I use X2Go to login to some of my systems when I need to access a graphical desktop. To keep the load on the system low I use XFCE as the desktop environment. Recently I found that when I logged into one of my systems running Ubuntu 22.04 that …

I have resisted using pull requests on GitHub for my own repositories because it seemed like I need to have have both an Issue and a Pull Request for each branch. I create Issues for fixes and features that I want to implement. During development I create a branch for …

In an earlier post I explained how to use password protected zip files in Windows. This post is the Mac version. 7-Zip is still the file format, however the application is Keka instead of 7-Zip. This is because the 7-Zip application for Mac is command line only and therefore not …

Creating zip files with a password is a fairly easy way to add some security to information that you are sending via email. It's not really good encryption, but it will keep many people out.

I suggest using 7-Zip. It's an open-source and free application that runs on Windows, Linux …

The Duplicati backup software is a nice cross platform backup solution. There are times when one wants to start a new backup with the same settings as another backup. Duplicati doesn't support 2 backups going to the same directory, so one needs to make sure to specify a new destination …

Duplicati is a nice backup tool that is cross platform. However sometimes it has issues. This post gives one solution for dealing with the error "Unexpected difference in fileset version".

1. Open the duplicati web page
2. Pay attention to the fileset version number in the error message.
3. Dismiss the error
4. Click …

To help with restores or migration to another piece of hardware I find it useful to keep track of which packages are installed on my Linux systems. This isn't very difficult, but it has taken a bit of experimenting to come up with with something that works fairly well and …

I have been setting up a few Jenkins nodes lately and decided that I should write up the configuration that I'm using to share with others.

Create the node in Jenkins

The first thing to do is to create the node in Jenkins. Start by logging into your Jenkins host …

This past week I finally decided to try out Google Inbox. The feature that really drew me to it was the ability to snooze emails. This feature allows you to make an email leave your inbox and come back at some later date and time. This is a really cool …

Comcast has now opened up their IPv6 service to residential customers. If you have a supported modem from Comcast and a device connected to it that understands IPv6 you can connect. You might ask why would I want to setup IPv6? And that is a good question. One reason is …

I use a Mac at work and was recently introduced to Skitch in a training class. This application is really handy if you need to share images or screen shots with others. Skitch allows you to easily take a screen shot of what you're doing and then annotate it to …

I've finally made it. I can now use my iPod Touch just with Linux. Apple adding over the air updates really helped, but I still couldn't sync my music. I also found that pulling large videos off via Dropbox didn't work as the app would time out. I had been …

On my iPod Touch I'm using Appigo's Todo application. I had been syncing the data to Toodledo so that I had a backup in case something happened to my itouch. Now Appigo's Todo app supports Dropbox. The advantage here is that the place that I'm syncing to, dropbox, supports all …

Until recently I've been using MyKeePass to store passwords on my iTouch. This allows me to use KeePassX on my desktop. What I'd really like though is Dropbox integration. Well recently on Hak5 they said that there was a free app for IOS that understood KeePass password databases and MyKeePass …

This year I replaced my Palm Treo with an iPod Touch. To make sure that I could access all of my data on my iPod as well as on my Linux desktop (and anywhere else for that matter) I moved all of my data to the cloud. This is great …

On my Palm I used Keyring to keep track of my passwords. This has a nice interface in jpilot to access it on my desktop. When it came to my iPod Touch I needed to find something else to use. I did some searching and found that there was an …

One of the things that I really liked about my Palm was using Plucker to view web pages when I'm not connected to the Internet. I've found a few apps for the iPod Touch that do this and here are the ones I've tried and what I think about them …

I have already been using Google to store some of my contacts for syncing using Zindus. So it seemed pretty natural to use Google to store all of my contacts.  Using Google means that my information is available on any platform. Google provides a nice sync interface for the iPod …

I chose to use Google for my calendar. I already use Google for some of my mail and I sync contacts with Thunderbird using Zindus. Using Google means that my information is available on any platform. Google provides a nice sync interface for the iPod touch.

One annoying thing about …

I have been using a Palm as my PDA for a number of years. With the decline of the Palm platform I have been looking for a replacement PDA. The smartphones aren't an answer for me as I really don't want to pay for a data plan. I was looking …

I've been using the free version of the NX server from nomachine to access my Linux hosts and it's been working really well. I've set it up at work to allowed shared access to our compute server, however we've run into an issue here. The free version limits how many …

Brother makes great, inexpensive laser printers. However the technology that they use to determine when you need new toner is a little too conservative. I've found that it states that I need more toner when there is still quite a bit of toner left. Unfortunately at this point the printer …

I usually try and upgrade my computers fairly quickly once a new operating system or a new version of an application comes out, even if there aren't particularly new features that I'm looking for. However sometimes I've been a little slow to upgrade some servers because I'm too busy with …

So I've been looking to migrate my bacula installation from MySQL to PostgreSQL. Personally I like PostgreSQL better and the claims on the bacula-users list were that it's faster. So I did a bunch of reading, and then testing the database conversion and finally have made it through the process …

I have a 15" Macbook Pro unibody for work. Recently I was looking at the hard drive specs as I needed to upgrade another users laptop. Turns out that the SATA controller is capable of 3Gbps, however the drive from Apple is only capable of 1.5Gbps. What's really annoying …

So I'm working on a project that has a number of components to it. In particular the data is all stored in a MySQL database. For various reasons we wanted to convert this to a PostgreSQL database. So off I went working on a branch to make the changes and …

Jon Schewe is an alumnus of Michigan Technological University. I graduated in 1998 with a BS in Computer Science. I'm currently working for BBN as a research scientist. For those that may be interested, my resume is available upon request.

What does it mean to be a "Research Scientist"? Well …