For years, I’ve received emails that have capital ‘J’s thrown in at the end of seemingly random sentences. It’s never been a big deal, but it has always baffled me.
For example, I just received an email that contained the following bit:
Ha, I didn’t mean to reply to everyone! I am glad I didn’t say anything bad. J Thank you for…
Every so often, I see some search result that led to my site that piques my interest. I think I’ll post about these when I see them and add them to my new category: Interesting Search. Every so often, I’ll select one of these search queries and try my best to provide the content that I believe that person was looking for.
To kick off Interesting Search, we have the search query “cleaning soda off a motherboard”. I have to say that I find this search both funny and very concerning at the same time. In all seriousness, having soda on your motherboard is a very bad situation. While I’ll focus on soda and motherboards, the information I provide here is valuable for anyone who has spilled any type of liquid or powdered chemical on an electronic device.
So what dangers does soda pose to electronics?
A visitor to the site mentioned that he has the same laptop as I have yet is running Linux Mint rather than Ubuntu. He said that all the help that I was offering for getting Ubuntu to run well on the Studio 17 worked for him in Linux Mint except the headphone fix didn’t work. So, I dug in to see if I could find a solution.
I installed Linux Mint on my Dell Studio 1735 two nights ago and got the headphone jacks working successfully. Here’s step-by-step what I did:
Last night I needed to modify one of my partitions from inside Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex (8.10). I quickly realized that the familiar Partition Editor was nowhere to be found. I was quite stumped and looked through all the menus and didn’t find it. There is a simple reason for why I didn’t find it, it’s no longer installed by default on newer Ubuntu releases.
Fortunately, adding the Partition Editor, its true name is GParted, is extremely easy with package management.
Now that GParted is installed, you can access it via System > Administration > Partition Editor.
Happy partitioning.
Here’s a quick tip on storing a number of files into a single archive file quickly and easily in Ubuntu. The instructions will also work for those who use other distros as long as they are using Gnome and Nautilus.
Depending on the size of the files that you’ve selected, you’ll soon have a new zip file sitting in the folder where the source files are located.
I often enjoy simple games more than complex games. Grid is the latest time killer that I’ve found and became quickly addicted to.
Grid is a spin off of the old style circuit games where you have to get all the pieces connected in just the right order to form a circuit. The exception is that Grid requires you to connect every connector to some other connector. Each “grid” only has one solution, so you have to get it just right in order to move on to the next level.
Yesterday, I talked about how to get the most out of running regular expressions in PHP. The reason that I needed to dig in deep on regular expression syntax with PHP is because I needed to write some regular expressions that deal with Unicode characters.
After much reading, I believed that I knew everything that I needed. I started writing some regex strings and testing the code. Unfortunately, every time I ran a test with a string that contained Unicode characters, the match failed. When I removed the Unicode characters from the string and tested again, it would work. I was baffled.
Since beginning work on my DNS Yogi site, I’ve had to do numerous regular expressions to matching all sorts of string bits. I quickly ran into problems when I realized that I need to add support for Unicode characters since certain TLD registrars support registrations with non-Latin characters.
The main issue is that there are multiple regular expression engines. PHP uses a flavor of the PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expression) engine. Each engine and varient of an engine has a slightly different way of handling regular expression syntax. I needed to find out exactly how the PHP regular expression engine worked, and finding that information was not easy.
A number of updates were installed on my machine yesterday. Ubuntu asked me to reboot, but I was busy, so I never ended up doing that yesterday. This morning, I booted my machine and was very surprised to find out that my headphone jacks no longer worked. Needless to say, I was upset.
As I discussed in a previous post, I’m running Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) on a Dell Studio 17 laptop and getting the headphones to work required some workarounds. Basically, you had to set up the headphones to be line outs which caused one of the jacks to function but failed to mute the speakers when headphones were plugged in. This resulted in needing to manually mute and unmute the Front audio channel when you used or removed headphones. It’s because of this workaround that I thought the jack no longer worked.
I received a comment from John asking about using a mic with Ubuntu on a Dell Studio. I hadn’t tried to use my mic before, so I thought that it was time to try it out. After playing around a bit, I figured it out.
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