John muses over his first blog spam, and invokes Wordpress’ Akismet anti-spam plugin.

So, maybe in part 1 the data recovery didn’t work for you?
Well, that’s OK because Linux is robust against bad discs in one form or another. The trick is to work out what that might be.
A good method is to use dd or dd_rescue. These tools create a forensic copy of your hard disk drive [...]

I finally completed getting all of my printers working together nicely today.
It’s been a while, but I must admit that while I’m using the Windows XP virtual machine for my office work, the need to print in Linux is not that great.
Oddly, the HP psc 2510 was the first to behave itself. Using the HPLIP [...]

There’s a small incompatibility in Beryl which causes certain program windows to appear translucent or transparent.
A simple fix for this is to

Open up the Beryl Settings manager
Click Windows Management
Enable and select the WIndow Specific Settings option
Under the Rules tab, expand Disable ARGB Visual, and click Add (the + button).
Select Class Name in the list, [...]

Today, I’ve been working on a server that doesn’t want to mount one of the partitions that has been formatted with reiserfs.
Using the fsck command doesn’t work because there are bad blocks on the drive, resulting in fsck vehemently refusing to cooperate.:
Cannot read the block (41713664): (Input/output error).
To get fsck to play with such a [...]

… was in Asda.
I’ve heard of this being done before, but I never really could believe it.
There were signs on the entrance advising customers that if they told the meet-and-greet chap that they are single on Valentine’s Day, then they would be given a red balloon to walk around with.
If someone were plucky enough to [...]