Blogs

What I love about science...

...is the ability that every day provides the opportunity, and more often than not, allows you to realise what a colossal idiot you are.

And not just about the simple stuff, the every day mundane things like "Where the hell did I leave that?". No science allows you to come to some sudden, sweeping realisations that not only you an idiot today, but in fact you have been being a massive idiot for 2 YEARS.

Which is essentially what I've come to today.

Ghosts of Xmas past

It has been some time since my last blog post, but this is more a reflection of my philosophies than inabilities. It has been a very many years since I started blogging and it has largely been my belief that I've only ever blogged when I've had something to say. Not necessarily important to all audiences, or for that matter any audience outside of m head. And I'm sure that if I ever bothered to read through some past posts it would be surely cringe-worthy.

HTC Desire headphone jack fix

This morning on the way to work I got down to the road, plugged in my earphones to my phone and hit play on Spotify. Only for some horrible, tinny, quiet music to come out. It seemed that the phone just simply would not recognise that anything had been plugged in. Something that I confirmed when I got to work and confirmed with a pair of headphones and PC that it was the phone and not the earphones.

Well I'm not having this, so I tear off the back cover

Xepr license work around

Disclaimer: the author does not condone piracy but this may be used as a temporary measure

Troubleshooting a non-connecting Bruker ELEXSYS spectrometer

Recently in the lab we've had some problems thanks to a helpful software update rendering it impossible to connect to a spectrometer. This troubleshooting provides a record of my steps to diagnosing the problem. Hopefully shortening the process in the future. The spectrometer in question is a Bruker ELEXSYS E580/E680 hybrid connected to a HP/Bruker desktop running openSUSE 12.1 x64, with Xepr v2.6b53. You will need super user privileges for almost all of these commands.

If not installed getminicom

su -

Logarithmic backups on a linux server

This is the second part of the lab server setup guide. Mainly for my own memory purposes, but if you find it useful then so much the better.

Lab server setup - Ubuntu 12.4

With a recent change of machines in the lab, I thought that I should update the backup server according to reflect the new machines. However, upon inspection the backup server OS hard drive had died long ago; but then what do you expect when you use 8 year old battered PCs as a server.

Annoying the French

Sometimes you get to the end of a conversation and you realise just how weird it got for a moment somewhere in the middle. And really by the end of it, you're so far from whence you started that the mind boggles. Take for example last night, I phoned my brother to say happy birthday and generally see how he was doing as I haven't talked to him in some time.

Frozen in space and time

Now don't get me wrong, I love my job, I really do. I don't think there are many other opportunities in this world where I could get to be a biochemist, chemist, physicist, engineer and software developer all in one day. But I really wish that mistakes weren't so punishing.

Blog introduction