Charging a kindle from Fedora

When a kindle is plugged into a USB port it acts as a flash drive by default.  The device itself is nice enough to tell you that you need to eject it if you want to either use it or charge it via the USB cable.  Unfortunately, in linux one needs to use "eject"; simply unmounting via nautilus does not suffice.  (I've no idea why.  What does "eject" do that "unmount" doesn't?)

So, a really stupid "kindle_charge" script:

#! /bin/bash
beesu eject /dev/disk/by-label/Kindle

Frodo 4th of July portrait

Frodo portrait, originally uploaded by g2boojum.

Posing for his portrait. Natural light, 18-55VR lens, about 12 inches away.

Postal Fail!

Postal Fail!, originally uploaded by g2boojum.

Click on the image for the text of the USPS apology. It's not really much of one, I'm afraid.

Amazon mp3 store w/ 64-bit linux

I purchased Pink's "Raise Your Glass" from Amazon, and discovered that I had downloaded an .amz file.

Huh?

Oh, that's the file extension for files that are meant to be downloaded by the Amazon music downloader. Unfortunately, Amazon doesn't have a 64-bit downloader for linux.

Help comes from Pymazon (http://code.google.com/p/pymazon/). I installed pymazon (using the

current mercurial branch), and "pymazon -c AmazonMP3-1295025407.amz" was enough to download the file. It even made it through the corporate firewall. Cool!

Ice in Houston

Ice in Houston, originally uploaded by g2boojum.

Not something we see every day.

Taken with a 2G iphone.

juniper ssl vpn w/ Fedora 14

I use the juniper ssl vpn client to connect to my work's internal network. Although there is a linux client, it requires the Sun (Oracle) jre to work, which doesn't play well with selinux on Fedora 14. (It's not Fedora's fault, it's a bug in the plugin.)

Temporary fix:

# setsebool allow_execstack 1

It's not persistent, so it's not a permanent hole, but it would be best if I figured out what needed to be set for the various files involved. *Sigh*

Intel atom D510 motherboard, take 2

The cpu in my home server is dying, so I decided to replace it with an atom motherboard. All was going well, until the screen went wonky, and the computer shut itself down. I rebooted, there was a large pop, followed by the delightful smell of ozone. Ah, well. I now get to experience the Intel warranty system. Wish me luck!