I learned a little something about nginx, a small footprint web server ideal for serving mobile sites, or sites where you don’t want the heavy overhead of Apache. While I was serving in a DevOps role at Armor Games, I needed to redirect iPhone/iPod users to a different URL for a promotion. Since nginx at the time didn’t have the ability to utilize mod_rewrite rules, I had to learn how to enable redirection at the server level.
CNET posted a HOWTO video on how to enable a much broader Control Panel setup by creating a folder with a specific filename. If you want to skip the video, here are the instructions: create a folder in the root level of any drive (C:, D:) call the new folder “GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}” open that folder enjoy
quick and simple: edit /etc/hosts (or on Windows machines: C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts) add the following lines: 0.0.0.0 www.facebook.com facebook.com apps.facebook.com 0.0.0.0 www.myspace.com myspace.com 0.0.0.0 www.digg.com digg.com etc. Add as many sites as you want. When you want to stop being productive at work, simply comment out those lines (like during a lunch break) with a # hash character, save the file. Just be sure to uncomment the lines when you need to be productive again…
After a lot of digging and some tweaking, I finally have Ubuntu playing nicely on my work laptop, so wanted to post my findings here in hopes it can help someone else. My video chipset: $ lspci | grep Graphics 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c) 00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c) The annoyance I faced was that plugging an external monitor into the laptop before powering it on forced the laptop/monitor to be a mirrored/clone display output, which is annoying.
A previous blog engine I used to use, e107, created links like “http://iandouglas.com/page?3.0" (my old SpamAssassin trainer tutorial page) so I decided I should at least attempt to toss in a few mod_rewrite rules to even up the playing field so search engines and people with bookmarks could still get to the tutorial text which I’ve started adding to the new CMS. Trouble is, mod_rewrite doesn’t support something simple like:
“Denny” wrote a great article over at MisticRiver.net (back when the site was operational) about replacing the internal battery of the iRiver H300 series players. The original article can be viewed at http://www.misticriver.net/showthread.php?t=34257 if you can find a cached copy anywhere. Someone named “Jeantet” grabbed a copy in PDF format available from their blog Since installing Rockbox on my H320 last winter, the battery performance of my H320 was slowly going way downhill.
UPDATE: This article was written over a decade ago. I haven’t tested whether this technique still works in Firefox (or any other browser with a similar setting). Use at your own risk. If you truly need this functionality, you’ll need to find out which version of Firefox was available back in early 2006 and follow these instructions. Imagine the horrific screams of Internet users world-wide as their printers start spewing coupons and ads from their printer without warning, and without the precious print dialog box to “cancel” the print process.
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