Archive for category howto’s

Android ringtones notifications alarms resetting reverted or lost after reboot

You just added a few ringtones of your own to your android device, but after each reboot you lose them and they are set to something else, or muted altogether? Just like something was resetting them, or they were not saved correctly? Well, most probably it’s because you copied the MP3′s on your SDcard, under [...]

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Cache PHP to gzipped static html pages using htaccess redirect

No matter the server performance, the fastest kind of website for a visitor is the one with static HTML pages; this way the server just has to upload existing data to the browser instead of starting the PHP compiler, open a connection to MySQL, fetch data, format the page and only after that send it. [...]

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Redirect mobile and desktop users to the correct CSS via .htaccess file

The winning solution for a mobile compliant website is to have a single HTML structure for every visitor, and just choose the appropriate CSS to render the page correctly for both worlds; so, I’m not speaking here about a /mobile/ folder under your website root, nor any ?mobile query string, but about the exact same [...]

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Zip MySQL database backup with PHP and send as email attachment

I was a happy user of MySQLDumper until a while ago, when my shared hosting upgraded to the cloud architecture and latest PHP version; with that, some modules for PERL went missing and I was left without a viable backup solution (MySQLDumper PHP approach uses a javascript reloading routine which is superslow and is not [...]

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Low power consumption server with integrated car battery UPS

I wrote in another post how I simply attached a car battery to a standard market UPS to give it even more juice; in that occasion, several users commented how I committed several shortcomings regarding the assembly. Also taking into consideration that comments, this morning I rearranged the power supply of my home server to [...]

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Backup installed packages list in Ubuntu and restore via Synaptic

To backup your Ubuntu install you don’t just need to keep a copy of the /home folder (or partition), since you would still need to re-fetch all the packages you installed, and that can be time consuming, especially if you carefully chose the applications to add to the system. Synaptic already offers a similar function, [...]

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Zoneminder can’t chmod /dev/videoN, operation not permitted, and not starting at boot

Zoneminder has reached its current peak with version 1.24.2 since quite some time, so you can finally get it off the official repositories of Ubuntu, instead of finding then the older 1.23 as it was at the time of Jaunty, when you had to compile off the source. Running configure and make install comes with [...]

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Clean middle drain hole in Rover 75 (ECU flooding in non-UK models)

Credit where it’s due: I started off with this thread, where the tutorial is for UK models (supposedly it’s easier to access the middle hole from there). My Rover is a non-UK model, with steering wheel on the left (I live in Italy after all), so I had to follow a little more steps to [...]

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Rover 75 water leakage

Until now I have experienced two kinds of water leakage in my Rover 75. One of them is (supposedly) causing a failure of the fuel pump power output, so 99% of the times the fuel pumps (both under bonnet and in tank) receive no power and the car isn’t able to start; this leakage is [...]

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Virtualbox bridged network adapter driver slows down LAN speed

When I upgraded from WiFi to a physical CAT5E cable running between my router in the other room and this desktop, I jumped from 2-3MB/s tops (1MB/s usually, sometimes less) to 11-12MB/s speeds during file transfers from my home server. Lately I was checking that the speed to download some fansubs off the server got [...]

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