Like the fool I am, whilst messing about with user privileges in phpMyAdmin I managed to delete the root account. Suddenly I found myself with no access to any of my databases

It took a while to figure out how to re-create the root@localhost user, so here’s how I did it.

I recently gave K9COPY a try, it’s supposed to be the Linux equivalent of DVDshrink for Windows. It certainly looked the part, but when I ran it with a disk I wanted to back up it ran for a short while and then crashed

Looking at the output of dmesg revealed that the disk was having trouble reading the encrypted disk:
`[235.097347] sr 5:0:0:0: [sr0] Add. Sense: Read of scrambled sector without authentication

Today saw the release of Xen 4.1. Major changes include support for greater than 255 CPUs, a new credit scheduler and CPU pools.

However, the most significant change to those that use Xen will be the new XL toolstack which replaces XM/XEND and will ultimately replace xcp’s xapi and libvirt.

I was converting a TV show I’d  to DVD format using ffmpeg, but the resulting file had the wrong audio channel. At first I thought it had no audio at all, but then I noticed it had a voice over occasionally explaining what was happening; “so-n-so has just entered the room…”.

It appears that ffmpeg had selected the wrong audio stream. For some reason, it had had selected the second audio stream instead of the first. The fix is simple enough, you can manually set the streams to use with the -map option. The command below works well for UK freeview.

The XEN developers ad community have been trying fr years to get DOM0 support into the Linux mainline kernel. On January 5th 2011 it finally happened when Linux kernel 2.6.37 was released.

Okay, so it’s only basic support at this stage, but it does represent a significant milestone in the hypervisors history.

A very simple Jumping Jack zx Spectrum remake written in JavaScript for the browser. Written as a programming learning exercise.

This short guide takes you through the steps needed to install a custom Android 2.1 ROM onto the original T-Mobile Pulse.

The official T-Mobile Android 2.1 ROM was removed from T-Mobiles website because it had a few bugs, the worst of which meant that you’d lose the odd text message. However the latest ‘custom’ ROMS appear to have fixed these problems.

If you’ve ever had a collection of mp3 files that you want to burn to CD for playback in the car or archiving etc, you’ll likely know how annoying it can be when the collection of mp3 files is just a bit too big to fit on a CD. You end up having to remove a couple of tracks… While this is probably OK for music (there’s always a couple of tracks I’d skip anyway), it’s not so good for audio books and the like.

One answer to the problem is to reduce the size of the mp3 files themselves. Be warned though that

Okay, so I often hear people (mainly at work) pronouncing Linux incorrectly, with an emphasis on the letter ‘I’, as you would in the word ‘light’ for example. Although this may sound more professional it really isn’t. I don’t know why it winds me up, but I do have to bite my tongue to stop myself from correcting people and sounding like the office nerd (which, now I think about it I probably am!