My grandfather found this in a bag of Herr’s potato chips today.  At first I thought some bread or a cookie had fallen in the bag.  But after a quick smell test, it is indeed some freakish form of potato.

Photo credit amandoo

Bidding starts at $25.

I plug my FiOS box into a 22″ Acer monitor using an HDMI to DVI cable.  I have an old Boston Acoustic 2.1 computer speaker set that I plug in for sound.  Changing the volume required standing up and walking over to the speakers.  Commercials are approximately 470% louder than regular television programming, so it’s nice to control volume remotely.

These instructions are for the Philips RC 144 Remote:

1.  Press and hold the STB key
2.  While holding down STB, press OK
3.  Release both keys, the device keys will blink twice.
4.  Press 9 – 5 – 5, the STB key will blink twice
5.  Press OK

Volume is now setup to change the volume on the Verizon box rather than the TV.

Visit this page if you have another remote or want to download the user manual for your Verizon FiOS remote.

I recently upgraded my kernel which broke VirtualBox, I got the following error:

Kernel driver not installed (rc=-1908)

The VirtualBox Linux kernel driver (vboxdrv) is either not loaded or there is a permission problem with /dev/vboxdrv. Re-setup the kernel module by executing

‘/etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup’

as root. Users of Ubuntu, Fedora or Mandriva should install the DKMS package first. This package keeps track of Linux kernel changes and recompiles the vboxdrv kernel module if necessary

Usually this is fixed by running:

sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

I then found this post which applied to the generic kernel and indicated that I may be missing the kernel headers.  Since I am running VirtualBox in Ubuntu Server 9.04 I ran:

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.28-14-server

and then

sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

Working again.

This short guide will help you move all users, databases, tables, etc from server1 (current server) to server2 (new server).

Stop the mysql service on both servers:

sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop

Setup a temporary directory in the home folder of your user on server2.  (This is because we don’t have root access remotely.)

mkdir ~/varlibmysql

On server1:

sudo rsync -axv –progress –stats /var/lib/mysql/ user@server2:~/varlibmysql/

On server2:

sudo rsync -axv –progress –stats ~/varlibmysql/ /var/lib/mysql/

chown -R mysql:mysql /var/lib/mysql/

At this point if you try to start mysql, you will most likely see the following error:

error: ‘Access denied for user ‘debian-sys-maint’@’localhost’ (using password: YES)’

To fix this (on server2):

cd /etc/mysql

sudo mv debian.cnf debian.cnf.backup (creates a backup of your original)

On server1:

sudo cat /etc/mysql/debian.cnf

(highlight and copy the contents of this file to your clipboard)

On server2:

sudo vim /etc/mysql/debian.cnf

press i on the keyboard to begin editing

paste clipboard into file

press Esc, type :wq and press Enter

Start the SQL service on server2:

sudo /etc/init.d/mysql start

And you’re all set…