If you don't have Windows around anymore, and you need to flash your BIOS, you need to figure out a way to make a bootable floppy.

If you don't have a floppy, you can make a bootable CD.

Exim4's docs need some work, especially the split config.

First, you need to make a new config file /etc/exim4/conf.d/main/000_localmacros

Then, in the file:

I had to send out some mass emails, and because the site had been taken off the collective server, the only installed, configured copy of PHPList I had was on an internal server.

I was testing a new product called Mailarchiva, and I misunderstood the instructions. The upshot was that a mailbox full of messages was moved into Mailarchiva, and I wanted to restore them to the mailbox.

After doing some research on the subject, I was totally confused about Cisco terminal cables. These are just regular serial cables, with with all kinds of weird "cisco-y" features. The big tutorials on the web really confuse the issue by trying to cover every possible type of cable.

It's pretty simple to set up Skype (dynamic) on Ubuntu 9.10 (beta). I think all the 32bit libraries are installed by default. If they aren't, check out Daryl Dawkins' page about running it on Fedora.

The one oddity I experienced is that you need to run the skype program from within the skype directory. The following script does that - my Skype is installed in ~/bin, my personal bin folder.

A couple odd things happened recently. I was trying to set up Mailscanner on an Ubuntu box, and when I got to the project's site, it said to uninstall the Ubuntu package, and install their package. Lacking time, I didn't do that, but it made me think, "what's the point then?" I wanted the distro version because it updates itself automatically.

The same thing happened with NetBeans. The user-contributed Ubuntu package integration crashed a lot. The Sun version didn't.

GiSTEQ sells a GPS data recorder called the TripBook that is powered by a car's cig lighter. The magic is in the software that figures out the distances. Just to see, I tried to get Linux to talk to it. It did, and it worked as a GPS, spitting out NMEA sentences.

This is one of those problems that has been solved, but, it's been solved in incomplete ways so many times that these not-too-useful answers outnumber the useful answers, totally messing up web searches. This consequently seeds the idea that this is an intractable problem! Even at stackoverflow, they say it's really tough.

This is the opposite of so-called "collective intelligence". It's collective stupidity.

This script is being used to move files around in a Maildir. A bunch of spam goes into the "new" directory.

I'm trying to get WDS working between an WRT54GL running OpenWRT, and a Motorola WR850G running stock firmware.

This outlines how to change web hosts with minimal downtime. It won't go step by step, or explain, too much.

If you're cheap and have a low-end, generic MP3 player that will also display text files, you can read your RSS feeds on it with the help of this script.

The office was experiencing more spam, with a disproportionate effect on mobile phones. The existing spam catching gauntlet was operating well for desktop clients, but mobile phone users weren't benefiting because most scanning and removal ocurred after the messages got into the inbox. This meant that, often, spam was forwarded to the mobile phone before it got detected.

My abatement strategy was to filter mail before the message got to the mail server. One option is an external mail filter, like Postini. My choice, described below, was to set up Spamassassin on an in-house Linux box.

I'm starting to learn EXIM. It's the default mail transport on Debian, so I have made a Spamassassin filter with it. The install was simple, but the configuration is arcane.