main May 2019

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9 participants
5 discussions

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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applets for mint
by Bev Nicolson 24 May '19

24 May '19

Ubuntu had a bunch of applets too of course but amongst them was one that enabled you to copy and paste fractions, copyright symbols, accents (French, Spanish, etc). Very useful. There doesn't appear to be anything similar for Mint, though. Ideas? Bev.

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Archiving photos/media from Android phone to Linux PC
by Mark Rogers 20 May '19

20 May '19

I have a Linux desktop (Ubuntu) which already gets backed up and has a decent amount of disk space on it. And I have several Android phones (mine, my wife's, etc) all of which accumulate photos and videos taken on the phone eating into storage and never getting archived off the device or properly backed up. What I want to achieve is that when at home on Wifi the phone will automatically sync all photos and video to my desktop and delete older (configurable) ones of the devices to free up space. (What I really want is to know with 100% confidence whether something is backed up so I can decide to delete it if it's taking up a lot of space; usually paranoia kicks in and I hang onto things on the device, and of-course then I run out of space...) Whilst I will happily manage the desktop end, the phone end needs to be "wife friendly", ie there needs to be an app that will do it for her. The Internet isn't short of suggestions but really I'm looking for advice from others who have done this. -- 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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[ALUG Announce] ALUG Norwich Pub Meet Thursday 9th May
by Viperfang 06 May '19

06 May '19

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, 9th May 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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Sync to USB before unmount
by Mark Rogers 02 May '19

02 May '19

I have a script which writes data to an SD card connected via USB, then umounts it. The data is several GB in size so it hangs at the umount stage while the writes complete, and I want to give user feedback. (Note: I have had no luck whatsoever using sync to force the data to sync first, it always returns immediately.) At the moment I send umount into the background and grep /proc/meminfo for a "Dirty" value which I display, repeating until the umount command closes. This is reliable and fairly meaningful, but because it takes a few minutes is throwing a kernel INFO message into syslog: INFO: task umount:17976 blocked for more than 120 seconds Ideally I would just wait for writes to complete before even trying to umount, but I can't see a way to do that. Is there a way to determine if (say) /dev/sdc is still busy, and if so how much data is pending? Or any other suggestions? Current code (modified a bit for clarity in posting): echo -e "\n\nWaiting for writes to complete" sudo umount /dev/sdc[1-9] & while jobs -r | grep 'Running' > /dev/null ; do pending=$(grep -Po 'Dirty: *\K.*' /proc/meminfo) echo -ne "\rBuffer remaining: ~$pending " sleep 1 done echo -e "\rUnmounted - you can now remove the disk. " -- 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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