I have written a new guide, focusing on backporting Debian GNU/Linux packages to earlier releases.

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I finally bought a Scythe Kama Bay. It’s a product of solid construction. The 12cm fan it ships with is reasonably quiet, for me, even at +12V. It won’t spin up at all at +5V, but probably will at some higher voltages. It has a dust filter in behind the swiss cheese metal mesh in front. It probably provides better airflow with that removed. (Which I later did.)

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This exchange should prove amusing.

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With HSBC having recently reducing their APR yield to an noncompetitive 4.50%, I made the jump to GMAC Bank. Initially I was somewhat skeptical, given my experience with signing up with HSBC earlier this year. Fortunately, I went ahead with the signup for the 4.75% APR offered as of this writing for a balance of $500 and I can say I could not be more pleased!

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Finally, there’s a way to convert DocBook XML to PDF. Petter Reinholdtsen describes the tool he used and the simple process involved. I pulled dblatex from Debian Unstable and it essentially just worked. The PDF output looks quite professional and the DocBook XML conventions are followed as you’d expect. Nice.

Spammers aren’t happy, so I am happy. Blue really annoys them, and that makes me happy. Contribute to my happiness and sign up for a Blue Security account.

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Recently, I have found myself with two independent internet feeds. The nice side effect of having two feeds is you can configure multipath routing, load balancing, failover, and dead gateway detection. However, for a individual setup there isn’t much value in configuring all that is necessary for the latter items. Nevertheless, configuring multipath routing can be quite valuable, allowing select traffic to travel over an intentionally underutilized link for reduced latency, increased bandwidth, or what have you.

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