Crafty Blog

50 grape leaves use 1 cup of rice and 1 pound of meat-you can use lamb or beef

I separate the grape and cut the stems of the grape leaves.

Then I put a handful at a time in the boiling water but be sure and dump tons of meat tenderizer in the water since the large leaves are tough. Boil for a couple minutes

Mix meat, rice, garlic salt, cut up garlic, oregano, pepper , tons of olive oil and lemon juice- mix and then roll-

Steam for about 35 minutes or until the rice is done

1 cup of Uncle Ben’s Rice
3 cups of water
chicken bullion cube
spaghetti
olive oil
garlic( optional)

Cover bottom of pan with olive oil on high add chopped garlic and spaghetti (break into little pieces) and brown- be careful browns very quickly

Add rice and bullion and stir to coat rice with oil so rice doesn’t stick while cooking.

Add 3 cups of water and stir . When it starts to boil put temp. on med. high and cover. Do not stir while cooking. Cooks about 25 minutes or until water is gone. Sprinkle with Cinnamon and enjoy!

If you use Brown rice which I like but don’t care for in this recipe you need to add a little extra water and cooks a little longer as well.

Just upgraded my Mythtv box to an XFX motherboard with onboard nVidia 7150 (includes HDMI!!), and went to enable XvMC only to find out that video was extremely choppy. After examining output from mythfrontend, I noticed that xvmc-blit and xvmc-opengl were not detected, nor being loaded by mythtv. Thanks to this Gentoo Forums post, the fix is simple.

Edit /usr/portage/media-tv/mythtv-0.21_p17100.ebuild:

src_compile() {
.....
use xvmc && use video_cards_nvidia && use opengl-xvmc && \
 myconf="${myconf} --enable-xvmc --enable-xvmc-opengl --disable-xvmcw"

#Add following two lines:
use xvmc && use video_cards_nvidia && \
  myconf="${myconf} --xvmc-lib=XvMCNVIDIA --enable-xvmc --disable-xvmcw"

# nvidia-drivers-71 don't support GLX 1.4 

Then digest ebuild, and re-merge

Luckily someone located the CGI page for enabling SSHd on the SS4000-E NAS.
To enable, just navigate here (substitute XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX with internal net IP of NAS):

http://XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX/ssh_controlF.cgi

The downside is that upon rebooting the NAS, SSH will be disabled yet again, but it’s as simple as visiting the above

When compiled, will fail with a bunch of errors similiar to the following:

../../libs/libmythtv/libmythtv-0.21.so: undefined reference to `XvMCGetSurfaceStatus'
../../libs/libmythtv/libmythtv-0.21.so: undefined reference to `XvMCCreateMacroBlocks'

Grab the patch here.

For Gentoo, edit /usr/portage/media-tv/mythtv/mythtv-0.21_p17100.ebuild:

src_unpack() {
....
epatch /path/to/mythtv-0.21_p17100-xvmc.patch
}

Don’t forget to digest the updated ebuild!

ebuild /usr/portage/media-tv/mythtv/mythtv-0.21_p17100.ebuild digest

When upgrading on an AMD64 system from nvidia-drivers 100.* to 169.* you will get the following error in your /var/log/Xorg.0.log file when you try to start X:

Backtrace:
: /usr/bin/X(xf86SigHandler+0x6d) [0x4777ed]
: /lib/libc.so.6 [0x2b999debc430]
: /usr/lib/tls/libnvidia-tls.so.1 [0x2b999fa8865e]
Fatal server error:
Caught signal 11. Server aborting

There’s an issue with a symlink going to the wrong file, which can be corrected by the following:

rm /usr/lib/tls/libnvidia-tls.so.1

ln -s /usr/lib64/opengl/nvidia/lib/libnvidia-tls.so.1 /usr/lib/tls/libnvidia-tls.so.1

To find the libnvidia-tls.so.1

equery files =x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-169.09-r1 | grep tls

Credit goes to this forums.gentoo.org post

When I first got my iPhone, it would sync my Outlook contacts/calendars in iTunes when the phone was connected, and everyone was merry. Then, one day,  I noticed that events I had added in Outlook would show up after a sync, but events  added on the phone  would not show in Outlook. I had also noticed that when iTunes showed “Syncing calendars” during a sync, I would get an error about the outlooksync.exe app was crashing after about 30seconds.

After consulting the (un)mighty apple.com support pages and following all recommendations it had to offer, I was about ready to give up. While poking around iTunes sync settings in one last desperate attempt, I found a button called “Reset Sync History.” Out of curiosity (and since I didn’t have much to lose anyways), I clicked it. Immediately I plugged in my iPhone to see what I had done, and much to my surprise, the sync worked! It even prompted me for the events I had later added when it was not working, and were never synced in the past because of it.

So for anyone out there experiencing the outlooksync plugin crashing when syncing calendars on the iPhone, here are the steps to correcting it:

1)Unplug iPhone from computer

2)Fire up iTunes

3)Go to Edit->Preferences->Syncing(Tab), and click on the “Reset Syncing History”

4)When prompted, click “Reset Sync History” on the new window. Plug in your iPhone, and sit back while iTunes magically re-syncs everything!  You may get prompted for any events that need to be added locally (in Outlook) if they were created on the phone.

I have not tested this with the iPod Touch, but I would assume it would work on that as well, since it is basically an iPhone without the GSM radio

cc

Even though this happened last week (Thurs), I decided I should document it in case any other ball python owners are in the same situation

Enter Marilyn. She’s a 9 month ‘young’ ball python who likes to spend her time pushing her head against the cage lid in an attempt to find that one weak spot that will allow an escape. That weak spot was found sometime during Wednesday night/early Thursday morning.

After I discovered she had escaped, panic set in. I immediately thought that I would never find her again since I’ve heard many stories about pythons squirming into tight spaces behind walls, etc.  I began to frantically move things around trying to find her, but quickly gave up after realizing that it would not be that easy, and would more than likely require some thought. After ‘googling’ around a bit before I had to take off for work, I decided the best course of action is to strategically place towels on the floor around the house, so that if she were to go on the move again while I was at work, she might come across one and find it a nice and warm place to hole up.

While at work, I did some asking around and further searching around online to come up with a plan of action when I got home. I was going to be out all weekend, so I had to take that in to account as well.

Uber Plan to Snag Marilyn:

1) Place heating pad on floor, place damp towel on top. Pythons love warm, damp places, especially with all the dry cold around in the winter.

2) Use flour to make a line ~1″ wide across doorways leading into rooms, in order to section off the house. Apparently when the snake crawls into a new room, it will cross the flour line and make a small trail pointing in the direction it was headed. Would be useful in narrowing down the search area.

3) Make sure than any holes that were uncovered when I noticed she was gone are still uncovered. Just in case she happened to crawl in under the cabinets in the kitchen, I didn’t want to block her in if she wanted to wander out over the weekend.

I got lucky and did find her after I got home from work on Thursday. While packing for my trip before the weekend, I opened my sock drawer, and there she was staring back at me. So if any python owners out there have an escapee on their hands, hopefully my list of things to try will be of some use to them.

cc

Howdy.

I’m just an average guy who is fed up with having issues and not being able to easily find solutions on the net. The primary purpose of this blog is to document any software/hardware/life issues that I encounter for my, and everyone else’s, benefit. Nothing worse than getting some strange software error and not being able to find a solution! This blog will include topics on Linux, Windows, computers in general, fishing/hunting, and any projects I’m working on at home.

Hopefully this blog and all information on it will be indexed by all major search engines, so that anyone who happens to have an issue that I resolved would be able to find a solution!