Author: garyjlittle_gd13bd

Changing Sway bar settings on S2 Exige

The default setting from Lotus is to use the central hole (out of 5). My Lotus came (from the PO) with the sway bars on the hardest setting (the hole closest to the bend).

You will need

  • Stands – jack stands or quickjack. I got my stands from Harbor Freight.
  • A 17mm open wrench to keep hold of the lock nut. Lowes stocks these.
  • A 17mm wrench, or socket. Lowes stocks these.
  • A long lever (breaker bar) to break the nut loose initially

The key thing is to have the car on stands – both wheels need to be in the air at the same time to avoid putting load on the sway bar.

To set the bar back to default:

  • Lift the car, so that you can get access. You will need to lift both sides of the car equally – else the sway bar will be under load and it will be difficult to remove the bolts
  • Using a 17mm socket and 17mm spanner/wrench – remove the bolt. The connection is likely to be a bit rusty – some WD40 helps here. I needed a breaker bar to get leverage.
  • Remove the bolt from the old position and move it to wherever you want.
  • Tighten the bolt back up. I used 33 ft/llb – the manual states 45NM
  • Repeat for the other side.

Visiting the Posh Museum

Anyone taking a business trip to Germany can probably get to the Porsche Museum on Sunday if you arrive before midday at Frankfurt Airport.  There are lockers at the museum, and the staff there were happy for me to stash my carry-on wheelie luggage behind the desk.

I spent almost three hours there, mostly because I took the audio tour (free) and looked at almost every artifact.  The museum gift shop is a bit limited but OK.

  • Land at Frankfurt Airport
  • Find the DB Long distance line, the long distance lines are located away from the main lines.  Follow the DB signs and Frankfurt Shuttle signage.
  • The train from Frankfurt Airport to Stuttgart is high speed and takes around 1 hour 15 minutes.  In April 2017, I paid 65 Euro, single (one-way), on the day at the ticket office.  It may be possible to get cheaper tickets by purchasing in advance.
  • Once at Stuttgart station, you will need to transfer to a local line to take you to the Porsche Museum.  The museum has its own train station.  The local lines are on the lower level.  Buy a ticket before taking the elevator down.  The journey is about 10 minutes
    • The station you want is called “Neuwirtsch (Porscheplatz)”.  Single ticket cost is 2.9 Euro.

Desktop Customization – Theming

  • Arc Theme top-level https://github.com/horst3180/arc-theme
  • Arc Icon Theme https://github.com/horst3180/arc-icon-theme
  • Arc Firefox Theme https://github.com/horst3180/arc-firefox-theme

My current terminal “Terminator” does not seem to adhere to the theming – or anything much for that matter, but gnome-terminal does.

Terminator’s use of tiling is probably redundant with i3 and tmux, so will switch to gnome-terminal (by changing i3-sensible-terminal to gnome-terminal in ~/.config/i3/config.

gnome-terminal inherits the font and themeing from gtk.  Apparently (u)rxvt is more customizable/has plugin ecosystem, but I don’t think I need a plugin-ecosystem.  Such things are probably best left to vim and shell.

fontawesome – unicode cut/paste.
http://fontawesome.io/cheatsheet/

Desktop Customization

Worked through this video tutorial, which had some great hints for making nice fonts appear in Linux.  Previously, I could only seem to get decent fonts in Ubuntu, and for other reasons (primarily Nutanix CVM is based on CentOS) I wanted to use CentOS as my desktop.

The two things which had most impact on font appearance were

  1. Adding font that claims to be same as used in OS-X
  2. Installing a tool named infinality, which improves randering.
  3. Using lxappearance to set the default font for all GTK based  applications.

Both are described in the Tutorial

  • Installing OS-X Fonts : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARKIwOlazKI&t=130s
  • Infinality Section : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARKIwOlazKI&t=580s

Another nice idea from the series is to match, or at least give some thought to the Browser (Firefox)  window manager (i3) and GTK “Themes”.  The tutorial uses a single colorscheme across all elements to achieve a nice coherent look and feel.  Doing so has given me the ability to customize/use a lightweight window manager, but still retain nice fonts in the applications, browser and Windowing environment.

Forensic recovery of formatted SSD on MacBook Pro OS X

On a MacBook Pro, with OSX, after installing a 3rd party SSD, there is no option to issue a “Secure Erase” and only “Format” is offered.  After formatting the drive (prior to selling the MacBook) – I was able to recover hundreds of photos and other documents using this freeware tool. Test Disk. Run the tool as “photorec” to access the Photo Recovery features.

To get around this I overwrote the partition with /dev/random.  Since the /dev/random device is bounded by CPU – you’ll want to stop the Mac from sleeping during the process by issuing

sudo systemsetup -setcomputersleep Never

Before formatting, there are lots of personal family photos that are recoverable by anyone who goes looking.  After formatting, the only images available are the default graphics put onto disk during OS-X install.