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Month: August 2007

Personal: Car Annoyances

I so regret getting a car. Since I purchased it about 6 weeks ago it’s needed:

  • New drivers side wing mirror after somebody hit it once I was parked up outside my house (4 weeks ago): Approx £8
  • Small paint repair on the passengers side after I got a scratch in either the local Tesco or work’s car park (2 weeks ago). Approx £
  • A new drivers side front tyre as the one the car came with had a slow puncture (Friday). Approx £40
  • Another drivers side front tyre as when I was staying at a Days Inn hotel on the M62 last night, somebody “speared” it and hence once I got home from Yorkshire it was flat. Approx £40

And those costs exclude two tanks of petrol so far (£40 each time), car insurance (£730), breakdown cover (£70) and the car itself. It’s tax is due in January and an MOT next year and I’ve still got to get it through a service (as it’s service history is unknown).

Why did no one warn me of all these “incidental” costs?

Techy Fun: I keep being blocked – why?

As I’m in the process of slowing shutting down other sites I’ve worked on (due to time constraints), I’m reposting them here. Here’s an article from “Behind The Frontline” which was going to be a cross between I Work With Fools, Worse Than Failure and Dilbert.

Categories: Just Plain Dumb and Timewasters. Author: Dohpaz.

*Ring* *Ring*

Me:”Hello, tech support”
Peon:”The server has just blocked me again!”
Me:”Ok, what”s your IP address?”
(finds out IP address and unblocks customer for about the 3rd time this week)
Peon:”Why does it keep on blocking me?”
Me:”Because you keep logging in with the wrong username and password”
Peon:”Can’t you stop it blocking me?”
Me:”No, but you can start logging in with your correct details ”
Peon:”Oh ok – I”ll try that

Techy Fun: Newspaper: The day PC meant Perfectly Confused

As I’m in the process of slowing shutting down other sites I’ve worked on (due to time constraints), I’m reposting them here. Here’s an article from “Behind The Frontline” which was going to be a cross between I Work With Fools, Worse Than Failure and Dilbert.

Category: Uncategorized. Author: Anonymous

From the Daily Mail, Friday December 31 2004:

A technical helpline for owners of new computers was flooded with more than 25,000 calls over Christmas.

PC Servicecall, which handles queries from customers of Dixons, Currys, PC World and The Link, said it received an average of one call every 21 seconds on Boxing Day. Most related to cables – mainly with the device not being properly plugged in. Others were about power supply, software installation and a failure to find the ‘on’ switch.

cPanel: Simple Script To Backup Over rSync

If you are running a reasonably recent version of cPanel (I think v11 or later), you have the ability to run WHM backups over rsync instead of just FTP. This post, if it isn’t obvious, is intended for people with root access to their cPanel server.

So how do you do this?

Simple, configure the backups as per normal in WHM to backup your secondary hard drive or a set partition on your main hard drive. Then just add a script via the shell command line as “/scripts/postcpbackup” (open PuTTY, connect to the server, login, “su” to root if necessary if you didn’t login as root, type “nano -w /scripts/postcpbackup”) and past the following script:

#!/bin/sh
rsync -vrplogDth /backup/cpbackup/* username@backupserver:/backuplocation/

Replacing “/backup/cpbackup/” with the location of your “local backups” if you changed it from the default, “username” with the username of your rSync account, “backupserver” with the hostname/IP address of the backup server and “backuplocation” of the place to store the backups. (It’s CTRL+X to exit nano by the way).

You then just need to make it executable by running “chmod a+x /scripts/postcpbackup” and you are done!

Hope it helps someone!