User Blogs

Today I replaced the passenger-side braking support rod bushing on my 1982 300SD. The job didn't go so well on the driver's side, because I attempted to use all of the specified replacement hardware. Unfortunately, Meyle is currently delivering substandard and improper hardware for remounting the bushing carrier, with the effect that the nut shears off of its captive shim and causes you to live in a world of hurt. Using the original hardware with some red thread locker seems to be a workable solution; I've done it on the other side with good results, and now I've done it on both sides. In the process, I also learned that one can trivially press the new bushing in with the old hardware.

The Seagate Dockstar is the lowest-end PogoPlug device, a tiny low-power ARM server which runs Linux. Devices like this are ubiquitous now, but when the PogoPlug came out it was extremely unusual. It also cost substantially more than it does today, when a Rev.2 PogoPlug (not the new-new one, the old new one) is only $20. The only cheaper ARM-based server I know of is the Dockstar, which can be had for as little as $14 through Amazon today. Regardless of which PogoPlug you might have, you probably want to run Debian Squeeze with a recent kernel featuring LED support, which is not that difficult — but finding all the information you need is.

I've got an Android phone with, currently, no phone service. Well, OK, it's a WinMo phone chainloading Android, but that's relatively irrelevant. Soon I will want to avoid using minutes from my incoming T-Mo PAYG phone card, so I'll still want to make phone calls using SIP any time I'm in WiFi range. You can even get out of paying for outgoing calls so long as you turn them into incoming calls.

I myself probably should have looked for one of these before I made this one; it's a .desktop file for gksudo that gives you access to it from the GUI in non-incidental ways. Below the break you'll find the text, which is not very long.

I wanted to run OpenELEC 3 to get XBMC 12 "Frodo" because cancel works, which is to say that I've never previously been able to cancel actions like browsing a SMB server and I've been running XBMC since it was XBMP. To make a long story short, OpenELEC 2.99.2 (RC2) has nonworking bluetooth. Some have reported success with 2.99.1 but that didn't work for me either. But as of yesterday (20130206) there is a dev build that does work, and I have installed it.