Poisoned by a colleague, I purchased a FiiO E18 today. There has been many great reviews online but very few mentioned how it actually works when connecting to an Android phone digitally. I’m going to share my experience on that with anyone who’s interested. So these are my gears. I have a ZenFone 5…
For semi-automatic expresso machines, especially the inexpensive ones, they are usually equipped with froth-assisted wands, AKA Panarello wands for Gaggia machines. These wands have little breathing holes on the wand which push in additional air to help with the frothing process. This type of wand is typically found on small machines where smaller boilers are found….
Immediate adaption efforts are need – that’s what I feel when I started to mess around with the latest version of Redhat. “Good! Adaptation, improvisation, but your weakness is not your technique.” – Morpheus Systemd First thing I notice is many services have been migrated to systemd. That means the traditional service and…
So XFS is no longer a luxary item and will be used as the default filesystem. I think this is welcomed by many of us. Will Redhat be able to bring us surprises? I seriously doubt that as Redhat has never been on the frontier. But I do expect a rock-solid distribution. See about Redhat’s…
Pine was probably the first UNIX application I used back when I was at school. Decades later I decided to give it another go and it’s still good. It’s certainly memory friendly and it gets the basic job done. The only problem is the binary package does not support password saving. Well I guess if…
There is a very impressive app from stand ford, namely vectormagic. It converts bitmaps into vector graphics. Vector graphics are made of geometries and can be enlarged or reduced and there won’t be any anti-alias effects. More importantly, I think it has an artistic effect which is very attractive. It’s just abstract enough to remove…
In my opinion, an easy to use distributed filesystem on Linux is long due. Today I came across XtreemFS which accomplishes just that. Setting up a basic cluster with 2 OSDs takes no more than 10 minutes. Let’s walk through the processes. First, install the binary packages using repositories made available by the XtreemFS team. Once…
There are a handful of version control tools for Linux but they were not designed to work with system config files. For example, RCS resets the file ownership and permission when a commit is made. This is when etckeeper comes into play. It works with a number of version control tools such as git and…
The program looks short but the way Python handles JSON is not very elegant. JSON is supposed to be a serialized object, so it should be processed as an object. But here, it’s processed as an array. [python] #!/usr/bin/python import json import sys print "Usage: cat JSON | BasicParse.py | column -t" jsonInput = sys.stdin…
I had to give it a try. This blog is now moved to AWS. There are a lot of cool features but they’re sort of expensive. For example, if I put the database on RDS and memcache on ElasticCache, it will cost me $140/mo. Come on, running yum -y install memcached is not worth $50…