Graham's How-To Guides

My summary of the book Time Management for System Administrators . Good advice for people who otherwise get interrupted a lot to make time for project work. Works for SRE and DevOps too. [5 minutes]

Presenting a comparison a wide range of free software for local file synchronization. In my case, for synchronization between a PC and an external hard drive. [5 minutes]

In which I show how to optimize Wordpress on Apache to handle a reasonable continuous load on a tiny free tier virtual machines, with only standard Ubuntu packages. [6 minutes]

This is how I got my waterproof jacket to smell fresh without losing the waterproofing, after it was infused with campfire smoke on the Cape Point overnight trail. [2 minutes]

This is my solution to make Apache HTTP Server log the actual remote client IP address from behind the Amazon Elastic Load Balancer (ELB), with a little help from SetEnvIf. [2 minutes]

This is my solution for modifying the Bash prompt (PS1) to show the branch name. It works for any working directory in a Git, Mercurial, Subversion or Bazaar branch. [2 minutes]

Presenting a faster way to grow large copper sulphate crystals! The pictured 4cm crystal took me 5 days by cooling, instead of the 3-6 weeks it would take by evaporation. [4 minute read]

These are my tips for minimizing the data usage of your PC. It's handy in cases where you have to tether your mobile phone but mobile data is expensive. [3 minutes]

What follows is my review and advice on the 2010 Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS5 "Super-Zoom" camera that I recently bought in Cape Town recently. Also known as DMC-TZ8 in Asia/Europe. [5 minutes]

Here is how to sync files from Windows to Linux with rsync. Specifically, using cwRsync server (a Cygwin + rsync package) on the Windows server, and rsnapshot on the Linux backup server. [3 minutes]