Welcome!

If you didn’t know already, ThePCSpy is the online lair of Oli Warner.

If you’ve been here before, you’ve probably noticed that things look slightly different. The site is in the middle of quite a large overhaul so there may be some turbulence.

Popular Posts

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How to fix the 100% CPU issue in XBMC

Long time users of XBMC and Boxee on Linux will probably be aware of a very annoying bug that essentially uses an entire CPU when just sitting at menus.

Published 1 month, 2 weeks ago. Tagged with: boxee linux nvidia ubuntu xbmc

How to unblock Wikipedia

I thought I could go without Wikipedia for one day and I was wrong. Less than an hour into the day and I needed to look something up. I could go and look it up somewhere else but I like Wikipedia!

Published 3 months, 4 weeks ago. Tagged with: javascript ubuntu

DPD are terrible

There are few things more tedious than waiting for a delivery. One of those is waiting for a delivery, seeing the van turn up and just drive off without delivering the item. Worse still when the driver says it was your fault.

Published 4 months, 1 week ago.

The Death of Ubuntu

It’s happening again. Ubuntu is on its deathbed. Pundits and community members are exchanging blasts of statistics and in the crossfire people are getting dubious. Well I’ve one thing to say to Ubuntu community members:

Published 5 months, 3 weeks ago. Tagged with: statistics ubuntu

Why does Ubuntu need the Canonical Contributor Agreement?

Let’s say you want to improve Ubuntu by contributing a patch but if that project is covered by the Canonical Contributor Agreement, you’ll need to sign over some of your rights. People have been arguing about this for a while now but why does Canonical need it in the first place?

Published 9 months, 3 weeks ago. Tagged with: canonical ubuntu

Fixing /var/lib/dpkg/status corruption

Apt and dpkg are wonderful tools when they work. However, like most tools, if you chuck rubbish at them, they’ll stop working. Here’s a quick guide to overcoming the most common break in /var/lib/dpkg/status.

Published 1 year, 3 months ago. Tagged with: dpkg

Canonical's Landscape should be cheaper

Landscape is a great tool but at its current price and integration with the costly Ubuntu Advantage service plan, uptake will be slow.

Published 1 year, 4 months ago. Tagged with: canonical ubuntu

How to Enable Antialiasing in Wine

I love Wine. If you’re a Linux user, you’ll almost definitely have some experience with it. I recently found a feature that enables antialiasing and I want to share it.

Published 1 year, 4 months ago. Tagged with: wine

ProTip: Change DNS without downtime

A few times I’ve found that I need to move a site to another server without any downtime but every time, DNS rears its ugly head and ruins my day.

Published 1 year, 5 months ago. Tagged with: dns

Nano: Open a file at a specific position

Nano isn’t the best editor but it does a fairly good job at staying out the way and letting you edit or view things without needing a cheat-sheet of cryptic keyboard shortcuts. However, what do you do when you have a 50,000 line document and you want to get a specific line somewhere near the middle?

Published 1 year, 7 months ago. Tagged with: linux nano