ord.ca

After countless failures while upgrading or running Ubuntu 12.04, I finally decided to leave the Ubuntu world.
It was time to go back to Debian roots and load 'Squeeze', Debian 6.0.4. It has been at version 6.x for over a year now and is very mature. What Debian lacks in the latest and greatest, it makes it up in stability and tight package management.
When Debian 7.x gets released, I will probably stay frozen on 6.x. If all LAMP functions continue to work then there really isn't any requirement.

Recently needed a convenient way to document remote site pictures easily. After some extensive keyword searching, came up with Theodolite Pro.
It's a great app that integrates tightly on the iPhone. The pictures now have all geotagged info embedded directly on the photo. Very useful for simple NSEW shots

Read a recent article in Connected For Business about going paperless.
The best statistic in the article said you can reduce paper usage by 8% if you change margins from 1.25" to 1". Not a bad idea when you think about it.

The new version of Drupad works great except it forgets your previous settings.
Now working on updates to Drupal itself.

After reviewing some recent mp4 movies, I realized there was a second audio track added in.
Changing the audio to a single 160 kbs track reduced the overall movie size by ~ 400 MB. The old profile was a mod from the standard Apple TV2 profile which contained a second audio track.
Still testing Handbrake but it seems this new single audio track approach will save 15-20 percent.

The tech guys solved the problems and now all ord.ca mail is working again.

The ord.ca domain mail has been down for 48 hours.
Hopefully mail will be up and running by Monday.
Please be patient. The ISP techs are working on it.

It looks like there are some hidden meta data fields for iTunes video.
When you buy a movie from iTunes, there are lots of extra fields displayed while searching on AppleTV. If you try to edit the info, the fields aren't there i.e. actors. This becomes very frustrating as the only way to resolve this is with a meta editor which has to rewrite the file. When changing basic info with iTunes, the file is edited in place and is not rewritten. When dealing with lots of movies, this becomes a problem. Also, you want to make sure the original encoding stays intact.

Running the new iCloud service hasn't been without issues.
The main problem has been calendar syncing. During a cleanup of calendar categories, some entries ended up without any category. It seemed that most of these entries were repeating events - not sure why.
The only solution was to delete the repeating events then re-create the entries.
Now all devices are in sync and updates are also faster.