Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • WordPress with MariaDB instead of MySQL

    So I heard good things about MariaDB and decided to switch from MySQL to MariaDB. MariaDB is a fork of MySQL developed by the original developers of MySQL and it is intended to be a drop in replacement – meaning all your commands and databases from MySQL should continue to work seamlessly after the switch. […]

  • Meteor::Socket bind: Address already in use at Meteor/Socket.pm line 115.

    If, after installing meteor server, you get an error like Meteor::Socket bind: Address already in use at Meteor/Socket.pm line 115. when trying to start it up with ./meteord -d or /etc/init.d/meteord start, it means that you likely have another instance of meteor running. Unless you have changed ports around, you can kill the exising instance […]

  • Installing Meteor Server on Ubuntu

    Meteor is a javascript server that does interesting things like live updating your live blog with far less load on your server than without it. However, setting it up is iffy, and the instructions are not idiot proof. So here are the steps distilled from my hits and misses, so that you may not have […]

  • Setting up live blogging that works with the latest version of WordPress

    Setting up live blogging that works with the latest version of WordPress

    True to form, I want big things for my blog, but they aren’t easy. This time the idea came from a reader who wanted my commentary tweet series on current events to be done instead as a live blog, so that they could read all the ideas at once in one place and they would […]

  • Upload Error: client intended to send too large body

    If you are using Nginx and are unable to upload files exceeding 1MB or so (most common) and get your error log shows “client intended to send too large body”, then here is the fix. Edit your Nginx configuration file (which on Debian/Ubuntu will be found at /etc/nginx/nginx.conf) and edit the setting for client_max_body_size to something […]

  • Nginx-1.5.6 with ngx_pagespeed (Google Pagespeed module) and ngx_cache_purge

    Nginx-1.5.6 with ngx_pagespeed (Google Pagespeed module) and ngx_cache_purge

    So I got tired of fiddling around with repositories offering builds that compiled ngx_pagespeed with Nginx. I was getting a lot of errors, was using older versions of Nginx and was not able to make the dotdeb repository work. I was wary of compiling, because I’m a creature of habit, and I like my Nginx […]

  • PCLZIP_ERR_BAD_FORMAT (-10) : Unable to find End of Central Dir Record signature

    If you are trying to upgrade, and suddenly start getting errors like: Incompatible Archive. PCLZIP_ERR_BAD_FORMAT (-10) : Unable to find End of Central Dir Record signature Here are some things to check. This basically means that WordPress is not able to unzip the downloaded packages to install the upgrades. Check to see available space on […]

  • Free space in your WordPress install by deleting old image sizes

    If you change your theme often, your uploads folder will accumulate thumbnails of images in many sizes that you no longer use. This consumes disk space unnecessarily. I wish someone coded a plugin for this, but failing that, a handy way to do this via SSH is: find . -name *-250×250.* | xargs rm -f […]

  • How to autopost your blogs and Twitter feed to Google Plus pages

    HEADS UP!!! Hootsuite is offering a very cool 50% off on a pro membership (which allows you unlimited autoposts). Use Coupon Code: HOOTXA90 Please note that this does not work with Google Plus profiles, only pages – like this Vidyut page. Google has recently released an API to select partners, which allows posting to google […]

  • Fix: Realtek SD card reader not working with Ubuntu

    I have a RTS5209 Realtek SD card reader on my laptop, which was not reading any card inserted. The following instructions are likely to work for other versions like RTS5229 or RTS5289 as well. Turns out I needed to install the driver. Realtek offers drivers on its website for Ubuntu/Linux. Download the driver and unpack […]

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