Unlocking a Virgin Mobile (Canada) Prepaid Phone

If you want to use a Virgin Mobile prepaid phone on a different network, then you are going to need to have the handset unlocked. You can either have Virgin do it — for $75+ — or you can pay cellunlocker.net to do it for you. It cost me $11.11 for five unlock codes for an LG K4. After you get the unlock codes, carefully read their instructions. As it turns out, I was able to unlock my phone before I even went to my new carrier, after I followed the instructions in this video. Instructions are in the video description.

I done give up on Internet Explorer 11

I have been using Internet Explorer 11 exclusively for a little over a month. I have tried doing this before but, as always, it never lasts.

I am not an IE basher.

I don't hate IE, or Microsoft.

So why not use their browser? It is missing a few features I have gotten used to with Opera:

• Close tabs to the right
• User defined "speed dial"
• A chronolgical history as oppsed to a "grouped by site" history
• Smarter actions with forms

There are other things I have probably not thought of, but those are the ones that keep cropping up. 

That is all.

Where are the Opteron X Series C/APUs?

On May 29, 2013 AMD announced the launch of the Opteron X-Series family of processors, namely the Opteron X1150, and the Opteron X2150. At the time of this writing, it looks like only the latter survived.

For those of you searching for these chips, and boards to run them on, I hate to disappoint you, but:

I was in contact with someone at AMD, and was told that these chips are currently being sold to partners only, and are not in the consumer channels at this time. Whether they will become available to consumers later is not known. Bummer Fisherman.

This means you can technically buy them, but only as part of an HP ProLiant m700 Moonshot server cartridge. Of course that is going to cost a wee bit more than the $99 MSRP given for the X2150 chip. How much more? Rougly $37,000. That cost reflects the minimum purchase of "15 identically configured Moonshot m700 server cartridges." (source). Double Bummer Fisherman.

So for now, I won't be building my NAS server with Opteron parts. Instead, I will probably start with an HP ProLiant N54L, and do a few upgrades.

CES 2014: AMD Kaveri Tidbits

"It's the most wonderful time of the year..." OK, aside from the Polar Vortex as of late, for all us tech junkies it's a special time of year because CES is upon us! This year AMD has unveiled their new chip, Kaveri, and though there was not a lot of new info (no benchmarks publicly available yet), there are a few particularly interesting details.

A while back AMD joined The Document Foundation, offering to help refactor the code for LibreOffice Calc. Essentially what the folks at LibreOffice have accomplished since then is to leverage the hardware found in AMD systems (in particular, the GPU, or in the case of Kaveri, the APU) to do some very heavy lifting. Exactly how much the new hardware and code improved performance was revealed at CES:

Dual boot FreeBSD 10 with Windows 7

If you have installed FreeBSD 10 (this applies to 9.x as well), on top of a pre-existing Windows 7 install, you have noticed that there is no option (at least not by default) to dual boot. To enable dual booting open a shell in FreeBSD, su to root, and enter the following:

boot0cfg -B ada0

Reboot. Now when the system begins to boot, you should have options for booting into Windows 7 or FreeBSD.

HT: Edubuddy - Dual boot Windows 7 and FreeBSD 9.0

Change GDM login background image on OpenSUSE 11.4

First, let me start off by saying I truly dislike Gnome, and the attitude by the Gnome devs that somehow giving people options is a bad thing.  Why is it that I cannot easily change the background image of the Gnome login screen?  Why do I have to use hacks like this one?  Why do the hacks always have to change?  Anyway, for Gnome 2.32.1 which shipped with OpenSUSE 11.4 the way to change the login background image is like this:

As root:

mv your_new_image.jpg /usr/share/pixmaps/backgrounds/gnome/background-default.jpg

Where your_new_image.jpg  is the image you want to be the new background image.

Cygwin top

If you want to use top in Cygwin, you will need to install the procps package.  I have spoken.