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Going for a real “Evil Mad Scientist” shtick today. I have been pondering some simple DIY projects for making my little living space a little better, and decided that drawing them up might be handy to visualise/work on ideas.

The first one’s a bit of a storage cabinet/shelf to sit over the toilet cistern, which normally wasted space full of dust.

Basically there’s two “legs” which hold toilet paper rolls on hinged roll-holders like you’d normally see in people’s toilets, but covered by a bit of a door so they’re out of the way. On top of the legs are a shelf or two for putting things away. While drawing this up I scribbled a few ideas down for how the toilet roll holders would work, and as I thought of the implementation steps the idea morphed into something significantly easier. (from a weird elevator-pulley idea to just a hinge)

I pre-ordered it! Digital downloads make things so easy.. and paypal even more so 🙂

Sigh, I really should get a dollar every time “reboot it” fixes things.

I decided that since I’m approaching 30 years old, I should be able to order a bottle of wine and have a vague understanding of what I’ll get when it arrives.

My first choice was to go with Guzman y Gomez burritos - a 2010 Curious Kiwi Pinot Noir. RMB said either a Pinot Noir or a Rose, and I knew I didn’t want something as light and fruity as the Rose for my spicy dinner.

This is going to be image-heavy and explanation light because I’m lazy. I went looking for lantern/lighting ideas and hit up IKEA / Spotlight / Anaconda / Freedom today.

For the put-your-feasting-gear-in-a-basket idea, I present IKEA’s sole solution to the problem, the BRANAS basket:

Branas-Basket

The small one’s about $7, the big one’s $10, and unless you’re using just bowls you’ll need the big one. They come in White, Black and Birch, and all the signs I see mention “Last chance to buy” so they might be disappearing soon. Bugger.

I was cruising WalletsWeLove the other day after being introduced to it by a friend. Wallets and bags are very similar, and I seem to be obsessed with finding the perfect one for any given application I can dream up.

The perfect wallet for me is incredibly thin, ideally it would take up no more space than the items it holds, but still have a relatively simple billfold shape. I don’t like money clips (they’re ungainly) and can’t see the point of having more than one space for bills, let alone all that extra material and bulk for a trifold.

I was getting an error trying to run a remote command on a Windows XP machine on our domain today:

“Error communicating with PsExec service on [hostname]: No process is on the other end of the pipe.”

As usual, google came to the rescue but it took a lot of forum scanning to find a result. The quick fix is to do this:

 pslist \\[hostname] 

You should find a process called PSEXESVC, if you pskill it, then you should be able to use PsExec again.

I had a workmate with issues using privilege escalation this morning, he kept getting an error like this:

I had a workmate with issues using privilege escalation this morning, he kept getting an error like this:

RUNAS ERROR: Unable to run - cmd

1327: Logon failure: user account restriction. Possible reasons are blank passwords not allowed, logon hour restrictions, or a policy restriction has been enforced.

After googling around a bit, most of the responses were about group policy or other restrictions causing issues, but it was actually much simpler!

I’ve had an issue with some of my Ubuntu VM’s lately destroying the available resources on my ESXi box. The hard drives were going crazy due to a combination of normal disk access and also memory paging into swap file.

Running top showed a process “update-apt-xapi” which was top of the charts for memory and cpu usage.

I googled around a bit, and found that the update-apt-xapian-index process is Ubuntu’s way of updating the synaptic indexing. Considering this is a cli-only vm where I use puppet to manage the packaging, it’s useless. Also, there’s many many many posts on the web about this package going mental on low-resource machines.

Ok, I’m going to admit this one had me working for a few minutes with a pencil. RMB’s young son had gone to his dad for help with some maths homework, and they’d blasted through it with ease except for one question, which they eventually came to me with before calling shenanigans on the whole thing and proclaiming it broken:

O O O
O   O
O O O

In the circles above, take the numbers one through eight and arrange them so that each side of the square adds up to fifteen.

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