TheSave's Blog

Recently I have been fiddling with MATE Desktop, sleek and lightweight.

Anyhow, I had some problems with network manager and the companion applet. The applet did not appear on the panel and the application was not working properly.

Luckily I found a solution looking on the Ubuntu forum (although I shamefully lost its reference).

Here are the steps:

on a console reinstall both the network manager and the gnome apple with the command sudo apt-get install --reinstall network-manager network-manager-gnome;
open the network manager configuration with your editor of choice (e.g., nano): sudo nano /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf and change the line managed=false to managed=true;

make sure that network interfaces file /etc/network/interfaces contains only the basic configuration:  auto lo iface lo inet loopback (you can simply comment the other lines);

restart network manager with command sudo service networking restart;

In case the network manager applet does not show up on mate’s panel try these one of these fixes:

edit the file  sudo sublime /etc/xdg/autostart/nm-applet.desktop, remove the line  AutostartCondition=GNOME3 unless-session gnome, and restart the networking service;
remove the .state file relative to the network manager with command  sudo rm /var/lib/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.state

I hope the procedure can be useful also for someone other out there 🙂

Yesterday I finally gave a try to Cards Against Humanity. 1 Word: Hilarious.

And since it is Sunday, why not commemorating the event with a xkcd-style strip on my favourite card?

1 Awesome point!

 

Some time ago I wrote about my experimentations with book printing and binding.

In between, I’ve continued my hobby trying with other materials and techniques, even looking for advices and feedbacks from other home-made bookbinders like me and this time I write down how I obtained my favorite and qualitatively-acceptable way to bind a book.

From hot-glue to PVA glue

In the previous article, I wrote about my aptitude for using a fast-drying hot-glue to get all of the book’s pages firmly together yet maintaining a certain degree of flexibility for the book’s spine.

Continue reading →

It’s been a while since I bought my iPhone 4 and, in spite of its older brother 3G, its Home Button started feeling the weight of millions of clicks per day.

Long story short: using the Home Button’s gestures became a real pain in the… a real pain.

Luckly I remembered of having read a post on lifehacker about  this “brave” designer — Khoi Vinh — who successfully applied WD-40 to his iPhone 4’s Home Button, bringing it to a new life.

Marvellous! And since I started having the same problem, I decided to give the same therapy to my iPhone, although I reminded that WD-40 is not intended to be used for electrical devices. As usual Google has been my friend and I found some folks who tried the WD-40 method and got mixed results: the lucky ones got their Home Button back and lived happily ever after while the rest got a short-term improvement which constantly required newer applications. Continue reading →

I’ve recently bought a new LCD TV for my room.
Hippiaye!
But wait, what the heck, the remote of the satellite receiver works weirdly, changing 2-3 channels each time I press the prog. button. What’s wrong?

IR disturbances
Searching a bit on the InterWeb, I found that other people had and still have my same issue and it can be boiled down to one of the features of these new generation of  TVs. Some models are equipped with a feature called OPC (Optical Picture Control) which automatically adjusts contrast and brightness according to the room’s lighting. Some TVs allow the user to disable the OPC (or equivalently called) feature, but others – like mine – don’t.

That’s why I had to “deal with it”, up to now. Continue reading →