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Scanning Cash

Posted on May 14, 2013 by Stargazer

While doing a routine install of a scanner I discovered something interesting – an error message while processing a test image:

Scanner refusing Money

The scanner software recognizes money and refuses to process it, to make it harder for the kids to produce counterfeits. Does anyone out there know since when this functionality is being implemented?

Posted in IT Related stuff | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Debian: From 6 to 7

Posted on May 7, 2013 by Stargazer

Debian did release its Version 7 – named after the cuddly Penguin of the movie ToyStory, Wheezy. Time to update? Sure – painless as usual: Backup (did I already mention that I love vmware snapshots?) first, followed by a traditional update to have it all set before doing the real update:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

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No SSD? Take a slow HDD instead!

Posted on April 5, 2013 by Stargazer

Nowadays, when buying a new laptop, you may choose whether you like to have a SSD disk or a traditional ‘spinning disk’. There’s nothing special about it, you might say but I could observe that the HDD drives used are the cheapest crap available: 5400 RPM and a lousy small cache. A recent disk should be at 7200 RPM which gives you a speed boost feeling of 30-50% due to faster access and bigger caches. The price difference for disks like that are huge 5 EUR for a reseller.

In the end, it’s the customer who’s fooled and pushed into the SSD direction to be able to work. Honestly, in many cases the 7200 RPM disk would have done the trick.

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Doing a disk change

Posted on March 27, 2013 by Stargazer

If you run out of disk space, it’s time to get yourself a newer one; Basic rule for users. In my case, I’m just the one who’s doing the technical work behind, which is less troublesome than the user.

To save me some headache, I usually start by replacing the disk in the PC first and wiring up the old one via USB to get the data moving.

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Posted in IT Related stuff | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Goodbye Windows 8

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Stargazer

I’m fed up with Windows 8 on my Lenovo W530 and the troubles I am facing. To name a few: No support for the color calibration sensor by pantone, VMware vSphere only works with a few hacks (and doesn’t show consoles),…

I have to admit, Microsoft did a few new good things with Windows 8, but all in all it’s too early to get things working completely. Besides that I miss the old start menu.

Back to Windows 7…

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Suspect things going on

Posted on March 1, 2013 by Stargazer

It’s not a secret that I tend to dislike apple for the way they raped BSD to get it useable for the masses, but what they do to me from the programmers point of view, is insane. Let’s start out with a simple MAMP installation (Mac, Apache, MySQL and PHP) and a plain system() call in php:

system(“kill -9 `ps -ef | grep Acrobat | awk ‘{print $2}’`”);

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