Widening a blogger/blogspot blog

I wanted to display high-res pictures on a blog but the standard width was only ~500 pixels or so.

To widen the blog, from the blog page, click "Design", which will bring you to Template settings. Click "Customize", then "Adjust Widths".

To post 800 pixel wide pictures, I made my blog 1140 pixels, with a sidebar of 240 pixels.

When embedding youtube videos, I make the size 800x450 pixels.

Gmail draining battery on android phone

I have a fairly new Samsung Note 2 phone running Android v4.1.2. One day I noticed that the battery was draining much more quickly than usual. (It usually lasts over two full days without a charge but recently it didn't even make it through one day.)

I went to Settings->Battery and it showed that Gmail was using 80% of the battery. This is weird because it's usually the screen or Android OS that consumes all the battery.

In the Gmail app, I also noticed that it was constantly refreshing on the lower right.

Google searching led me here, which recommended going to Settings->Application manager->All->GMail and clicking "Clear data". It was previously using several GB (I didn't record the exact amount) but after clearing, it was back down to ~13MB. Pre-clearing, the cache was also several GB and after it was ~2MB.

Clearing the data solved my problem.

Using different ssh keys for different github accounts

Mostly followed the advice from here (but it's not quite right --- see the comments).

(Note: I didn't follow the github recommended HTTPS method because I didn't feel like installing the credential helper app.)

Here are the general steps:

• Create a new ssh key (see here for help). I named mine id_rsa_githubusername

• Edit ssh config file (mine was at ~/.ssh/config) and add a new Host entry for each github account, ie:

Host githubusernamegit
    HostName github.com
    User git
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa_githubusername

• clone with the command: 

git clone githubusernamegit:githubusername/repositoryname

setting up transmission completed torrent script

Tried to get transmission to call a script on download completion but it wasn't working. Checked /var/log/syslog and saw that the script was blocked by apparmor, specifically the /usr/lib/firefox/firefox{,*[^s][^h]}//sanitized_helper profile.

Running sudo apparmor_status will also show which profiles have been triggered and by which processes.

Turns out the problem exists when transmission is launched by clicking a link in firefox. If I start transmission from the command line, the script runs successfully!

Using transmission 2.51 (13280) and Ubuntu Precise 12.04.1 LTS

Setting up VLC http interface

Using VLC 1.0.6 (Goldeneye) and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

Tools -> Preferences (Show settings: All) -> Interface -> Main interface -> Extra interface modules: check "HTTP remote control interface"

Restart VLC and controls should be available at http://127.0.0.1:8080 on the local machine.

To enable control from remote (but still network-local) machines, edit /usr/share/vlc/http/.hosts (note: editing /usr/share/vlc/lua/http/.hosts did not work!)

Update: Updated to Ubuntu 12.04.1 (precise) and VLC 2.0.3 Twoflower and now the hosts file is at /usr/share/vlc/lua/http/.hosts

Notes on .hosts file format:
To get enable access from non-local machines, I uncommented this line in the .hosts file:

192.168.0.0/16

According to this guy, it is "equivalent to the IP range 192.168.0.0 thru 192.168.255.255"

Update (2015-11-10): Set up web remote for VLC (v2.2.1) for Windows 7. Followed the instructions here.

Differences:

On Windows 7 (vlc 2.2.1), the check box is labeled "web" (not "HTTP remote control interface"). 

Also, you must enter a password at Tools -> Preferences (Show settings: All) -> Interface -> Main interfaces -> Lua: Password. The password used by the vlc remote app is "vlcremote". 

I did not have to edit a .hosts file for the Windows version of vlc.

installing a new video card (upgrading from integrated video)

In the BIOS, in the northbridge configuration, switched video from IGD (internal graphics device) to PEG/IGD (PEG = PCI Express Graphics). Other option was PCI.

Ubuntu seemed to auto detect things after that. The desktop didnt quite fit on the screen but changing my Samsung tv to "Just Scan" seemed to fix things.

XFX PV-T96O-YHFC GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150570

Build Transmission from source

http://trac.transmissionbt.com/wiki/Building

On Unix

Prerequisites

Ubuntu users: The packages you need are: build-essential automake autoconf libtool pkg-config libcurl4-openssl-dev intltool libxml2-dev libgtk2.0-dev libnotify-dev libglib2.0-dev. After you install those you can skip this section.

If this is your first time compiling on Unix, you'll need a few basic tools:

• gcc
• libtool
• gettext 0.14.1 or newer
• intltool 0.23 or newer

If you're planning to build from SVN:

• automake 1.9 or newer
• autoconf 2.54 or newer

Once you've got the basics out of the way, here are the libraries that Transmission needs to have in order to build:

• OpenSSL 0.9.8 or newer, preferably ssl or gnutls support.
• libcurl 7.16.3 or newer
• GTK+ 2.6 or newer (only needed by the GTK+ gui)
• libnotify 0.4.4 (optional, and only needed by the GTK+ gui)
• DBUS 0.70 (optional, and only needed by the GTK+ gui)

RPM users: you'll also need to install the corresponding -devel packages.

Building from a tarball

$ tar xvjf transmission-1.40.tar.bz2
$ cd transmission-1.40
$ ./configure -q && make -s
$ su (if necessary for the next line)
$ make install