Monday 18 June 2012

9pt grey text on a dark grey background

Is it just me? Am I getting old? (Well, yes, but...) Surely 9pt grey text (#646464) on a dark-grey background (#1C1C1C) qualifies as a Bad IdeaTM? How's this for readable:

Form Factormini-PC
CPU SocketIntel® Atom™ D525 (dual-core) (1.8 GHz) Intel® HyperThreading™ technology
ChipsetNM10 Express
GPUIntel® GMA 3150
MemoryUp to 4GB
Harddrive2.5“ drive bay SATA 3.0 Gb/s compatible
Graphics Output1 VGA / 1 HDMI

And even that's better than the original linked above, I haven't managed to find all the styles they applied to mess up the text.

Grumble...

Thursday 14 June 2012

Too Funny - An IE7 Tax

An Australian online retailer has started charging users of IE7 a tax to use the browser on their website. This was inspired, they say, by the amount of time it took their developers to make the site work correctly with IE7 (which 3% of their users were still using). The tax is currently 6.8% — 0.1% per month since IE7 was released.

Presumably they just aren't supporting IE6 at all — if they did, the tax would be a whopping 13% (at the moment).

Cleaning up old Ubuntu kernels from /boot

My Ubuntu system told me today that it was running quite low on room in /boot. I searched around for what to do about that, and found this answer on Ask Ubuntu. It turns out that when kernel updates are applied, old kernels are left lying around in /boot.
So what to do? It's quite simple:

  1. Ensure you don't have a restart pending (Linux can update just about anything without rebooting...except the kernel). If you do, restart.
  2. Check to see what kernel you're using with uname -a:
    $ uname -a
    Linux forge 3.0.0-21-generic #35-Ubuntu SMP Fri May 25 17:57:41 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
    That's telling me that I'm using kernel 3.0.0-21-generic.
  3. List what kernels you have installed:
    $ sudo dpkg -l linux-image-\* | grep ^ii
    ii  linux-image-3.0.0-16-generic  3.0.0-16.29  Linux kernel image for version 3.0.0 on x86/x86_64
    ii  linux-image-3.0.0-17-generic  3.0.0-17.30  Linux kernel image for version 3.0.0 on x86/x86_64
    ii  linux-image-3.0.0-19-generic  3.0.0-19.33  Linux kernel image for version 3.0.0 on x86/x86_64
    ii  linux-image-3.0.0-20-generic  3.0.0-20.34  Linux kernel image for version 3.0.0 on x86/x86_64
    ii  linux-image-3.0.0-21-generic  3.0.0-21.35  Linux kernel image for version 3.0.0 on x86/x86_64
    ii  linux-image-generic           3.0.0.21.25  Generic Linux kernel image
    
  4. Uninstall the oldest one(s):
    $ sudo apt-get purge linux-image-3.0.0-16-generic
    ...and so on, being sure not to uninstall the one you're using.
Many thanks to Lekensteyn for the answer, and user6722 for the question.