Shady Goings On

As a last resort on a locked-up linux box you might hold down the power button to restart it. This is not great as the discs will still be mounted.
A safer way is to hold down Atl-SysReq while slowly typing “REISUB”. This will reboot the box safely.

What it does:

• R: Switch the keyboard from raw mode to XLATE mode
• E: Send the SIGTERM signal to all processes except init
• I: Send the SIGKILL signal to all processes except init
• S: Sync all mounted filesystems
• U: Remount all mounted filesystems in read-only mode
• B: Immediately reboot the system, without unmounting partitions or syncing

You can also type “REISUO” to power off, rather than rebooting.

Today I received my new infra-red webcam that I bought on eBay. I’m going to use it to monitor the nursery from downstairs.
It took a while to find a true infra-red camera as most advertise themselves as “night vision” which means that a light will come on when the illumination drops below a certain amount. This would be no good for the nursery! The model I bought has a light sensor that will turn on some infra-red LEDs, this light is invisible to the human eye but is picked up by the camera.
I plugged the camera in and it was immediately found by Fedora and the gspca driver. It appears as a zc3xx (vendor =0×0ac8, product id = 0×303b). Using the (free) Camstreams software I am now able to open the video stream to test the camera. Switching the room light off shows that the infra-red LEDs are working (see captured images).
The next step is to install some video streaming software so that I can watch the video remotely (downstairs). I would prefer to run the camera off my quieter and less power-hungry PC running Puppy Linux. I’ll let you know how I get on.

If you want to buy one then ask the eBay seller: benzuel

I recently changed to using Mozilla Thunderbird at work, instead of the very buggy Microsoft Outlook. One thing was annoying me slightly: each time you change folder the entries will be sorted by date oldest first. I prefer to have newest first.

Luckily everything is configurable!
Instructions here: Change the default sort for all Thunderbird folders, inc RSS

In summary, change the mailnews.default_sort_order value from 1 to 2, then “reindex” each if the folders.