LornaJane

If you've been following the previous entries in this series, you'll have seen how to start to crochet, and if you've followed the instructions you should be able to add another couple of rounds onto your project and end up with something that looks like this:



There are a number of things you can do with these little squares. They're a very traditional form of crochet (and a really good way of using up odds and ends), you can see the kind of thing I mean if you search for "granny square" on flickr. When I was first learning to crochet I made myself a coding blanket that I still love!



Crochet doesn't have to be square and it doesn't have to be traditional - I've seen everything from the subversive (crochet covers on parking meters) to the cute (amigurumi). I'm currently working on (currently in the sense that I've begun and I haven't finished yet, rather than it being truly ongoing) a set of hexagonal string coasters. The idea is that they will tesselate and form either a big placemat to put hot pots on or several smaller cup-sized coasters. They're not radical, but they're not really your traditional granny square either!



I'm sure there are many more uses of crochet in general and granny squares in particular - answers in the comments please :)

rsnapshot is a great tool that I use for all my backup stuff, its really easy and seems pretty robust (or rather, I haven't broken it yet!). When I set it up most recently, I discovered that it has a very useful flag, no_create_root. The problem I often have is that since I back up to removable media, if the disk isn't mounted, rsnapshot will back up to the local drive instead, in the mount point - and then I'll promptly run out of space. Stopping rsnapshot from creating directories means no writing rubbish into your mount point, and this setting is designed specifically for this issue with removable media.

This setting does have a gotcha, however. It does the check for whether the directory exists before it calls the script named in cmd_preexec - so if you were hoping to mount your drive in the pre-exec script, you can't! I was very confused why my rsnapshot configuration didn't work to start with. My workaround is to run a separate mount script before calling rsnapshot in a cron job, not ideal but it does work for me.

Tickets are now on sale for PHPNW - the PHP Conference in Manchester, UK, on November 22nd. This is a conference aimed at bringing together and promoting the amazing wealth of local talent and activity in PHP within the North West and wider area. The schedule is online already and tickets are priced at a very reasonable and credit-crunch-friendly £50 (with discounts for students and OAPs) - and all that isn't enough to persuade you, remember I'll be there on the day too :)

Recently I was shopping for an embriodery hoop and I saw that you can buy ones which are ready-made picture frames, you literally put the fabric in, embrioder, then trim off the outside and tidy up the back. I decided that this would make a great basis for an earring tidy - I try to keep my earrings linked together in pairs, but it depends what kind of butterfly they have and whether I remember! Some days its a real challenge to find a matching pair at all, and looking for a particular pair of earrings is usually a waste of time.

Enter the earring tidy, my 3-minute craft project! Take some fabric ( mine is linen, so its easy to put the earrings through ), put into the hoop, trim. Now add earrings!



It would be cool to categorise earrings and embroider in some outlines and labels, but I didn't bother. This now hangs by my mirror on a piece of string so I can pick it up and get the earrings easily.

I was recently installing the VMWare tools onto a debian etch virtual machine which I downloaded from the thoughtpolice.co.uk site, and I ran into problems. When the installation instructions from thoughtpolice say to type

This gives me an error about "You must specify the mount type" or similar. I found that actually you should type:

and see the disk appear in /media/cdrom0. Thanks to this article which helped me out (I am pretty sure its the same one that helped me last time we had this problem as well!).

I am an irssi user - I have issues with mice (I don't use one) and so the text-based IRC client works wonderfully well for me. It also looks less like a chat client and more like I might be working on a terminal screen, which was more useful before I worked from home. In most of the channels I frequent, there is a bot (Phergie to be precise) which turns URLs into a Tinyurl link and also posts the page title.

Opera has a neat little trick (I hear firefox also now has something similar) where you can right-click in any search box, and save the search as a shortcut which you can then use in the address bar. By default this includes google so you can type: g cowsay to do the equivalent of typing "cowsay" into the search box on google.com. I usually add a few more searches to it - and one of them is for tinyurl, using the search string http://tinyurl.com/%s.



So when I see a URL in a chat session, I can just wait for the tinyurl, then type t followed by the 6 or so digits on the end of the tinyurl to get to where I'm going - very handy!