Cleaning espresso machines

I'm called on to clean espresso and coffee machines from time to time. I like Cleancaf:

Mix it, pour it in, and interrupt the brewing cycle. Let it sit a in the machine for a few hours. Here's a glass full of murky water that came out of the steam wand of a machine that had been ignored for five or so years

8-port serial board under Linux

I work with a machine that has an 8-port serial board in it.  For Linux to see all the ports, I had to do two things.

1. Add '8250.nr_uarts=12' to the kernal boot line in /boot/grub/menu.lst
2. Turn off ACPI.  That entailed '/sbin/chkconfig acpid off; reboot'

The result of an /sbin/lspci showing the specific board:

07:04.0 Serial controller: Oxford Semiconductor Ltd OX16PCI954 (Quad 16950 UART) function 0 (Uart)
07:04.1 Bridge: Oxford Semiconductor Ltd OX16PCI954 (Quad 16950 UART) function 1 (8bit bus)
07:08.0 Serial controller: Oxford Semiconductor Ltd OX16PCI954 (Quad 16950 UART) function 0 (Uart)
07:08.1 Bridge: Oxford Semiconductor Ltd OX16PCI954 (Quad 16950 UART) function 1 (8bit bus)

Excluding files or directories from Time Machine

There are a number of places that talk around excluding files or directories from Time Machine backups, but I thought I'd share the most direct way.  The global exclude list can be opened using

$ open /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist

but if you want finer-grained control, you can use extended attributes.  The following commands exclude several directories where I have experimental VirtualBox VM's that I don't need backed up:

$ xattr -w com_apple_backup_excludeItem com.apple.backupd VirtualBox\ VMs/Windows\ 7/
$ xattr -w com_apple_backup_excludeItem com.apple.backupd VirtualBox\ VMs/OpenBSD/

To remove an extended attribute, use xattr thus:

$ xattr -d com_apple_backup_excludeItem VirtualBox\ VMs/

To see which extended attributes are set on a file or directory, use the '@' argument to ls:

ls -l@ VirtualBox\ VMs/
total 0
drwxr-xr-x@ 6 beaty-admin  staff  204 Jun  1 13:53 OpenBSD/
    com_apple_backup_excludeItem     17 
drwxr-xr-x  6 beaty-admin  staff  204 Oct  5 15:46 Ubuntu/
drwxr-xr-x@ 7 beaty-admin  staff  238 Oct  6 21:22 Windows 7/
    com_apple_backup_excludeItem     17 
drwxr-xr-x@ 6 beaty-admin  staff  204 Sep 29 21:38 XP/
    com_apple_backup_excludeItem     17 

And: Let Time Machine backup File Vault while logged in

Turning off the blinking cursor in gnome-terminal

It shouldn't be this difficult, but one has to run 'gconf-editor', search to '/apps/gnome-terminal', and double click on cursor-blink-mode, and change the value to 'off':

Or, even easier: from the terminal do gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/cursor_blink_mode off.

Update

# Older way:
gconftool-2 --type string --set \
 /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/cursor_blink_mode off
gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/metacity/general/auto_raise true
gconftool-2 --type int --set /apps/metacity/general/auto_raise_delay 500
gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/metacity/general/focus_mode mouse

# Newer way:
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-blink false
dconf write /org/gnome/desktop/wm/preferences/focus-mode mouse
dconf write /org/gnome/desktop/wm/preferences/auto-raise true
dconf write /org/gnome/desktop/wm/preferences/auto-raise-delay 500

# GTK3 way:
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-blink false
dconf write /org/gnome/desktop/input-sources/xkb-options "['ctrl:nocaps']"
dconf write /org/gnome/desktop/wm/preferences/focus-mode "'mouse'"
dconf write /org/gnome/desktop/wm/preferences/auto-raise true
dconf write /org/gnome/desktop/wm/preferences/auto-raise-delay 500

Wouldn't it be nice if they'd stop messing with how to do this?

Pretty on the outside

I have one of those nice Rosendahl II watches from http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/watches/7a91/  Other people have noted how one has to be very careful fitting the band to your wrist as it is a destructive procedure.  Well, changing the battery isn't easy either, and if you're not careful, also a destructive procedure. After taking the back off, one needs to remove the plastic battery holder, essentially the whole gray thing you see after taking the back off.  It is connected in two places (see the red arrows) and one cannot take the battery out without removing it.

Giving one this

Once that is done, one can gently pry off the clip holding the battery.


Assembly, as they say, is the reverse.