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frugal technology, simple living and guerrilla large-appliance repair

Regular blog here, 'microblog' there

Many of my traditional blog post live on this site, but a great majority of my social-style posts can be found on my much-busier microbloging site at updates.passthejoe.net. It's busier because my BlogPoster "microblogging" script generates short, Twitter-style posts from the Linux or Windows (or anywhere you can run Ruby with too many Gems) command line, uploads them to the web server and send them out on my Twitter and Mastodon feeds.

I used to post to this blog via scripts and Unix/Linux utilities (curl and Unison) that helped me mirror the files locally and on the server. Since this site recently moved hosts, none of that is set up. I'm just using SFTP and SSH to write posts and manage the site.

Disqus comments are not live just yet because I'm not sure about what I'm going to do for the domain on this site. I'll probably restore the old domain at first just to have some continuity, but for now I like using the "free" domain from this site's new host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

Tue, 17 Jan 2012

This blog will go dark on Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2012 to protest the SOPA and PIPA bills restricting the open web

I'm joining Identi.ca, O'Reilly, Wikipedia, BoingBoing, MoveOn, Mozilla, Reddit and scores of other websites large and small in going dark on Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2012 to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA), which would allow U.S. copyright holders to shut down foreign web sites with only a suspicion of copyright infringement.

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Use alsamixer to turn off the annoying, loud beep (aka system bell) in Debian Squeeze when you shutdown or restart

Before I installed the 2.6.39 kernel from Backports on my Debian Squeeze system, I quieted the annoyingly loud system beep (aka system bell; it used to be a real bell back in the day) from startling me and waking others by "blacklisting" the pcspkr in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf.

Since that stopped working in 2.6.39, and the beep returned (it is LOUD), I figured there had to be another way to shut it up.

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