The default settings for the MySQL command line client are a bit annoying. There’s no output paging; columns with more than 80 characters are wrapped making matching field name to field data difficult. Here’s a way to make life easier.
Yeah, it’s ugly, but I thought others might make use of the xorg.conf from my groovy little fanless laptop, the Fujitsu Lifebook P7120D, running Gentoo Linux and xorg-server 1.2.0. I based this off of an xorg.conf I found on the web last year, and has been edited (a lot) as I found new information. This also requires use of 915resoultion, at least with xorg-server 1.2.0 (I’ve heard rumors that 1.3.0 will eliminate this dependency), to handle the non-standard resolution of the laptop’s LCD (1280×768). Switching between dual screens and single screen still requires editing of this file and uncommenting the desired configuration in “ServerFlags” and commenting the other section lines before restarting X.
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So, I finished my first run-through of getting an Asterisk PBX set up in my home. With the awesome community resource http://voip-info.org/, the book Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, and, of course, Asterisk’s own documentation and configuration file comments, I built myself a much more well-featured answering machine. 
Initially, I purchased two pieces of hardware - the Grandstream BudgeTone 200 IP Phone and the Grandstream HandyTone 488 FXS/FXO device. However, the 488 didn’t work well for my purposes, as it didn’t support passing caller-id information from the PSTN to Asterisk, and it was annoying that you couldn’t use the FXS when the FXO was active on the PSTN line. I e-mailed Grandstream tech support, and they said that they were never going to offer a firmware update to the 488 to add this function, so, I broke down and bought a Cisco/Linksys/Sipura SPA-3102. For around $30 more, the SPA-3102 offered much, much more, including a better web interface, caller ID from the PSTN, and, to my ears, a bit better sound quality both in the FXS and the PSTN connection.
So what do I get with this effort?
OK, well, here it is. I moved over the howtos and tips from Plone, and made nice little mod_rewrite rules to make that happen without losing their Googleness. I might post to announce them a bit later.
Howdy!
Well, I figured I might as well capture my computing adventures somewhere, and why not a blog? Yes, this site used to be managed by Plone. While I like Plone’s interface, the mono-purposed and complex framework (Zope) and its inability to use a common SQL database engine as its internal DB are too much overhead for my purposes. If I was to go with another CMS-y thing for my personal stuff, well, that solution would be Drupal, which I will also recommend for most of my for-hire work.
Now I have to move over data from Plone and then get this site looking gooooood.
