Apple Mac Mini: Mini DVI adapter does not have VGA RGB signals

The mini DVI to DVI adapter which is included in the Mac Minis with Mini DVI socket does not transport the VGA RGB signals which are necessary to connect a VGA monitor. This means it is not possible to use a DVI-I to VGA adapter to connect a VGA display. The included adapter is rather a mini DVI to DVI-D adapter instead of a mini DVI to DVI-I adaptr (which I would find intuitive). The mini itself emits the necessary signals, but the adapter does not carry these signals. Apple wants us to buy another adapter for 19 EUR.

Very nasty, but the worst is that I do not have the adapter for this weekend. Mini DVI is crap, completely.

LogiLink WL0038 WLAN Router review

Today I received my LogiLink WL0038 WLAN Router, a low priced 54MBit device (about 25 EUR). Unfortunately mine had several shortcomings:

• Internal HF shielding was rattling loosely in the housing (was not soldered to PCB) (broken)
  
• Antenna plug was attached to housing using hot glue, but was still completely loose (broken)
  
• Default IP of router was not 192.168.2.2 (as documented) but 192.168.16.1 (as if somebody already used the device)
  
• Automatic channel selection selected a channel which was already taken (11) although channel 6 was still free (well, other devices do that too)
  
• WLAN signal strength was at 80% (while set to maximum in settings) although the device was 1-2 meters away from the client. Even the networks of my neighbours were stronger! :-)
  
• Network access through WLAN was extemely slow: I always had huge latencies of > 2000ms. Ping times through WLAN were about 2100ms. Ssh was completely unusable through this. Websurfing felt as if going through a 9600 baud modem. I tried for about one hour to figure out what misconfiguration could have caused this and eventually gave up.
  

It seems like my unit was already used by somebody else who did not like it and has sent it back. The packaging appeared to be untouched however.

Nevertheless I will send the device back to the dealer and claim my money back. I do not even want a replacement unit.

Can't sleep (xkcd)

syslogd again

Argh! I thought I solved the /var/log/* issue once and forever, but no, it did not work at all with the changes of the last post. I still see almost all logfiles being rotated. Nasty. Only /var/log/syslog seems to work OK.

Now I see that there is another file in

/etc/cron.weekly/syslogd

This needs to be removed without replacement. I want monthly logging, this is more than enough.

And apparently I need to add the -a option to syslogd-listfiles to get all files rotated in a useful way.

Keep /var/log logs longer

I recently tried to increase the amount of log data which is kept in /var/log on my Ubuntu box. The log files are usually rotated using logrotate, or so I thought. The first thing I did was editing

/etc/logrotate.conf

I set the interval to monthly and rotate 24, but this did not help.

I seems like half of the log files are rotated by savelog which is triggered daily by cron. So I moved the file

/etc/cron.daily/sysklogd

to cron.monthly and edited the number of cycles to 120 (10 years, -c 120. This seems to do the trick. :-)