Monthly Archives: October 2013

My own domain? Why should I get one?

email, Opinion

A friend was asking me about my email address (lonbil.co.uk) and wanted to know why I hadn’t just stuck with my gmail address or ISP-provided email address.

As we were in a rush, and the question was tangential to the task at hand, I told him I’d have a think about it and get back to him.

Types of address

I would classify email addresses into 4 broad groups:

  1. Work addresses: This will be something along the lines of john.doe@megacorpintersolar.com
    This has a lifetime of your employment with Mega Corp Inter Solar. When you leave, you email address will probably be de-activated.
  2. Free Addresses: These are your gmail,hotmail and yahoo type addresses. These are fine for personal contacts, and as contact addresses for websites and mailing lists.
  3. Vanity Addresses: I use this term to cover addresses for domains you own, but are named like thedoefmaily.org or jonathanliversingstoneseagull.org.
  4. Your Own Domain: This is identical to the both the work and vanity address-type address, but is not looks more like an organisation or business and is not (obviously) tied to an individual (or family).

Pros and cons of each type of address

Continue reading My own domain? Why should I get one? →

The Hidden Math(s) in The Simpsons and Futurama

Uncategorized

This is really related to anything in particular, but a few weeks ago in the Observer, Simon Singh (a really excellent science communicator BTW) wrote a piece about the maths jokes in The Simpsons (See The Simpsons Secret Maths).

Today on the BBC web site, he’s followed it up with another piece, this time about Futurama (see Futurama and Maths). This is quite a bit shorter than the Observer piece.

The brief biography of the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) is fascinating.  He achieved so much before his early death at 32. due to tuberculosis.

I’d recommend any Simpsons or Futurama fan look at these – it’ll give you some ammunition against those who claim cartoons are responsible for  “dumbing down” TV.

 

 

Replacing Halogen Spotlights with LED Bulbs

Home, LED Lights

When we moved into our new house, the developers had decided to light almost the entire house with halogen spot lights.  Initially I didn’t pay too much attention to this, until after the first winter I was looking at the electricity bill.

Since I didn’t think we using more than our previous house, I did some quick back of an envelope calculation and results were quite eye-opening.

The house had 48 50W spot-lights and 3 20W down-lights. (When I came to replace them, I discovered that most lights were MR11s, each running off its own transformer also.) There were a few GU10 bulbs also.

My gut-feeling was that this was probably quite expensive to run, however I didn’t have the figures, so I did some rough calculations.

Continue reading Replacing Halogen Spotlights with LED Bulbs →

Konsole stopped working.

Konsole, Small Fixes

KDE Konsole Problem

I’m running openSuse and after the last set of updates, I found my  konsole sessions stopped working.  (Konsole is the KDE terminal application.)  Well to be exact, the session I had open was fine, but when I tried to open a new tab with either a bash shell or a midnight commander session, I’d get an infuriating blank screen and flashing cursor. And that was all.

After some digging around,it looked as though the issue was with the pty devices.

It appeared the error lay in an entry of the /etc/fstab file.

devpts        /dev/pts        devpts  mode=0620,gid=5 0 0

I commented out this line and like so (putting the hash/pound ‘# symbol in front of the line)

# devpts        /dev/pts        devpts  mode=0620,gid=5 0 0

and all my konsole sessions immediately started working again.