Ubuntu: Dropbox and crontab

In your default user, run "crontab -e", and add the following lines:

0 4 * * * DISPLAY=:0 /usr/bin/dropbox start >/dev/null 2>&1
0 5 * * * /usr/bin/dropbox stop >/dev/null 2>&1

This will start dropbox at 4am, and stop at 5am.

802.11ac wifi for Linux

Since I am running a HTPC in my living room I am dependent on having a reliable and FAST wifi connection. Running videos is one thing, but having a quick and responsive connection when it comes to fetching thumbnails for and browsing large photo files from my NAS is even more important.

Finding a good 802.11ac wifi adapter for my unit seemed to be harder then expected. Lot's of posts online told me that either 802.11ac simply won't work (you won't get your card to jump from 11n to 11ac speeds) and other challenges. Finding a pci card seemed to be even more challenging as most cards I could find with the best chipsets for Linux seemed to only be available on minipci express.

After some googling I did find that there were adapters for minipci express to pcie x1. I also did find one readily mounted with antennas, CE branded and at a reasonable price on ebay. The intel 8260AC is one of the latest chipsets running on 802.11ac offering a theretical speed up to 867 Mbps. The intel chipsets also offer good linux drivers. Installing the card was easy, the only thing I actually had to do was to make sure the iwlwifi package was installed, and to upgrade the kernel package of my Linux Ubuntu 14.04 distro, as the kernel package I was running used an older version of iwlwifi not offering support of the 8260 chipset yet. I took a full leap and went for kernel 4.4. After this everything wen't smoothly. No problems at all. The only thing is when I run iwconfig it says the card is running 802.11abgn but on 867Mbps. After some googling this seems to be a bug in the iwconfig app. The speed stated on iwconfig is the correct parameter to look at, and 867Mbps is impossible on 802.11n.

A word of advice: The ebay site selling this card states in large red letters and exclamation marks "This item don't compatible AMD computer motherboards". This is wrong. I have no idea why they say so. I knew this had to be wrong as there is a lot of AMD based computers running a intel wifi chip. I've had to deal with motherboard blacklists/whitelists before though. Anyhow, I am running this fine without any third party firmwares at all on a AMD motherboard running a AMD X3 450 CPU.

Force unmount/umount of disconnected NFS drive in Linux

Following command as root: "umount.nfs4 /volume -f"

Chromium in Debian: Flash missing - manual install of Pepperflash

So, here's the situation:
1.) Google Chrome dropped support of 32bit linux
2.) Pepperflash has gone missing from the Debian repositories
3.) Chromium only supports Pepperflash

Here's how you fix it:
1.) Install chromium.
2.) "apt-get purge" (not just remove) everything that has to do with flash.
3.) Download the latest available version of Google Chrome for 32bit so we can extract the plugin we need. Latest available version is google-chrome-stable_48.0.2564.116-1_i386.deb available here: http://bbgentoo.ilb.ru/distfiles/google-chrome-stable_48.0.2564.116-1_i386.deb
4.) Extract the file. Go to opt/google/chrome and find the PepperFlash directory. From this directory copy the libpepflashplayer.so to /usr/lib/chromium/plugins/ or any other available directory.
5.) For some reason I can't chromium to load the plugin by default. So I made a shortcut executable file with the following chromium prefix:
/usr/bin/chromium --ppapi-flash-path=/usr/lib/chromium/plugins/libpepflashplayer.so
6.) Run it. Enter "chrome://plugins/" into your address bar. It should now show up here.

IKEA Utrusta LED - remote problems

Installed the IKEA Utrusta LED system for my kitchen. The system have caused me quite a headache as I had a lot of problems with the lights randomly responding to the remote.

After a while I managed to sort out the problems. I did the following:
1.) First I got a new remote from IKEA. I'm not quite sure if this solved any problems or not, but I do think it helped quite a bit.
2.) Then I managed to identify one LED device which seemed to cause problems way more often then the others. I replaced this one. No more specific problem with this light.
3.a) My lights now worked all good until one night when I was downloading some huge files over the wireless network, when the lights went all hammock when using the remote. As I already know the Utrusta remote is using the 2.4ghz frequency - the same as my wifi, I went straight for the router and unplugged it. Suddenly it all worked perfect again.
3.b) To solve this problem I booted up my router again and changed wifi channel. I also have a router which runs on the 5ghz frequency. I was therefore able to change the wifi devices I have which use the most bandwidth to this frequency.

After taking these measures, I haven't had any problems for several weeks. The lights also respond way more synchronous then before. It's rather strange that IKEA doesn't seem to know about the frequency problems themselves. When I called them in the beginning this wasn't even mentioned, but after doing some research online it seems to be a rather normal problem with interference between devices running on the same frequency.

Update: 3 months later. Still no problems. All good! (FYI: The problem lasted me for 1-2 years until I managed to solve it.)

Torrenting to NAS via CIFS/SMB never completes

Problem: Vuze keeps on redownloading and redownloading the last 10-30% of the torrent file over and over again. MBs downloaded exceeds total torrent size, and it never ends.

Solution:

Edit your /etc/fstab for the cifs mount.
cache=none,user,uid=abcd123,gid=users,rw,suid,credentials=/root/nascredfile

Fix: Shoe air whooshing sound from shoes

I had big problems with this on some Loake Churchill shoes. The sound came from the toebox and was caused by my arch which is a tad large, giving the air in the toe box no easy route to escape when I was walking.

The reason my shoes were so tight around my arch was the lacing which my shoes were delivered with. If you take notice of the Shoe shop lacing pictured below, you will see that when you tighten this lacing, it takes very little pressure before you make the lacing around your arch to tight. The solution is changing the lacing to the zigzag lacing, and leaving enough slack on the lower lacing.

It probably sounds weird that lacing should cause such problems. But give it a try.

I've also read of people leaving strings of leather in a | | formation above your arch, leaving a "channel" for air to escape through, which solved the problem.