When Your Gentoo Desktop is Just a White Screen
Yeah, so this has happened to me twice, each time I forget how to fix it until too late.
As root:
eselect opengl list / eselect opengl set <nvidia/etc>
Netcat + Tar for simple file transfers
This past week I spent 3 days watching a 3-thread sftp process transfer over a system backup of 53GB. This backup in particular had a ton of files and directories, and I suspect most of the actual time was spent querying and creating the files rather than the actual transfer itself. Now that everything is transferred over, I can rsync it against another machine, but that's another story.
In searching for a better way than what I did, I found this cool gem:
On the sender:
tar cf - directory_to_copy | netcat other_host 7000
On the receiver:
netcat -l -p 7000 | tar x
Sunday Congregational Prayers
As part of being a member at Holy Trinity Church I am asked to do the congregational prayer sometimes as part of a rotation. I don't think I'm fantastic at formulating quality prayers of length at this point in time, so I tend to default to finding what I think is a high-quality old prayer, update it's language, and adapt it as I see fit. So far I'm a fan of Charles Spurgeon, as I think he has some really quality congregational prayers that hit on the major points of the gospel and he isn't afraid to be bold.
Since I doubt I'm the only one out there who needs assistance on Sunday mornings, I'm going to publish my adaptations for your use. If you really feel the need to credit anyone, credit Spurgeon, since it's 80-90% his. I usually don't offer credits when I pray, as I think it's distracting from what we should be doing- coming to God in prayer and reverence.
A Big Pet Peeve
One thing that absolutely drives me nuts is when other blogs, news sites, or other sources of information do not include the year of the entry, or even the entire date itself. What the heck?! Take this for example. I was searching for information about the AA/BA deal and Google gave me this site. Great, except how do I know how old this was? Maybe it was referencing another deal 4 years ago? Ugh. I had to dig into the -trash- comments for a datestamp.
I see this problem strewn everywhere especially with blog posts. Great that you published a few nice posts 3 days ago… or was it 3 days and 3 years? Always frustrates me.
Just Because a Chair Is Expensive Doesn't Make It Good
Jeff Atwood (who I must admit I only really read when someone links to him) wrote an article awhile ago about his thoughts on the chair you use for work. He's a fan of Herman Miller, and for the most part this is rightly deserved. When I worked with Accenture, everyone had Aeron's, and while it is possible to be uncomfortable in them, most of the time I was very happy with it and didn't think anything of it.
