Online Tailored Shirts

I work in the financial business. This type of work expects me to wear a certain dress code. Full suit and

shirt. Since I have the typical athletic body with broad shoulders, I've had a lot of problems finding good fitting shirts which I can feel comfortable in working long days. After some years I've come to the conclusion that when buying a shirt I have to get it tailored either way.

Why online tailoring?
After spending years buying shirts in stores, you will probably find them either getting to wide/tight around your waist and/or shoulders, to short/long or have certain types of cuts and styles you don't like. Many people also find that they have to send the shirts to a tailor to get them custom fitted before they can wear it to work. Getting clothes tailored online is a really easy, fun, practical and affordable way to get good fitting shirts. You get what you want, and it fits! You only have to spend a bit time the first and second time you order to get the perfect fit you want.

How do I do it?
The first time you have to take some measurements. Getting measurements from your current favourite shirts is without doubt the best way. Setting up an excel scheme is probably not a bad idea. This way you can compare your measurements between different shirts, and orders. For first timer you can also take measurements from different shirts. Ie. you can take measurements on the shoulder area from a shirt you find fitting around the shoulders, and measurements for the waist area from a shirt you find to be well fitting around your waist. This is all very well explained in the online tailoring stores.

Where?
You have a lot of options:
- Tailorstore
- Indochino
- Black Lapel
- Modern Tailor

I've tried several of these. My favourite is Modern Tailor. They give you great custom service with a lot of options as well as the ability to give special instructions. The price is also very good. Shirts starting as low as 30$, and full suits for 300$. The e-mail service is also great and they often send you photos of your finished product by e-mail in order for you to confirm if it looks as expected. I will post a review with some photos of my results soon. Stay tuned!

Best online storage solution

The last year I've tried multiple online storage and backup solutions. I've tried them on multiple platforms, and although many boast with lots of space they tend to fail on factors like:
* Portability
* Functionality
* Lack of OS support
* Speed
* Ease of use

My favourite after a year of trying is without doubt dropbox.

Why?

A.) The fact that sharing with other users is so easy greatly favours choosing dropbox  It's also a fact that dropbox is the most commonly used online storage solution.

B.) Dropbox also supports a wide range of systems: Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android and BlackBerry.

C.) You get 2GB storage for free. By doing some tasks and referring some friends you can easily get above 18GB of free online storage. If you want more, you can easily upgrade to hundreds of more GBs of storage.

D.) The seamless synching works absolutely flawless. You get a directory on your computer which automatically syncs to your dropbox account, and so to the rest of your devices. You can work directly against this directory without a hitch.

Give it a try!

Linux script to mute and unmute both Master and PCM

Updated my debian distro recently, and trying to make amixer mute and unmute only the Master channel caused some problems. Why do I use this cmd for this job? Because I'm linking my multimedia buttons to amixer to mute and unmute my audio.

Created a bash script called mute, which I put in /usr/bin/mute and chmod 755. It looks like this:

if amixer get Master|grep off; then
amixer set Master,0 unmute
amixer set PCM,0 unmute
notify-send "[ ] Mute"
else
amixer set Master,0 mute
amixer set PCM,0 mute
notify-send "[X] Mute"
fi

You can of course decide to remove the "notify-send" cmd, if you don't want any notifications.

amixer and alsamixer wont run as regular user

Recently got this problem after upgrading my debian distro. Searched around for a solution and got the help I needed from debian forums.

The problem looks like this:
user@computer:~$ amixer
ALSA lib control_ext.c:664:(snd_ctl_ext_create) ctl_ext: Plugin version mismatch

amixer: Mixer attach default error: No such device or address
user@computer:~$ alsamixer
ALSA lib control_ext.c:664:(snd_ctl_ext_create) ctl_ext: Plugin version mismatch

cannot open mixer: No such device or address
user@computer:~$ 

user@computer:~$ ls -l /dev/snd/
total 0
drwxrwxrwx  2 root audio      60 Jun  1 17:52 by-path
crw-rw-rwT+ 1 root audio 116,  8 Jun  1 17:52 controlC0
crw-rw-rwT+ 1 root audio 116,  7 Jun  1 17:52 hwC0D0
crw-rw-rwT+ 1 root audio 116,  6 Jun  1 17:52 hwC0D1
crw-rw-rwT+ 1 root audio 116,  5 Jun  1 18:59 pcmC0D0c
crw-rw-rwT+ 1 root audio 116,  4 Jun  1 22:46 pcmC0D0p
crw-rw-rwT+ 1 root audio 116,  3 Jun  1 17:52 pcmC0D6c
crw-rw-rwT+ 1 root audio 116,  2 Jun  1 17:52 pcmC0D6p
crw-rw-rwT+ 1 root audio 116,  1 Jun  1 17:52 seq
crw-rw-rwT+ 1 root audio 116, 33 Jun  1 17:52 timer
user@computer:~$ 
user@computer:~$ which amixer
/usr/bin/amixer
user@computer:~$ ls -l /usr/bin/ | grep amixer
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root   root       59588 Jan 10 02:46 alsamixer
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root   root       51280 Jan 10 02:46 amixer
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root   root       56076 Nov 23  2011 gnome-alsamixer
user@computer:~$ 
user@computer:~$ groups 
user disk dialout cdrom floppy audio video plugdev netdev fuse

The solution? It was simply deleting the .pulse directory in my home directory.

Thanks goes out to debian forums and the user dmuc for this one.

Fix stuttering flash in chrome

There has been quite some problems with pepperflash 11.7.700.203 in chrome lately, specifically with youtube. It has been stuttering a lot and made it impossible to watch anything.

Managed to fix this with a workaround.

Here's the solution:
First, go to "chrome://plugins/" in your browser. Locate pepperflash and disable it. Next look for a folder where other plugins are located where you can put your new plugin. I'm using /home/user/.mozilla/plugins/.

Next go to Adobe Flash official webpage at http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ and download the latest .tar.gz package with the plugin. I'm using version 11.2.202.285. After downloading it, head to it's folder in the terminal, extract it:
tar -zxvf packagename.tar.gz
..and you will get a lot of files and folders you don't need, except libflashplayer.so. Copy this file to the directory you chose earlier.

Restart chrome, check in "chrome://plugins/" again that the new plugin is loaded, and you should be fine!

Unbalanced audio when tuning with amixer in Linux

I've recently experienced that my audio balance gets uneven when tuning it up and down by using the amixer command (My dedicated vol+/vol- buttons triggers the amixer command). My solution to this problem is restarting pulseaudio running in the background. I just kill it (killall -9 pulseaudio), and restart whatever musicplayer I'm currently using, and it's working fine again.

To balanse the audio you can use alsamixer from the cmd, and press b to balance the audio.

How to get the cheapest airline tickets

Here's the most important advice to follow if you want to get the cheapest airline tickets available. This is advice that I've collected over time. In my very own empiric and highly unofficial "study" it seems to be golden!

1.) Only order tickets on the following two days:
A) Tuesdays, or next best...
B) Saturdays

It's all about supply and demand. Most people order tickets the rest of the week, causing the dynamic ticket pricing systems to increase the prices. Try sticking to Tuesday is my very own top advice!

2.) Cheapest days to ravel
Tuesday or Wednesday is absolutely the best in my experience. Fewer people travel these days. Business travelers seems to push the prices up since they are traveling a lot on Sundays, Mondays and Fridays.

3.) How early before departure should you order your ticket?
This has actually been scientifically studied. Eight weeks seems to be your best bet.

4.) Check one-way tickets.
It's often cheaper to order one-way tickets each way.

5.) Combine different airlines
Try building your own route with different airline companies.