Ouch. Does anyone else have footshooting problems today? So you accidentally clicked on the “Do not show again.” Doh!

We’ve all done that. This is an easy way to reset the notifications and popups, courtesy of the folks at the Linux Mint Forum. This is more of an internal note to myself, because I do this a few times a year, and have to schlep around till I find how to fix it again.

Using your favourite editor, create, reset_netmgr_notify.sh

Here is the easy shell script:


#!/bin/bash
#
# reset notifications for network manager to get all notification popups
#
# W. Guerrini 02/13/2018
# V1.0
#
# from: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=89627
#
#

gsettings set org.gnome.nm-applet disable-connected-notifications false
gsettings set org.gnome.nm-applet disable-disconnected-notifications false
gsettings set org.gnome.nm-applet disable-vpn-notifications false


to run the script


sh reset_netmgr_notify.sh


Easy. And this way I won’t have to schlep for it again.

ThioJoe’s explanation of Net Neutrality is the best I have found.

The future of the Internet as we know it is at stake. It’s time to write to your representatives, and ask them to enact a law prohibiting the Federal Communications Commission from dismantling Net Neutrality.

Wayno

A lot of people have asked for a sample .bashrc script. This is nothing fancy. It exits if the script is not executed interactively, turns on the colour prompts, sources .bash_aliases, adds /usr/sbin so some commands are executable (for debian mostly)


#!/bin/bash

unset color_prompt force_color_prompt


My Samsung Galaxy S5 had a usb charging port problem after 18 months. I had gotten a SquareTrade policy when I bought the phone, since they are half the price of At&t’s protection plan.

I did NOT have enough battery power to do a factory reset, so I sent the phone in minus the SD Card. HUGE Mistake. A mere week had gone by after I sent the phone in for repair, and oh! What’s this? A charge from Microsoft Xbox on my account? I have never owned an Xbox, let alone opened an account. I called Microsoft Xbox at (800) 469-8269 and said, “Umm, I never bought an Xbox, what’s going on? They had opened an account using my gmail spam email account@outlook.com, that day. Sure enough, my credit card was linked to this account. They removed the credit card, but could NOT say what the charge was for….hmmm.

I called my bank, and cancelled the my credit card. Oh but wait. There were more surprises in store.

They tried to change my Facebook password. Twice. But since I have dual layer authentication (something you have, plus something you know. Like an atm card and a pin.)

And I permanently lost about 6 weeks of emails from my regular gmail account.

But the fun was not over yet. When they returned the phone, it had been factory reset.

Then, I started getting a Sim Card Error. We traipsed lazily into the At&t store, and got a new Sim card. Nope. I still had no service. So we put a friend’s Sim Card in my phone. Nope, not going to happen. We put my Sim card into their phone and it worked as advertised. So the phone has a bad Sim Card Reader. Nice.

Round 2 of dealing with SquareTrade. I spoke to their “offshore” tech support person, and he said that someone would be calling me in 20 minutes (on another line.) Sure enough about 1/2 hour later, the phone rang, and this time it was good old American based tech support.

I explained the issue (again). Since the failure occurred less than 30 days after repair, this was covered. So my phone went to Los Angeles (via Memphis) a second time. I am still waiting.

Lesson learned. If you are going to send your cell phone in for repair, doesn’t matter if it’s SquareTrade, or someplace else. Save yourself some grief, do screen shots of your screens, save them to the micro sd card (or email them to yourself), and nuke that phone (factory reset) before it leaves your hands for repair, if at all possible. I could have gone to Batteries Plus and gotten a 2nd battery and done the wipe before shipping. But hey, I now have 2 batteries.

Enjoy my technological impairment!

Wayno

Thank you jya_ from #mythtv-users (irc.freenode.net) for identifying the location to change the skip time for playback using mythtv.

By default, mythtv skips 30 seconds FORWARD using the Right Arrow Key (->) symbol, and skips 5 seconds BACK using the Left (< - ) symbol on the keyboard. I wanted to change the skip back time to 15 seconds instead of 5...but where did they hide the setting? The adjustment is in mythfrontend. Navigate to the settings from mythfrontend: Setup -> Video -> Playback Groups -> Default

Your screen looks like:

Or whatever works for you. Thanks jya_.

Wayno

This threw me for a loop! Literally.

I wanted to use Google Hangouts, but it told me I needed to update the plugin.

I downloaded the plugin, installed it, fired up hangouts again, only to be told, I had to update the plugin again! The screen looks something like this:

What the? I just installed the plugin! How could you tell me I needed to install it again?

I did a sanity check.


apt-cache policy google-talkplugin


I got back the following:

google-talkplugin:
Installed: 3.10.2.0-1
Candidate: 4.9.1.0-1
Version table:
4.9.1.0-1 0
500 http://dl.google.com/linux/talkplugin/deb/ stable/main amd64 Packages
*** 3.10.2.0-1 0
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

The page Google had sent me to, was trying to install the version 3.10 plugin. That isn’t going to work.

apt-cache policy shows me the installed version, 3.10 and the current version in the repo. 4.9!

So I told it to get the latest version in the repository.


sudo apt-get install google-talkplugin


When I redid the apt-cache policy it showed:

google-talkplugin:
Installed: 4.9.1.0-1
Candidate: 4.9.1.0-1
Version table:
*** 4.9.1.0-1 0
500 http://dl.google.com/linux/talkplugin/deb/ stable/main amd64 Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

and behold!

Wayno

I am a n00b when it comes to the Kindle world. When The Narrow Road came out with their e-book version, I was eager to read. As I discovered, there are no posts on how to set up an Android based device for Kindle.

The following assumes you have an account with amazon.com

1. Download and install the Kindle application from the Android Play Store. Sign into the Kindle application.

2. We need to get some information from the Kindle Application. To access the settings, you will see 3 horizontal lines (see picture below) in the top LEFT of the screen (it is depicted on the top right here, but the 3 horizontal lines are what you are looking for in the top LEFT.). Press that, and it will open up the menu.

3. We want to access the settings, so again press the settings button (see screen above).

4. The information we are after is Send to Kindle Email Address (highlighted in Red Below.) Write that down, we will use that later.

5. Now we want to login to our amazon account. Go to the dropdown menu under your account (see below), and LEFT click on Manage Your Kindle.

6. Click on Personal Document Settings on the left (see red highlight.) We want to add Add A New Approved Email Address.

7. Add the email address you will be emailing the document from.

Otherwise, you will get an email saying,

Dear Customer,

The following document, sent to you by yourname@youremail.com could not be delivered to your Kindle because the sender is not in your Kindle approved e-mail list.

(Been there, done that)

8. And now…..remember that email address we wrote down in step 4? Now we compose an email with the attachment. (Note for Kindle books we want to email the book as a mobi attachment to the address obtained in step 4.)

9. Et voilà:

The nation’s largest cable tv provider, Comcast provided clear qam (or local channels in High Definition withOUT a cable box) over their cable system. Apparently, that has now come to an end.

A channel scan today yielded only 2 channels. Both Comcast info-mercial channels.

So if you were counting on tuners like the hdhomerun to tune and record cable channels, those days are ended.

Comcast could NOT be reached for comment.

Wayno

It took a little over 2 years (June 2, 2011) to add 100 posts to pkill-9. Thanks Joe, Loni, Mike, Frances, Jeremy and Darren!

Wayno

I had this problem years ago. And it cropped up again, a few days ago. I didn’t write it down then…

Symptom: bash aliases work if I am logged in as a local user. However, if you use ssh to gain access, the bash aliases are gone!

What’s happening? Actually it is very easy to fix. You simply need to add the .profile file to your home directory. The profile file is something that is executed each time you login. It is like the old Windows autoexec.bat file.

Here is the text for the file, and an addition I made to make life easier. Using a text editor of choice (gedit, nano, or….vi) create a .profile file.


# ~/.profile: executed by the command interpreter for login shells.
# This file is not read by bash(1), if ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bash_login
# exists.
# see /usr/share/doc/bash/examples/startup-files for examples.
# the files are located in the bash-doc package.

# set PATH so it includes user's private bin if it exists
if [ -d "$HOME/bin" ] ; then
#
# add /sbin to the path so we can use things like ifconfig
# without have to do sudo or getting
# bash: ifconfig: No such file or directory
# PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"
#
PATH="$HOME/bin:/sbin:$PATH"
fi


After you create the file, log out, and back in again, and the bash aliases will work over ssh.