Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

If you’re trying to get around documents in VIM using a Mac keyboard, you may feel fairly stumped without a page up and page down button. But you need not be!

VIM has an extensive set of commands, including moving backwards and forwards through a document a page at a time. They are logically named too – Ctrl+F will go forward a page and Ctrl+B will go back a page.

Having finished chairing the Leeds Skeptics meeting, I sped up to North Leeds on Wednesday to join the end of White Rose Speakers’ final meeting before Christmas, which, for a holiday celebration, was being held at one of the member’s houses (who happens to have a large house).

The reason I was so keen to get there was that the group had very kindly agreed to do a collection and raffle to raise money for the Humanist Action Groups 2012 Holiday Food Drive for local homeless shelters.

Once there, they sprung a table topic on me, the song title “Merry Christmas Everyone”, to which I talked about how you can’t call an event this time of year a Christmas event as people get upset, so you have to end up calling it about a dozen different things in the title to keep everyone happy.

We came away with bags of stuff, and plenty of money from the raffle too! Thanks to everyone donated, your support is very much appreciated!

Last Monday, we went to the final session of our photography course.

Overall, it was well worth attending. I’ve read plenty of books on how to use my camera, but having in person tuition and going through the exercises is far better to getting knowledge into my head, even compared to going out and practicing what I had read about.

It did end quite expensively though – I’ve acquired two new lenses since starting the course and added flash studio kit to my Christmas list, so presuming Elina gets me that as well as my iPad 3 and iPhone 5, that is going to end expensively for her too.

If you want a service to start automatically when Gentoo boots up, you need to tell Gentoo to start it. Gentoo looks at /etc/runlevels/boot to see what it needs to run, so all you need to do is add a symlink in here to your init.d script. In this example, I’ll use exim.

cd /etc/runlevels/boot
ln -s /etc/init.d/exim exim

Next time Gentoo boots, it will see exim in the boot directory and run the script. This isn’t just limited to boot either – /etc/runlevels also has directories for shutdown and system initialisation.

As many of you know, for weeks now, it has been my dream to be the starting quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers. So, last week, me, George and Matt headed down to Yorkshire Rams training – a Leeds based American Football team.

It was rather intense – a three hour training session, roughly consisting of an hour of fitness, an hour of technique and an hour of practicing plays. None of us could walk for days after!

It was always going to be an interesting train to London as we went down to attend GRAM. It was a 7:30am train and by 8:30am, the speaker had announced that they had sold out of all beers and ciders!

Who is drinking at that time in the morning? A quick bit of research told me that Leeds were playing away at Millwall today. Leeds and Millwall have a long time rivalry with whose fans can be the biggest hooligans, so it turns out they were going to stop serving all alcohol on trains from 10am anyway.

Not fancying returning in the middle of a large crowd of angry football fans, and given it was only a mere £15 extra (of which I did not expense, of course), we decided to upgrade to first class.

Overall, I’m not sure it’s worth the upgrade cost. The seat is very nice and big, and the complementary food is good, but being on a weekend, isn’t hot, nor is alcohol included. It was also very quiet though, and you do get unlimited wifi included, so maybe it wasn’t too bad.

A Wendy House without The Fonze? Oh the horror. Somehow, we survived it though, with good memories intact.

We went to Leeds City Museum to see the Stolen, Saved, Smuggled? exhibit. It was pretty disappointing to be honest.

If you are trying to run CruiseControl on Gentoo Linux, you may find that you get an error similar to the following.

line 109: /bin/java: No such file or directory

There is due to the Java path. You can find it using the following command.

whereis java

You can then create a symlink to it.

ln -s /usr/bin/java /bin/java

Try running the command again and it should work.

At my birthday meal, we managed to eat our way through £557.54 worth of meat :D.