knottythots label

18 Dec

New Language

Filed under: Comics, Humour

Source: Cyanide and Happiness

Reminds me of Vincent…

17 Dec

Remap Windows Key in Ubuntu

Filed under: Ubuntu

I’ve been using Ubuntu for almost six months now but till today, I still find myself hitting the windows key to call up the “start menu”. It doesn’t work in ubuntu.

The equivalent shortcut key is actually Alt + F1 but after using windows for so long, it seems like the Win key is hardwired. Okay, maybe I’m just lazy. One key is easier to hit than holding down two.

To set this familiar key up:

  1. Navigate to the System > Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts.
  2. Select Desktop > Show the panel’s main menu
  3. Press the Win key when “New shortcut…” appears.

That’s it. It’s done. There’s also a option to make a shortcut to the terminal which I did. I replaced Alt + F1 for it. Terminal is one thing I call up several times a week. For it to have no shortcut… Navigating to it through the main panel or to check “Run in terminal” option in the “Run application” dialog box just takes too much effort at 3am in the morning.

16 Dec

Breko @ Holland Village

Filed under: Reviews, Food

I’ve been infrequently patronising the Breko outlet at Holland Village for many years, be it for dinner or just a place to sit and chat. The only food I remembered from my past visits was their cabonara spaghetti. The cream based sauce was sinfully delicious.

This time when I dropped by, they had a promotion going on. A main with a drink and a bowl of their soup of the day for $19.90++. Since the soup of the day was cream of mushroom, my sister and I ordered two sets and I forgo the cabonara due to the price. I could have a choice of a more expensive main but still pay the same standard price for the set. After browsing through the menu, I chose King Kong Burger with hot chocolate while my sister ordered ribeye steak with coffee float.

The food:

Their strength actually lies in their outstanding sides and soup with the actual mains being just alright and the drinks… >_> Let’s not mention the drinks…

The soup is fantastic! So rich, so creamy… It’s sinful… Before ordering, we were thinking of not getting the set to save money and do away with the soup of the day. But after tasting their cream of mushroom, we actually feel damn lucky to have ordered the set. Thank the heavens :) If I have the money to splurge, I’d definitely order this the next time I come even if its not for dinner but to sit and chill.

My sister loves steak to bits. Had her pocket money allowed, I wouldn’t be surprised if she fed herself beef everyday. Her verdict on her ribeye steak was that it was nothing outstanding. In fact, she much preferred the mash potatoes and said they were unique on their own, even without the sauce. I agree the mash potato outshone the steak. As for her drink, I may be bias being more tea-drinker than coffee-drinker but… I kind of hated it… I only took a sip, found it bitter and bland. She seems alright with it though…

My King Kong burger was better than her steak. We both agreed on that. It’s quite big but would be an alright portion for a guy. Strangely, I suffered the same situation as my sister, preferring the side over the main. I love my coleslaw’s taste and the thickness and length of their vegetable shredding. I also had fries for a side but… I’m not a fries fan at all so I’ll pass on the comment. That cup of hot chocolate is horrible though… The chocolate is overly diluted with milk. It should be called hot milk with a pinch of chocolate flavour instead. Should have stuck with the Earl Grey. At least tea sachets hardly go wrong.

The environment:

It’s split into two distinct places - the lower and upper level. The setting for each is different. The lower level is for casual dinner and also have some tables on the outside allocated for smokers. Because of that I don’t usually sit at the lower level even if its in the non smoker section. There’s no partition or anything so the smoke blows in freely.

The upper section mostly have wide and comfortable sofa seats that have their backs leaned back at a very comfortable angle. Very good for inducing sleep. Since the tables are at knee levels, it makes eating dinner a little hard. It’s a very good place to hang out though. I usually like to drag friends if we’re around Holland Village to Breko.

The service:

Awesome! When we were served ice water, the waiter was quick to note something wrong with one of the glasses before he served it and apologized before getting a new one. Maybe there’s oil, maybe it’s dirty. We didn’t know what was wrong…

Because we ate so slow and had long interruptions, our food turned cold before we even hit half of it. Seeing that they had a microwave, my sister asked if they could heat it up. We thought they’d just heat it up and return the very same plate to us. Surprisingly, they actually changed the plate and rearranged the half bitten food to look as appetizing as it could be.

Polite and attentive crew. A pair of them came up to ask if we felt the aircon was too cold for us.

15 Dec

Lady Gaga Vids

Filed under: Videos, Humour

Parody of Lady Gaga to the hit song, Poker Face.

On a more serious note, a well sung medley of her singles.

14 Dec

GRUB Error 17 - Native Installation

Filed under: Troubleshooting, Ubuntu

On a the recent fresh install of Ubuntu Jaunty, I had grub error 17. With that error, I don’t even see the grub menu. Error 17 usually refers to confused partition table disk order.

The first thing to check is naturally the order of the partition disk.

Using the commands:

sudo fdisk -l

the l in fdisk -l is a small L

A quick wiki revealed fdisk as a command line utility (in both windows and linux) used to manipulate disk partitioning. fdisk stands for fixed disk. putting -l will pull a list of your partitions.

If indeed the partition tables were messed up, right after the list, the following message will be shown:

Partition table entries are not in disk order

To fix this, follow this site’s instructions.

For me, that message did not appear. A native re-install of GRUB solved the problem instead.

  1. Obtain a LiveCD. Downloadable from www.ubuntu.com
  2. Reboot the computer. It should automatically boot from CD. If it did not, then you’ll need to press a key quickly at the first screen you see when you first turn on the computer. The key to press will be stated at the bottom of the screen.
  3. Choose to “Try Ubuntu Without Installing”
  4. Once ubuntu is loaded, launch the terminal. It’s located at Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal at the top left hand corner of the screen.
  5. If you already know where grub is installed, skip this step. Type
    find /boot/grub/stage1
    The output should tell you where it is located with hd(?,?)
  6. With the output (hd?,?), insert the same values into the command:
    root (hd?,?)
    For example, if the find command output was (hd0,1), then type accordingly: root (hd,0,1)
  7. Next, type:
    setup (hd0)

The root command used at step 6 was to set GRUB’s root device to the partition containing the boot directory. The setup command at step 7 will install the GRUB boot loader on the Master Boot Record (MBR) of the first drive. It doesn’t matter if you installed ubuntu on the second hard drive and your first is windows.