Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Touching up a breakaway wand

Friday, August 1st, 2008

Almost any magician who uses a wand and some comedy bits is familiar with a breakaway wand. Certain plastic breakaway wands will develop unsightly chipped edges. Even though these chips are small, they stress the plastic and turn those edges into a color that is significantly more white than the desired black. The result of this wear are visible rings on the wand.

There is however, a very easy and effective touch-up. Grab a black permanent marker and run the tip across all of the chipped edges on your wand and then… Alakazam! Your wand has been returned to a near-new looking status.

Solution to error adding Sensors Applet

Sunday, September 9th, 2007

I’m running Fedora 7 with the proprietary Nvidia drivers. After an upgrade to the Sensors Applet, I found that I could no longer add it to my panel. It gave me this error:

The panel encountered a problem while loading “OAFIID:SensorsApplet”.

Little did I know that an awesome new feature had been added and broke the applet. This feature was temperature monitoring for Nvidia graphics cards! When I was trying to add the applet to the panel, the sensor applet attempted to find out my GPU temperature, but failed because of a missing package. By installing the “libXNVCTRL” package, I was able to give the sensors applet the API it wanted and get things working just fine.
(more…)