Some cars have a satnav called Becker Map Pilot. Somewhere in it’s name there also appears “Harman”. It’s unclear to me if they’re related to the audio equipment manufacturer. Anyhoo, recently, I wanted to update the maps, having not done so for the past 3+ years. Time has really flown by, but USB continues to…

Very briefly, it’s a microwave, it works. Flatbed is convenient, and it has rubber suction feet which help keep it firmly planted where you place it, and it looks pretty good. However, using it is frustrating because: The buttons are supposedly touch-sensitive, but require a slightly disconcerting amount of pressure to activate, unless you’re lucky…

In Ubuntu Bionic, I found that the dnsmasq package no longer creates a service for dnsmasq that you can control with service or systemctl. After a fair amount of experimenting and some help from the friendly folk at #systemd on irc.freenode.net , I ended up with a dnsmasq service file that does the right things,…

Another installment in this series. If you are used to dropping scripts in /etc/network/if-pre-up.d/ and seeing them get executed just before the network subsystem is up that’s another thing that doesn’t work in ubuntu Bionic, and you get no feedback that it doesnt. Don’t panic though, because here I show you how to accomplish partially…

The “new” way to configure your network in Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver is to use netplan files in /etc/netplan/ instead of the age-old /etc/network/ . For some reason, /etc/network still exists and you get no warning that whatever you specify there will be ineffective. Personally, I renamed the single file in /etc/netplan/ to something that has…

You just deployed yourself a fresh copy of Ubuntu Server 18.04 Bionic Beaver. It should be the latest and greatest, and you just need a virtual machine to do some web development or perhaps you just want to enable IP forwarding and use this machine as a router. That’s great, except the latest Ubuntu assumes…

In a bout of nostalgia, and seeing as the game was now reasonably cheap on PC-DVD, I got myself a copy of EA’s 2012 (personal favourite) Need for Speed Most Wanted for PC. They didn’t port this title to PS4 of Xbox One. Amazon provided prompt delivery in their usual style and I was up…