Author Archives: Brian

Spelling help for elementary students

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Found a great use for the iphone app Orchestra. Its main purpose is to help you make todo lists by speaking them and it converts it to text. But… I found a cool trick… my daughter frequently needs help spelling longer words she hasn’t learned yet for papers and reports, etc. It would take her a while to look up the word online or in a dictionary and it really added up when she had a long paper to write and had to look up the spelling of lots of words. Now, I let her use Orchestra – she just says the word and it shows her how to spell it almost instantly. For every individual word she has tried it (so far) has been 100% correct.

Upgrading Perl in Linux Mint

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WARNING: don’t do this – it could hose your system like it did mine… details to follow once i figure out how to undo it.

Figured I’d share this since it was a PITA to figure out. Linux Mint 11 ships with Perl 5.10. I was trying to install icinga and it needs Perl 5.12.4 or greater.

To make it happen I had to:

  • add this line to /etc/apt/sources.list: deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian wheezy main
  • install/upgrade with this: apt-get install gcc perl -o APT::Immediate-Configure=0 (from linux mint forums)

and Bob’s your uncle.

AND…. to put 5.10 back in place…

  • remove the entry you put in /etc/apt/sources.list and replace it with deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian squeeze main
  • sudo apt-get install perl=5.10.1-17ubuntu4 perl-base=5.10.1-17ubuntu4 perl-modules=5.10.1-17ubuntu4

upgrading to 5.12 caused lots of problems – Pidgin wouldn’t work and most importantly, my VPN stopped working – it would disconnect after about 30 seconds.

French press coffee – attempt #1

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I couldn’t handle not having coffee any more and the coffee at work is horrible so I bought a French press from Amazon and it arrived yesterday. This morning was my first attempt at making French press coffee. It looked weak and it is a bit on the weak side, but it’s still pretty darn good. I’ll tweak the steps a bit for tomorrow – I think within a week I will have the recipe/ratios/steps figured out.

Blog you should be reading: The Surfing Pizza

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If you are not reading http://thesurfingpizza.com you should be. The first time I found the site, I read maybe 12 articles and laughed so hard I was crying. Unfortunately, I didn’t make note of the ones that made me LOL, so here are a few that are entertaining (but the PEZ story *did* make me LOL multiple times):

Much of his writing is LOL funny, but today he wrote this brilliant piece about being good at something (anything). Check it out.