Merry Christmas - Love & Peace to you all.

Every year I can't help but be thankful for how lucky I am.  I have wonderful friends and family, we share an elaborate meal and trade gifts.  There is always a few fights / bickering, but we're together and we love each other regardless.  I've had a blessed life in many regards.

Yet here I am, Christmas yet again and all I can think of, is all the people unable to celebrate Christmas with their family, friends and loved ones.

To all those suffering, in hospital, unable to make it home and to those brave soldiers stationed away from those they're closest to this year.  Merry Christmas, my thoughts and love go out to you all.

My wish will always be to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless and to stop all conflict.  Our world has the potential to be a beautiful place, let's work together as one to achieve that!

Merry Christmas.

Easy Cable Labels and Organisation!

 

Untangle This! - The Worlds Worst Cable Clutters!

Domestic cable mess?

Are these familiar sights?

Crawling down the back of the entertainment unit or venturing under the desk, to add / remove yet another electricity draining item of technological DOOM can strike fear into even to the most organised technologist!!!

Where does this cable come from?  Where does it go?  What does it belong to? HELP!!!

There are so many cable identification systems available to us, for a price.

Stick'nGo

Cable Clips

Kableflags

Tie on Cables

While wandering around the world of Google Plus, I came upon an incredibly ingenious post by Bree Weasner that solves all your cable confusion woes sorted, using items that can be found in your kitchen!

With the addition of a few bread tags, you can label and easily identify which cable belongs to what in an instant!

I can not believe I never thought of this sooner.  A perfectly easy Recycle, Reuse, Reduce solution to all your messy cable issues!

8bit Friday!

I know I know, it's been a little quite on the blog for the last week or so, let's just say I'm under the pump at work.  Not really much time for developing my open source skills :-(

Anyway, it's getting so close to Christmas, I'm stunned at how quickly this year has gone by.

8-Bit "Let It Snow":

On a more charitable note... Ignited Digital Choir are donating $0.05 per view to charity!

Ignited Digital Choir:

8bit Friday!!

This weeks 8bit Friday youtube is more on the geeky then retro gamer style.

Fun with GLiP Projects!

GLiP Project - Demo

And just because it's getting to that time of the year.  Here is a fantastic 8-bith themed synchronised Christmas lights display.  I just love that they have an FM station playing the music the lights are synched with so you can enjoy the display from comfort of your car!

Rymdreglage- 8-bit trip! Christmas lights dance with Light-O-Rama 2009-

Ubuntu 11.10 issues with Wifi.

In July / August this year I installed Ubuntu 10.10 on my Thinkpad, I noticed when I logged in that the wireless wasn't working.  After some research I discovered that my Thinkpad is running a Broadcom BCM43224 wireless network card and that there were a number of known issues with the Broadcom drivers.  Luckily for me there was a patch available that would solve all my problems automagically, took a few hours and a ethernet connection but I managed it.

I recently upgraded Ubuntu to 11.10 and haven't had much of a chance to play around on it.  I did notice on Sunday night that the wifi wasn't working, ethernet was working fine which is why I hadn't noticed the issue earlier.

Deja Vu much?  After the hoops I had to jump through to get wireless working on Ubuntu 10.10 I couldn't believe I was having the same issues in Ubuntu 11.10...  

This time there is no patch sitting waiting to be downloaded that will automagically fix the wifi for me.  After some research I found a few "work arounds" (could someone explain to me please why we have to find work arounds for known issues?) 

The work arounds suggested deleting modules and installing other ones, although the work arounds had been well received I don't entirely feel comfortable jumping in and deleting modules and bits left, right and centre unless I know what it is that they do.  I initiated a game of 20 questions with Mr. O.G.

Problem:
Thinkpad running Broadcom BCM43224 wireless addapter, Ubuntu detects the wireless network card but proceeds to install the wrong drivers.

Solution:
Add bcma to the blacklist file created by bcmwl-kernel-source's postinst script.

• Edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf to include bcma

This will enable the wl module to run properly.

For full information feel free to have a look at the Ubuntu bug report raised ~8weeks ago & suggested bcmwl-kernel-source patch information.

What bothers me most is that this bug effects a multitude of people and has been reported several times.  I could understand that it could be considered a low priority issue and that valuable resources are being allocated to more pressing matters, but seriously accompanying this bug reported 8weeks ago was a patch to fix it... It would take very little to review, approve and make said patch available... my mind boggles!

8Bit Friday Video!

Yes I know it's that time of the week again I haven't forgotten, just running late!!!  Because I'm running late I'm going to give you 2 for the price of 1!!

This clip combines so many of my favourite things, 8bit music, gaming, lego & stop motion animation!

8-Bit Trip-

This second clip has been floating around G+ and I thought it was pretty brilliant.  Could be a fun new hobby?

Mario enters the real world-

EUREKA! Desktop Chaos Cured!

Finally some time to play around on Ubuntu 11.10.  Wasn't all fun and games, solved an annoying "issue" I'd been having created a few weeks ago.

For a reason unbeknownst to me, all folders in the home directory were displaying on my desktop.  The desktop folder was empty so I could not for the life of me work out what was going on...

I did note that the mysterious appearance of folders on my desktop commenced after changing all the folder names from capital letters to lower case letters.

Google is my friend!  Had a quick look at ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs

Shall we play a game of spot the difference?

<<

This is what my file looked like... oops!

>>

This is how it looks now... yay!

So it turns out that, when I renamed my folders using "mv" the user-dirs.dirs wasn't happy and automatically selected my desktop as it's default directory path for everything!  Most annoying.

Very simple solution, for a very simple mistake.

"Why are my folders appearing on my desktop - Ubuntu"