December 2017 - main

Reformatting a PDF
by Mark Rogers 03 Jun '19

03 Jun '19

On the Royal Mail website is a "handy" price guide available as a PDF: http://www.royalmail.com/sites/default/files/Royal-Mail-Our-Prices-March-20… It's only actually "handy" if you have a weird printer (or at least very unusual sized paper). I'm not sure what size/shape you'd call it but it would go into a DL envelope without folding... What I'd like to do is split the individual pages out and merge them to get three (maybe four) "pages" per A4 sheet so that I can print it on my very normal A4 printer. Suggestions? This is an annual headache and I'm fed up with a different manual solution every year. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Scoring in the Gnome game "Five or More"??
by Ted Harding 26 Dec '17

26 Dec '17

Greetings All! And Happy Christmas and Happy New Year. I am trying to find out what formula is used to determione the scores in the Gnome game Five or More, in which you score BY "lining up" 5 or more counters of the same colour on a 9x9 board. In fact it's a bit more general than that, and any 2 or more intersecting lines, where with your latest move you have made each line contain 5 or more counters all of the same colour, then you get a score which depends on the total number of counters in these lines. Theae counters arre then erased and their cells become empty. For a single line (vertical or horizontal or diagonal) you can score with 5/6/7/8/9 counters. To score more than 9, you need at least three lines, which intersect at a single empty cell into which you then drop a counter of the same colour, combining 2 of the line into a line with 6/7/8/9 and with 4 more in the third ine. Then you score with 10/11/12/13 counters. And, if I've got it right, the biggest number of counters you can score with is when you have 8 lines, each with four counters, intersecting at the centre of the 9x9 square which is still an empty cell; and then you drop a counter into that square, and then you score with 33 counters. The "Help" page for gthe Gnome game says: Number of objects Score given 5 10 6 12 7 18 8 28 9 42 10 82 11 108 12 138 13 172 14 210 so it only goes up to 14 counters. However, as I describe above, one can go higher (up to "Number of objects" = 33. Trying to give this a go, I did succeed in achieving 17 (four diagonal lines with 4, plus 1 for the cell where they meet), and my score jumped from somewhere in the hundreds to 4106; so clearly one can score in the thousands with "Number of objects" = 17. But since I have seen no documentation which tells how many points you score for more than 14 counters, and have not seen any description which describes how the score is calculated from "Number of objects". Does anyone know, or can find out? with thanks, and best wishes to all, Ted.

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New Server Recommendations
by steve-ALUG＠hst.me.uk 21 Dec '17

21 Dec '17

For many years I've been running a 2nd-hand "desktop" machine as a home server, which runs print, file & email services and a few others. It's an least 10 Y/O Pentium (5?) with 3GB RAM and is usually not taxed by these services. I have asked before, but I've never actually got round to doing anything about it, but I've got executive approval from the S/O BUT.... I'm in two minds. Do I go for A) a traditional box, plenty of room, RAIDed disk but comparatively high power consumption e.g. https://www.entroware.com/store/desktops/nyx or https://secure.zeta.systems/store/desktops/D540/ which seem to have PSUs rated about 650W or B) a small NUC style box, low power consumption thingy like https://www.entroware.com/store/desktops/aura or Something like the mini-itx jobbies available here https://www.logicsupply.com/uk-en/products/commercial-computers/mc500-serie… These seem to consume about 65W. I will be running some flavour of Ubuntu on it. I'd probably prefer it was 64Bit. I want it to be a "standard architecture" processor so that there will be a full-range of apps available to install from the ubuntu repositories. I would like to have a low-power-consumption as it's an always on device, and it doesn't seem to need much processing power. I'd also like to have raid (mirroring), but most low power-consumption machines don't seem to have space for raid. Does anyone have any comments or recommendations, especially of any companies they have dealt with, or products they have purchased that work well? Thanks in advance. Steve

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Amber intends to combat encryption!
by Phil Thane 19 Dec '17

19 Dec '17

I've been having 'fun' corresponding with my MP (Burt, con) and our much-loved Home Secretary about her plans to ban encrypted messaging. The gist is here, with links: https://pthane.co.uk/blog/ Scroll back a bit for the first installment. Feel free to register and comment, I don't claim to be an expert, I could well be wrong, but it seems I know more that the Home Office. -- Phil Thane www.pthane.co.uk phil(a)pthane.co.uk 01767 449759 07582 750607 Twitter @pthane

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Restarting wifi and network on a headless Pi
by Mark Rogers 14 Dec '17

14 Dec '17

I don't know if this is Pi specific, I assume it's just standard Debian. I'm using Raspbian Stretch. Suppose I have a working wireless connection. I can change wireless configuration in /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf to remove the working details and then use "wpa_cli reconfigure" to take effect. Except that I remain connected to the wifi that I no longer have settings for, and cannot force it to disconnect. What is the correct way to force the change to have effect other than reboot? On a related note, how do I change the IP configuration for the cabled network and have that take effect? Making changes to /etc/dhcpcd.conf works after a reboot but I can't reliably make it work without rebooting. (Restarted dhcpcd will add a new IP address, but won't remove old ones and doesn't seem to let me revert to DHCP reliably either.) In both cases, making a connection seems easier than dropping one. Mark -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Are there *any* decent web browsers out there now?!?!
by Chris Green 11 Dec '17

11 Dec '17

I'm finally getting a bit fed up with Firefox, for a couple of reasons:- It's seems incapable of working with eBay without going to 100% CPU and slowly grinding to a halt. The last few updates have made it *look* decidedly clunky. Arcane configuration parameters required to make it so it can open files on one's local file system. So, I've been looking at alternatives and there's not much that seems any better (they have different issues in the main). I've been trying chromium and it certainly seems faster than Firefox and doesn't seem to grind to a halt on eBay, but:- I want a separate search bar You can't change the keyboard shortcuts Is anything else any better? I've been wondering about Vivaldi, same underlying engine as Chromium but apparently much more configurable. Has anyone here tried it? I'm just a bit wary of going 'off piste' as it were (not in the Ubuntu repositories). -- Chris Green

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[ALUG Announce] ALUG Norwich Pub Meet Thursday 14th December
by Viperfang 11 Dec '17

11 Dec '17

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via https://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- Hello Norwich Aluggers, Our monthly ALUG Norwich social meeting will be held this Thursday, 14th December at The Coach and Horses (82 Thorpe Road, Norwich, NR1 1BA). The meeting officially starts at 8pm, although some people may arrive earlier. More information on those people can be found on the list and the IRC channel. If you are unsure if you will recognise us then make yourself and your intent to attend known by either posting on list or visiting us on IRC so we can look out for you rather than hiding in the corner. Optionally you could ask at the bar if they know where the geeky computer weirdos are and they'll point you in the right direction (seriously!). Another possibility is look for heaps of electronics on a table that may possibly look like movie props that would used for detonating explosives. Feel free to bring electronics/laptops/gadgets to the meet, you will by no means be alone. Ben Bewick aka Viperfang NB: This mail is automated, please refer to the usual sources for more information. ALUG Contact Details: Website : http://www.alug.org.uk/ IRC : #alug on irc.alug.org.uk List : http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo Twitter : http://twitter.com/anglianlug Identica: TBA Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2381613902 ----- Send discussion replies to main(a)lists.alug.org.uk (Reply-To set) Unsub, change settings via https://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

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How to allow easy editing of www-data owned files - or other workarounds?
by Chris Green 11 Dec '17

11 Dec '17

I've been trying to find a good solution to this problem for *years* but I'm still hitting problems with it. The current problem is that syncthing doesn't deal well with directories and files which have different owners on different systems. The essential problem is that web files which are manipulated by apache need to be owned by www-data but I want to be able to edit these files as well. In particular I have a wiki where I sometimes edit the files using the wiki (ownership ends up as www-data) and sometimes I edit them directly with an editor (ownership ends up as chris). Currently I use access control lists (setfacl) to make things so that both chris and www-data can both manipulate files in the wiki directory regardless of whether they are owned by chris or www-data but this isn't a perfect solution as the correct settings don't always get put on new files. What I really need is:- All the wiki files are owned by 'chris' (the wiki is rooted in my home directory and is synchronised across a couple of machines by syncthing). www-data can read/write/create files in the ~/chris/wiki directory but they will always be owned by 'chris'. Can anyone see a way of implementing this? ... or any other reasonable solution? -- Chris Green

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Magnetic resonance?
by Phil Thane 07 Dec '17

07 Dec '17

No this isn't a Linux question but you are the only techie people I know. If there is anyone from a Physics / Electrical Engineering background who can help with or proof read a short paragraph about wireless charging using electro-magnetic resonance, please get in touch off-list. Thanks. -- Phil Thane www.pthane.co.uk phil(a)pthane.co.uk 01767 449759 07582 750607 Twitter @pthane

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Strange postfix problem
by Laurie Brown 07 Dec '17

07 Dec '17

Hi all, Do we have any postfix experts on here? I have a very strange problem I'm struggling to resolve, and I'd appreciate some help. Cheers, Laurie. -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- Laurie Brown laurie(a)brownowl.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------

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