Disable yum fastestmirror plugin on CentOS

The fastestmirror plugin may be useful at some points, but it can be a pain in the ass at others.
For example, I tried updating my CentOS installation today and because of the mirror caching it was downloading the updates at 30K/s. After disabling the plugin the speed from picking a different mirror jumped to 3MB/s.

To disable the plugin…

RaspberryPI – first impression

I couldn’t resist not trying out my RaspberryPI which I received yesterday 🙂

I quickly recycled one of my SD cards, installed the recommended SD image and booted it up.

After the initial boot setup screen (and partition resize), you can see it running connected to a monitor via HDMI, with a keyboard, mouse and wireless adapter (Asus WL-167g) all plugged in a 4-port USB hub…

My RaspberryPI has arrived

Yay! After around 4 months of waiting, it is finally here. My very own Raspberry PI 🙂

It appears I received a rev2 board which, among other small improvements, should feature 512MB of RAM instead of 256.

The board comes packed in a nice neat pink(?!) case, together with a quick start guide giving you the essential information on how to get the thing started…

“Now playing” Windows 7 gadget mod

One of the gadgets I started using recently is the “Now Playing” gadget.

One issue I noticed though is its inability to display the trackname for tracks which lack the ID3 tag. The widget would just switch to its “Play a file in Winamp” message. So after a bit of tinkering, I managed to get it to use the track filename and display that instead…

Restricting access to hidden site using .htaccess

Just like in real-life construction and rebuilding, you sometimes need to demolish and rebuild an existing website. And you probably want to do this behind a very nice and safe wall.

The wall, in our case, will be a “currently rebuilding. please visit soon” index.html file. If directory index priority is set to html then php, now the index.html file will be our visible website and hide the soon-to-be-demolished php-based website.

Console commands to hibernate and standby on CentOS

It’s great that Linux nowadays supports all the power management features available on computers. But it’s odd that beside the buttons to trigger standby/hibernate – which are only available in a graphical interface – there are no simple console commands to put the computer to sleep or into hibernation.