Category: Informative

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Dell Studio 17″ 1749 – Ubuntu linux suspend and hibernate problems

I have a really awesome Dell studio 17″ laptop. It works brilliantly with Ubuntu since the day i got it, however during an upgrade at sometime, it suddenly stopped suspending and hibernating.

This was annoying more than anything, but still fine. I hunted for months high and low for an answer, and could find nothing in any log files. I saw many complaints and bugfixes of which non seemed to work.

The machine suspended fine, it just never came back from that. It sat with a blank screen until i power cycled it to get it going.

So, i had 4 days off work, and decided to get to the bottom of this silly bug. I could only assume that it was something preventing it from resuming, either kernel, module, or software.

Again, nothing in the logs anywhere. Finally i stumbled over this bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/748994

In the comments the following fix worked brilliantly for me.

Steps:

1. Create new file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-suspend.conf with the following two lines:

blacklist firewire_core
blacklist firewire_ohci

2. Run: sudo update-initramfs -u

3. Reboot and check that the modules were not loaded by running: lsmod | grep firewire

4. Suspend the machine and bring it back up.

5. Hibernate the machine and bring it back up.

Both suspend and hibernate work now.

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Syndicating your Google Plus Feed into your WordPress Blog

 

Somebody mentioned that it was hard/impossible to do this, and i know that a few people will want to. So i figured i would hunt about and see if it was possible, and it is! It’s not even too difficult!

First of all, go to http://plusfeed.appspot.com/ – it gives you an rss feed of all your public posts (this will only work for public posts sorry). My URL for my rss feed is http://plusfeed.appspot.com/114228869493885222559 , yours will look similar, just grab the id number from your profile page URL and add it after the domain.

Now go to your WordPress , login, to go Plugins > Add New . Search for and find the plugin called FeedWordPress and install/activate it.
Now it should show you your feed in that syndication tab, you can click the ‘update now’ button to load the last few posts.

Now you will notice a new menu bottom left called ‘Syndication’, click on that, then add in the URL above from plusfeed.appspot.com into the box named “New source”. It will confirm the look/feel, and add it.
Now you can click the ‘update’

 

 

 

 

Updating

Now click on the Feeds and Updates menu below it, look for the drop down box and choose ‘Look for updates after page loads’. You can do updates before the page loads, but this means if a person comes to your blog they are sitting waiting for the page to load whilst it does background grabbing of data.
From here you are away working, feel free to fiddle with other settings.

 

I found i prefer the link to go to the blog post rather than link to the google+ link, so i go to Posts and Links menu, and scroll down to Links, then choose ‘The local copy on this website’

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Google Plus – Shorter URLs of your own

Google+ is here, and its great! the only problem is passing out the link to your profile… its huge!
Mine looks like this https://plus.google.com/u/0/114228869493885222559/

However, with some small html i have now made it this http://velofille.com/g+

If you have your own domain, this is fairly easy to do. Open a notepad or html editor, paste in something like this

<html>
        <meta HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" content="0; url=https://plus.google.com/u/0/114228869493885222559/">
</html>

 

Change the url= part to match the URL you have on google+ . Once done, upload that page then go to http://yourdomain.com/pagename.html . Most servers have modules which allow you to drop the .html so you can go to http://yourdomain.com/pagename and it will assume the .html and just work (pays to test this, each server is different).

For another way, you can use PHP also. I entered into my text editor

<?php
header("Location: https://plus.google.com/u/0/114228869493885222559/");
?>

 

I named this g+.php and uploaded to my webserver, this allows me to just link to http://velofille.com/g+ (it checks for the suffix and assumes the .php).

In case none of these work, try using any other URL shortening service, some let you choose the name you give your link. http://is.gd/velofille works for mine also. To be noted, there is a google+ short linker which has been setup here http://gplus.to