Personal « KYRIAKOS ANASTASAKIS – ΚΥΡΙΑΚΟΣ ΑΝΑΣΤΑΣΑΚΗΣ

I use a virtualbox virtual machine to run Ubuntu from within Windows (yes, I know I am a masochist). Anyway, every time I resume the virtual machine Ubuntu loses connection with the internet and I have to reset the interface. In windows from the command prompt you have to do an ipconfig /release and an ipconfig /renew. Similarly in Ubuntu all I had to do was the following:

1. sudo ifconfig to get a list of all the network interfaces. There you can see the name of the networking interface that you need to reset. In my case I wanted to reset interface “eth3”. So I did:
2.sudo dhclient -r eth3 to ipconfig /release
3.sudo dhclient eht3 to ipconfig /renew

That’s it! Got a new IP and I can access the internet!

This morning I came out of the shower and found my iPhone on the floor. I had forgotten the alarm on and since it’s on vibration, the alarm was ringing for quite some time until the phone fell on the floor. I picked it up and the home button wasn’t functioning, the speakers were dead and it wouldn’t charge. The phone has been like that for the whole day.

I just came back from work and I decided to use a novel approach based on strict scientific/engineering reasoning. I let it fall down again. I picked it up and it didn’t recognise the Sim card. Ooops… I switched it off, removed and re-inserted the Sim card and turned it on. It’s back to normal! The home button works, the speakers are loud and clear and it charging at this very moment!

We had a storm a few months ago and before the storm a number of lightnings struck the area close to where I live. I recorder a video of the lightnings and I noticed something weird…

The first image shows the view from our house. The second and third images show two lightnings. The third image is quite interesting, because the closest building on that image is around 20 meters away from where I was standing; and the lightning trajectory appears all the way to the bottom of the picture. It’s been ages since I last studied physics, so even if I knew how to explain how this happened, I have now forgotten! My thoughts so far:

either the lightning struck less than 20 meters away from where I was. It doesn’t seem likely, because I assume I would have felt it striking so close. Moreover the clouds where the lightning started its trip [sic] appear to be far away close to the mountains.
or the camera was able to capture the trajectory of the lightning behind the trees and buildings!
or…

…?

Update: The method described in the following proved to be useless in the summer, when the laptop became too slow (almost unresponsive). I guess setting the CPU Fan Control level to quiet does not work well when the environment temperature is relatively high. So, I removed the fan cover (all you need to do is remove 6 screws on my laptop) and injected some sewing machine oil on the fan! Now the laptop is TOTALLY silent again! Hurrah!

The noise level of the CPU Fan of my Sony Vaio VGN-SZ71E laptop was driving me crazy for the past few days. When the laptop was on, you could hear the fan operating even in the room next door. The fan was also producing vibrations, which I could feel when I had my arms on the keyboard palmrest! It’s needless to say you can’t work properly (i.e. concentrate on your work) under these circumstances.

I tried removing the chassis to see if I can replace the fan, but in order to have access to the CPU fan on this laptop model you need to disassemble pretty much everything! Luckily there is a workaround.

I had installed the Sony VAIO Power Management utilities, which allow me to manage the CPU Fan speed (Control Panel -> Power Options->VAIO Power Managent -> CPU Fan Control ). I set it to level “1-quiet” and I have to say it is much better now. Probably this has some impact on the performance, but this comes second to the peace of mind when working 🙂

When I saw the comic on the new google chrome browser I was very excited. It seems to promise that I will never have to restart the whole browser if just one of the 10 open tabs crashes. No more 100% utilisation for heavyweight javascript sites?

My first experiences (I’ve only been playing with it for 10 minutes):

1) Doesn’t import my huge firefox visited sites history. If during the installation I ask it to import the history it just doesn’t proceed, without any error. The third time I tried to import my firefox settings I unticked the “import history” and it worked.

2) It seems to take longer to initially load up a page (I guess because it spawns a new process each time a new tab is opened and because of the javascript VM). But once Continue reading →

KYRIAKOS ANASTASAKIS – ΚΥΡΙΑΚΟΣ ΑΝΑΣΤΑΣΑΚΗΣ

Category Archives: Personal

Ipconfig equivalent in Ubuntu

When everything else fails…

That’s interesting…

Minimise the Noise of the CPU Fan on a SONY VAIO Laptop

Google Chrome: First Experiences