I upgraded our server to Fedora 16 from Fedora 14 recently, so I thought I’d continue my tradition of posting the solutions to the problems I encountered to help others. Two major changes in Fedora recently increased the difficulty of this upgrade: the switch to grub2 from the grub legacy bootloader, and the switch to…
New Weather Station!
The new Vantage Pro2 Plus weather station worked, recording about one inch of precipitation during the recent rainfall! Now I just need to get the USB interface working and wview set up to analyze the results. We installed the weather station up on the roof along with the new Wineguard HS-1000 omnidirectional HD antenna, which…
Hit Games Developed in Austin
I recently heard from a friend that past (and maybe present) West Coast game industry executives view Austin as developing no successful titles generating significant profit and/or receiving critical acclaim. I want to convince them otherwise, so here’s the a partial list of hit games developed in Austin: Dishonored (Arkane/Bethesda) – Released October 2012 Sales…
Fedora 14 could not find root filesystem on RAID-1 array, solution
Here’s a problem I ran into recently: I temporarily switched the root filesystem of my Fedora 14 install from RAID-5 to non-RAID. After I received the new SSD drives, I switched it to RAID-1 but the dracut boot sequence could not find the RAID-1 array and mount the root filesystem, ending in the errors ‘Can’t…
nut 2.6.0 not working with USB CyberPower System UPS, fixed in trunk
Have a USB-attached CyberPower System UPS but can’t get it to work with Network UPS Tools aka nut 2.6.0 (such as from the Fedora 14 or 15 rpms)? See the link to the rpms below I built. The errors you might see (especially when running usbhid-ups -D -D -D) include “could not connect to ups”,…
Hacking the Neato XV-11 robotic vacuum cleaner
Have a Neato XV-11 robotic vacuum cleaner with an intriguing USB port? Check out Hash’s post at the Random Workshop about connecting to the XV-11’s built-in serial subsystem via USB to send and receive commands and data from the vacuum. I’m using a Linux box and minicom. 🙂 Now I just need a miniature…
Styrofoam recycling in Austin
Melissa from Hunters Chase pointed out that Cycled Plastics in Austin recycles foam products, which are not taken and recycled as part of the single stream recycling from the City of Austin and Texas Disposal Services. From their website at http://www.cycledplastics.com/Services.html : Public Drop Off Site: Cycled Plastics maintains a public drop point at it’s…
Fedora 12 to 14 Upgrade
I upgraded Fedora 12 to Fedora 14 over the weekend using PreUpgrade for the first time. (I tried a direct yum distro-sync upgrade first but it got stuck in infinite dependency loops.) Overall I was impressed with the download size reduction and the install speed after rebooting the system for the anaconda installer to apply the…
Chevy Volt test drive
At the Chevy Volt test drive, waiting in line…
John Avlon – Voters should fire hyper-partisans
Another good opinion article on CNN, this one by John Avlon advocating voters rejecting hyper-partisan candidates. via Voters should fire Bachmann, Grayson – CNN.com. A great quote: “We need to stand up to the extremes on both sides to stop the cycle of incitement before it gets even uglier.”