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I received my new eBay purchase, a computer destined to become a Fedora 12 box. Once I had a VNC server set up and running, I decided to disconnect everything except network and power connections and place the machine somewhere quiet. Then I attempted to power it up, and noticed that it did not appear on the network, nor was connectible, despite numerous tests before when my monitor *was* connected. A couple of searches indicated that the problem was related to Intel integrated graphics and Fedora 12. The fix that worked for my machine is as follows:

1) Open up terminal and become root.
2) Navigate to /boot/grub/ and edit menu.lst with a text editor.
3) Add the “nomodeset” option to the end of the kernel line.

In my case, the line in question became:

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.31.5-127.fc12.i686 ro root=/dev/mapper/vg_comp4-lv_root noiswmd LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=us rhgb quiet nomodeset

After that, rebooting without a monitor works perfectly fine, allowing me to access the box without any problems.

Reference: [1]

Recently, I’ve needed to copy Google Calendar Events to ease the effort in setting up my weekly schedule. After fiddling with various settings in the main Google Calendar interface, I still couldn’t copy events. Thanks to a helpful forum post, the feature in question is actually buried quite deep within the event settings. To copy an event in google calendar involves:

1) Select the original event and hit “edit event details.”
2) Look for the “more actions…” drop down box at the top of the event area, near the “delete” button.
3) Select “duplicate event”
4) The original event has now been duplicated and now you need to change the dates/times on this event.
5) Hit save and you should have copied that event successfully.

Reference: [1]

I’ve noticed that on my primary machine, at nearly all times, the Windows Media Player process was running hidden in the background consuming a unnecessary portion of my system’s RAM. First, I thought it was related to some iPod syncing software that I had run some time ago, or perhaps even with the last.fm service, but after some further investigation, I discovered it was actually related to my G15 and its LCD panel.

The fix is to untick the Windows Media Sideshow Gadget which can be done by going to the Control Panel and then going into “Windows SideShow”. After that, there were no more ghost WMP process that I’ve noticed on my system.

Reference: [1]