UK OS Paper Maps are safe!

Contrary to press reports, there seem to be no plans to stop printing the Ordnance Survey core paper map products.  https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/blog/2014/03/maintaining-national-coverage-of-paper-maps-in-great-britain-commitment-from-ordnance-survey/

FIX: Airport Utility does not find any devices - Mac OS X Yosemite (10.10.1)

Apple appears to have changed the way the Airport Utility admin application finds Airport and Time Capsule devices.  This may also apply to the Time Machine tools for backing up and restoring Mac files.  There is a simple fix...

Fix for "openssl s_client -connect" cert verification errors

For Ubuntu 14.04, the correct syntax is:
openssl s_client -CApath /etc/ssl/certs -connect www.example.com:443

HOWTO: Tag music files automatically, based on folder and file name

Pasted at the bottom of this article is a Bash script I ran last night to tag my audio collection.  I was hoping this would enable Google Play Music to recognize the metadata in the tags, so that I could browse and stream music by genre, album, artist, etc. But as noted below, the tagging process worked, but Google Play Music ignored it :-(

HOWTO: Dual-SIM Cisco 819 Router Config

In the hope that it helps others, here is a working config from a dual-SIM Cisco 819 router.  Not clever, just a basic working config to get you started.

Mounting Apple Time Capsule share from Ubuntu 14.04

Older Apple Time Capsule NAS devices don't support NTLMv2: only NTLM.  So when mounting an SMB share from such a device, you need to manually select NTLM as your security mode. Otherwise the CIFS Client fails to mount the share, and reports a permission error.

FIXED: Ubuntu Server cron error message: invoke-rc.d: initscript php5-fpm, action "reopen-logs" failed in logrotate

Found a simple fix for this error in my Ubuntu Server 14.04 cron logs arising from one of the logrotate scripts:-

pfSense: Auto reboot if Internet connection lost

I use pfSense as both my router and my firewall.  If the ADSL line drops, normally it will come back up a minute later with no problem. But a few times per year, the ADSL line comes back up in a funny state, and I end up having to reboot the pfSense box manually to recover.  So, we can run a script from cron to fix that...

Fix for 100% CPU use in Apple Mail - Mavericks 10.9.3

Migrated to 10.9.3 today. Fired up Mail. 100% CPU, loud fan, hot laptop, slow system... Happens every time.  Happily there's a quick and trivial fix.

Fix for "None of the selected updates could be saved" on Mac OS X software update

Saw this error today when running the Apple Software Update process on an old MacBook running 10.6.5.   The text of the message indicated that the digital signatures on the downloaded packages were invalid.  Manually downloading the 10.6.8 combo updater didn't fix it.

Turns out the date was set to the year 2001.  Fixing the date & time on the Mac cured the problem.

Presumably the digital signatures have "valid from" and "valid to" dates: common practice, well intentioned, but unhelpful for software updates.

Multiple displays on Ubuntu 12.04

Finally got this working on my Dell Precision M4600 laptop with its ATI video chipset...