to remove it, you will have to manually remove it and restart the Dashboard.

Apple need to prevent these types of attacks.

[via Slashdot]

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Potential server problems

Paul Westbrook | 08 May, 2005 18:16

Twice today, my server got unresponsive where I had to turn it off, and then turn it back on.  When it was in this state, I noticed that the hard drive was thrashing. After rebooting it the first time, I noticed that apache died because it wasn't able to allocate memory.

I think that one of the processes is leaking memory so bad that it eventually uses all of the swap space.  I don't think that this problem is caused by anything external, as I can see a log of all of the connections though my firewall.  Now I just need to find out what is leaking the memory.

Update:  I found out what causing the problem.  I had installed version 1.3.0 of munin.  Since I had a cron job that got the statistics every 5 minutes and it appears that some of the processes were not finishing, so eventually the computer would run out of memory.    I updated munin to 1.3.2, and it doesn't seem to have this problem.

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