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Showing posts from 2012

Remote Working and non-reliable ISP

Having agreed with my manager, who was kind enough to allow me to work from home while away in India (my home country), I was quite eggsited about the Easter break. As usual, I was visiting my family, and was hopeful that it will workout OK for me, but it turns out that the country seem to develop backwards! Basically the ISP in my town here is quite appalling! A strong breeze and the connection is gone! Summer rains which is usually associated with thunders, makes it worse! Power-cuts or load shedding as they call it, is cherry on the cake! So I am left with a home setup that has a few KVA backup power but no reliable Internet connection! So I am having to work offline mostly and then sync occasionally! Some people might think, why not use a remote filesystem like SSHFS (fuse mount over SSH); I could, if the connection was stable, it is a no go area on unreliable link, as the mount hangs when link goes away! Surely, what is said in the title is norm

Lock and Turn-off ... why not by default?!

For reasons that I do not understand, most distributions including Linux Mint and my old favourite Ubuntu, doesnt seem to turn the display off once I have locked it (with keys Ctrl+Alt+L). For me, when I lock the display, it means that I am not interested in seeing anything on the display; or I am going away from the display/computer (physically). Either way, my intention was to make it secure while I leave it unattended! If I am not interested in the display, wouldn't it make sense to turn it off as well?! For me logically yes! Anyway, I had to make it work like that for me. Had to knock-together a little script and re-assign the lock keyboard shortcut to execute that script. The below script did it for me. #!/bin/sh ( sleep 3 && /usr/bin/xset dpms force off )& /usr/bin/gnome-screensaver-command --lock It starts a background task which will kick-in after three seconds since we locked the display. For some unknown reason, in my case, it didn't work w