Author: Andrey Mikhalchuk

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash
Posted in Hardware How To Windows

Fixing MacBook Pro BootCamp Black Screen of Death

So one day I’ve power on Windows on a BootCamp-enabled Windows 7 MBP Retina and after booting and making bunch of happy sounds the display went blank. No matter how many times I rebooted it the display kept looking dead. The computer was obviously running. It’s easy to check by…

READ MORE
Photo from unsplash
Posted in How To Linux Web Windows

How to migrate ownCloud 6 from sqlite to MySQL

Those who do not know what ownCloud is probably should read about it here: http://owncloud.com. This is an awesome tool that provides functionality similar to dropbox, but uses your own server to host the files. We all know about dropbox’s bad behavior like storing passwords on the server side, accessing…

READ MORE
HDD
Posted in How To Linux Software

Attaching >2Tb disks to Linux

Here is the sequence of commands to make disk space usable in Linux for disks >2Tb (so your regular fdisk won’t help you here).

READ MORE
Photo from unsplash
Posted in Other Travels

Tips and tricks for your Riviera Maya trip (Cancun, Playa del Carmen, Akumal, Tulum etc)

Hola!
There are plenty of great posts about what to expect when you’re traveling to Mexico in general and Riviera Maya in particular. So instead of writing another one let me just list couple lessons learned that hopefully will make your trip to Mexico even more enjoyable.

READ MORE
Silence Noisy Speaker
Posted in Featured on Home Page Hardware How To Other

How to silence a piezo buzzer in your microwave, alarm clock etc

Almost every time I buy a piece of electronics with some sort of alarm it always includes a super loud and mega annoying buzzer notifying about the end of cycle. Though tuning it off completely is an easy operation (just open the case and cut the wire) making it just…

READ MORE
Photo by Malte Wingen on Unsplash
Posted in Other

Fixing Sony Pulse Elite Edition Wireless Headset Blue Light of Death

Sony Pulse Elite Edition Wireless Headset is the finest you can find for PS3 and it totally worth its sticker price between $100 to $150. This is one of only a few options providing Surround sound for PS3, thanks to Sony proprietary protocols used for sound delivery to your ears.
Unfortunately…

READ MORE
Browser Offline
Posted in How To Web

How to make browser offline cache retrieve new version of the page when browser is online, but keep using cache when it is offline

Offline cache is awesome! For certain things. For most regular web pages it is unfortunately not. Here is web developer’s most frequent use for the offline cache: make browser use cached version of the page when browser is offline but refresh it when it gets online. What could be simpler…

READ MORE
Posted in How To Linux Web

AWS EC2 ssh not responding in RHEL 6.4 AMI

I was fighting with an AWS bug today seeming just ridiculous for a system that makes ssh the only way to access the server. With no console login EC2 users are completely dependent on flawless sshd operation and Amazon team just did a really bad job preparing the RHEL 6.4…

READ MORE
Photo by Micah Boswell on Unsplash
Posted in How To Tools

How to use large / multiline text as a field in mongodb

I’m working on a project that requires storing large multiline chunks of text in MongoDB. The chunks should be inserted in the database during initial database population, so I need to enter them somewhere in db population script. Unfortunately you can’t just put something like this:

db.tests.insert( {
name: ‘test’,
text: ‘this is
my…

READ MORE
Posted in Linux Software

rPlay rocks!

I’m currently beta-testing rPlay and this software totally rocks! What’s rPlay? Well, imagine yourself willing to share content of your iPhone or iPad screen with you family. There are couple ways to do this: you can get an Apple TV ($99) or … well, that’s actually it. AirPlay is…

READ MORE
Posted in Other

Fixing Verizon FiOS DNS Problems

Your superfancy FiOS internet link is getting flaky for no reason every now and then? The reason could be not the fiber-optic cable (which is awesome), but a problem with part of infrastructure called DNS servers. The DNS (Domain Name Resolution) servers are responsible for translating domain names such as…

READ MORE