Guide

So, I have this old Samsung monitor that has served me very well. It's 21" in size and I don't really need anything larger. Only problem is that it is a VGA monitor and uses a VGA cable. My new PC however deems VGA to be of the same archaicity as Morse code and has therefore not deigned to support it. There then I was, stuck with a wonderful monitor that could not be used due to a compatibility issue. Rather wasteful.

So I wanted to upgrade my Sony Xperia Ray from its now old (and official) Gingerbread version of Android to the relatively more modern Jellybean. The most reliable alternative out there is Cyanogenmod.

While the Cyanogenmod wiki was generally useful, here's what I think is a cleaner guide. I performed the upgrade via a Kubuntu Trusty (14.04) laptop.

In Kubuntu/Ubuntu (and presumably Debian and other derivatives), the CTRL + ALT + F4 (or any other function key) keyboard shortcut switches from the desktop to a virtual terminal while CTRL + ALT + F7 brings you back to the desktop. However, I want to disable this as it's messing up my HTPC thanks to its dodgy remote control. While I could find a solution for Gnome/Ubuntu readily enough, KDE/Kubuntu was not immediately apparent.

So, here I was writing a script that would automate the installation of a package in Ubuntu 14.04 and all was going swimmingly. Until I ran it. You know how some apt-get installs sometimes involve a technicolor pop-up that asks you for stuff? Well, those pop-ups interrupted my script which didn't proceed further. After much digging, I found that there are a couple of solutions for this:

After upgrading a Debian install to use PHP 5.4, I ran into the following error:

PHP Warning: Unknown: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected the timezone 'UTC' for now, but please set date.timezone to select your timezone. in Unknown on line 0

An easy avenue in Windows to change the encoding of a file is to open it in Notepad and then use the Save As option which allows you to specify the encoding that the file should be saved using ...

Linux does offer a bunch of solutions too, albeit perhaps relatively less simple:

Some documents contain paragraphs which are wrapped often at the 80 character mark to help with formatting and readability. This is sometimes accomplished using forced line breaks which can be quite annoying especially when you want to reverse it as I did earlier today. Rather than messing with regex and weird edge cases, use Vim which provides a lovely solution! Here it be:

I've got Kubuntu running my HTPC and XBMC starting up in full screen on boot. Besides XBMC's remotes which I operate from an Android tablet, I also use a VNC client on said tablet to connect to the HTPC to operate other programs. As a VNC server, I've got krfb also starting up on boot which is where my problem lies. krfb does not start minimised in the system tray. There is also no option to get it to do so in its configuration screen.

Here is a guide on how I have krfb configured to start it minimised.

Instead of having to look up the exact syntax for pscp every time, here's a list of examples for future reference. In these examples, I'm transferring a file (bar.zip) from a Windows host to a Linux server (with the destination path of /home/druss/Desktop/).

"C:\Program Files (x86)\PuTTY\pscp.exe" -scp -P 2134 -pw mypassword bar.zip druss@foo.dyndns.info:/home/druss/Desktop/

KTorrent on the LTS release of Kubuntu—Precise Pangolin aka 12.04—is perfectly fine except for the fact that it comes only with version 4.1. Unfortunately, this package is missing a few features that I was looking for, especially the option to add magnet links via its web interface.

Upgrading from 4.1 to 4.3 (the latest version at the time of writing) is pretty straightforward if one is happy to accept PPA sources.