I recently needed to do some testing with older versions of Linux Mint (for this) and was somewhat surprised to find that there were no official archives for this popular Linux distribution.
Thankfully, the Wayback Machine has archived almost every official torrent file and ISO image. So instead of catching up on sleep, I compiled archive links for every release (excluding any alphas, betas, or release candidates, except for the 1.0 beta).
Continue readingI recently did a fresh install of Ubuntu 24.04 on an older computer from 2010 and the process was unexpectedly difficult. The system would completely freeze a few minutes after booting from a live USB drive; the only possible next step was a hard power off. This would happen on every boot, but the time between boot and freeze would be different for each attempt. No matter what I did, the freeze would always happen.
Continue readingSometimes I wonder how you are
What is your life like now
What are you doing, who are you meeting
Now that I’m not there
Sometimes I wonder do you have
The same dreams you had before
Are they closer now, within your reach
Was I standing in the way
Sometimes I wonder if you know
How stuck I still am
I understand why you had to go on
Without me
Sometimes I wonder how you are
What is your life like now
I don’t want to wonder, I don’t want to know
I can’t
Sometimes, things need to be said. When someone is unaware of a problem, they should be informed, either directly or indirectly. To understate or overstate the problem would not be helpful. To assign blame when assigning blame is unnecessary would be hurtful.
Other times, things do not need to be said. When someone is aware of a problem, they do not need to be reminded or told again. To restate the problem would at best be a slight insult to the intelligence, at worst cause emotional harm.
Continue readingIn many ways, the lives of web developers have been getting easier these past few years. There are powerful tools that abstract away browser differences, allowing developers to use the latest technologies without worrying about older platforms. But the web has always been, and will continue to be, a messy place, and there is no way to abstract away the mess completely.
Which brings us to Safari. I am nowhere near the first person to say that Safari is the new IE, but consider this: Out of all of the major browsers (Firefox, Chrome, and let’s include Edge here for old time’s sake), Safari is the only one that is not an evergreen browser.
Continue readingThere is a question on Stack Overflow that I check from time to time, “Disable Auto Zoom in Input ‘Text’ tag – Safari on iPhone“.
“Someday,” I would say to myself, “I’ll post my solution and write a blog post as well.”
That day has arrived.
Non-English Linux users of Lightning, the calendar extension for the Mozilla Thunderbird email and news client, must be having a hard time these days.
Both Thunderbird and Lightning are available from the major Linux distributions’ software repositories. However, with the exception of Debian, the Lightning extension from these repos are available in English only.
Most non-English users at this point would look to Lightning from the Thunderbird add-ons site. Versions available here are only compatible with Thunderbird 52 or older though and stop working in Thunderbird 60.
Say you have brand new Ubuntu server with a few Samba shares (and Avahi for auto-discovery). Or perhaps you have upgraded your existing server to 17.10 or 18.04 LTS.
Welcome back to the heyday of Windows for Workgroups.
You open up Nautilus or Finder (or if you are unlucky, File Explorer) to test your Samba shares, and what do you see? Your meticulously chosen server name is in now in ALL CAPS. (Note that I haven’t confirmed this in File Explorer.)
This aggression will not stand (man).
I was visiting family in Toronto recently and wanted to send my friends some postcards.
Having grown up seeing cards of the city skyline in every discount or corner store, I wasn’t going to be purchasing any of those.
Luckily, there are folks out there making postcards that are a little bit more interesting.
This was a presentation I gave at the November 2011 Codeaholics meetup and at BarCamp Hong Kong 2011. The slides also have some brief notes.
