Uni-ball Signo 307

Most of my writing is done on computer so I don’t use pen that often. But when I do, I pretty much always use Uni-ball Signo 207. It is a pen that has been available for ages now in multiple tip widths, my favorite being alternated between 0.5 and 0.7 millimeters. It is comfortable, has a good quality ink, a reasonable price, and it can be found pretty much anywhere. Now Uni-ball decided to give it a bit of an update with the new Signo 307.

General shape is pretty much exactly the same between those two. If 207 fits your writing style, 307 will fit too. Major difference is omitting a few metallic details found on the 207 with all-plastic design. This slightly decreased pen weight but it’s hardly noticeable. For me it had mostly visual and durability impact as the new plastic clip seems a bit more prone to breaking.

Visually it is a black barell with a nice checkered background on upper cylinder. Clicker, clip, and ring details are in the ink color. I find blue looks the best, red details are a bit too bright for me and black looks really dull. Interesting tidbit is the clip plate which has a thin plastic tooling mark on 207 but it is beautifully smooth on 307.

Clicker is a bit harder to press on the new 307 but I don’t see it as a major problem. Since spring looks identical in both you can always swap it from the 207. It also might be just a slight manufacturing difference as all my 207 were bought in previous years. If that is the case, just grow some muscles. :)

Existing Signo series gel is really smooth, nicely colored, and dries reasonably fast. Although the new Signo 307 comes with supposedly better gel formula (UMR-87E), I found no discernible difference between it and older 207 (UMR-87). Even if somehow ink update makes a difference in your case, barrels are fully compatible so you can mix and match to your liking. At this time Signo 307 is available only in 0.7 mm so those preferring thinner writing will have to stick with the 207. However, I have no doubt that other widths are going to become available in near future.

In the end, it all comes to the looks and I find Signo 307 looks are a slight improvement over 207 despite its all-plastic design. But either one will do.

Windows 10 and Touchpad Disabling on Asus N56VJ

Even though it is a bit old now, I still love my Asus N56VJ laptop. It has nice hardware quite capable of running Window 10 and it does that almost flawlessly. Only thing I found misbehaving is button for disabling touchpad (<Fn>+<F9>). On laptops I previously used (mostly HPs) I wouldn’t consider that a huge issue. However, through great efforts, Asus has managed to manufacture such a lousy touchpad that I consider disabling it a mandatory function.

To get button working on a fresh installation of Windows, first step is to install the latest ATK Package followed by restart (important). On its own this does nothing but enables proper installation of Asus Smart Gesture touchpad application (followed by another restart). Only once both of these are installed, you will get <Fn>+<F9> working again.

Unfortunate news for Windows Insiders is that functionality will disappear as soon as new build is installed. And no, you cannot just repair applications. You will need to fully remove both ATK Package and Asus Smart Gesture followed by computer restart. Only then you can follow the original procedure once again and have the button working.

I guess I cannot expect wonders by using the latest Windows OS with now aging laptop, but I find this behavior most peculiar and worthy a frown.

Ham Check 1.00

This program is just one of many programs helping prepare for the amateur radio exams. What differs it from the other similar programs is the support for keyboard-only operation, ability to zoom into the text, and showing the image next to text. While these might seem basic options, not many other exam applications support them.

The whole idea is to have a simple program allowing for quick learning and easy presenting the exam content to others.

Download is available on the program’s page.

Cloning My Website

One disadvantage of having a reliable hosting provider is that you tend to forget about backups. In my ten years with Plus hosting there was not a single case of data loss. Regardless I wanted to go “better safe than sorry” route and make automated backups. And, while I am at it, I might as well use it to make “production replica” environment for testing.

My website environment is based on CentOS 6, MySQL database, and Apache. Ideally I would need exactly the same environment. But in this case I decided to upgrade all components to latest versions. In case of Linux that meant going with CentOS 7.1 (minimal).

Installation for CentOS is as simple as it gets. I basically click on Next until there is no button to press. :) Only possibility of error is forgetting to enable the Ethernet network adapter - not a catastrophic mistake; just annoying one. Once install was done, additional packages were in order:

yum install httpd mariadb-server php php-mysql rsync

To connect to my website I created new SSH keys:

ssh-keygen -b 4096

I appended newly created .ssh/id_rsa.pub key to .ssh/authorized_keys on my web server. That meant I could login and copy files without any passwords - great for scripting.

Setting up MySQL/MariaDB came next. It is just a basic setup followed by user and database creation:

mysql_install_db
chown -R mysql:mysql /var/lib/mysql/
service mariadb start
chkconfig mariadb on
mysql -e "CREATE USER '^^mydbuser_wp^^'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '^^mydbpassword^^';"
mysql -e "CREATE DATABASE ^^mydatabase_wordpress^^"

For data replication (after making sure /home/myuser directory exists) I created simple /root/replicate.sh script with following content:

#!/bin/bash

ssh ^^myuser^^@^^myhost.com^^ "mysqldump -u ^^mydbuser_wp^^ -p^^mydbpassword^^ --opt ^^mydatabase_wordpress^^" > /var/tmp/mysql.dump
mysql ^^mydatabase_wordpress^^ < /var/tmp/mysql.dump
rm /var/tmp/mysql.dump

scp -r ^^myuser^^@^^myhost.com^^:/home/^^myuser^^/* /home/^^myuser^^
#rsync -avz -e ssh ^^myuser^^@^^myhost.com^^:/home/^^myuser^^ /home/^^myuser^^

First three lines ensure I have a fresh MySQL database import and SCP is tasked with file copy. Better approach would be rsync but I kept getting Out of memory errors. As my site is not huge, I opted for dummy copy instead of troubleshooting.

Once I ran script once to verify all is working as expected, i added it to crontab (crontab -e) so it runs every midnight:

…
00 00 * * * /root/replicate.sh

For Apache I edited /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf file to change its root:

…
DocumentRoot "^^/home/myuser/public_html^^"
<Directory "^^/home/myuser/public_html^^">
    AllowOverride None
    # Allow open access:
    Require all granted
</Directory>
…
<IfModule mime_module>
    …
    ^^AddType text/html .php .phps^^
</IfModule>
…

Opening filewall was next task:

firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=http
firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=https
firewall-cmd --reload

sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
service iptables save

And all remaining was to start Apache:

chown -R apache:apache ^^/home/myuser/public_html^^
restorecon -R ^^/home/myuser/public_html^^
service httpd start
chkconfig httpd on

PS: Do notice that I didn’t describe security setup for this machine. Unless there are some mitigating circumstances, you pretty much want your backup as secure as a real thing.

Git Push to Multiple Repositories

There is no use in having the whole ZFS pool with backups if you won’t use it for your repositories. Backup for the private repositories is trivial - just create a repo on the server and push to it. But how do we add a new repository if one already has a remote (e.g., on GitHub)?

First step is to check current remotes. This information will come in handy a bit later

git remote -v
 origin  git@github.com:medo64/QText.git (fetch)
 origin  git@github.com:medo64/QText.git (push)

Next step is to create a bare backup repository, followed by adding both current and new destination as the push URLs:

git init --bare ^^//ring/Repositories/QText.git^^
git remote set-url --add --push origin git@github.com:medo64/QText.git
git remote set-url --add --push origin ^^//ring/Repositories/QText.git^^
git push -u origin --all

Reason behind the double add is due to Git “forgetting” its default location once the first manual add is executed. Any further update will not be affected.

Now a single push command will update both repositories.