How to clear apt-cacher cache – Ubuntu 14.04 – apt-cacher: Cache Full

james 1 Comment

We have a server running apt-cacher to help cache Ubuntu repositories.  However, after about 2 years of usage the disk on the server has filled up.  I discovered this after trying to update my Ubuntu desktop and got the following error: 

503  apt-cacher: Cache Full

Here is how to clear the apt-cache cache.

sudo service apt-cacher stop
sudo rm -rf /var/cache/apt-cacher-ng/
sudo mkdir -p /var/cache/apt-cacher-ng/{headers,import,packages,private,temp}
sudo service apt-cacher start

How To Clear Your Apple Maps Search History in iOS 8

james 4 Comments

I wanted to clear my Apple Map search history because it was auto-completing the wrong things. However, it isn’t very obvious how to clear your Apple Map search history. Here is how I cleared it:

1 – Open the Apple Maps app.

2 – Click into the search bar at the top.

Clearing your Apple Map search history.
Click into the search bar at the top

3 – Click on favourites

Clearing the search history on Apple Maps
Click on the favourites button

4 – Click the clear button.

Push the Clear Button
Click on the clear button!

Apple are generally great at usability.  However, this simply doesn’t make sense to me and seems massively confusing. I wish that Apple would add a control clearing the search history from within the iPhone setting app. This would fit in with their general settings paradigm and is exactly how they do the clearing of Safari browser history.

Hope this helps someone.

Great Image Viewer for Mac OS X … Lyn image browser

james Leave a comment

Apple Mac OS X is a brilliant OS but unfortunately it’s missing a good image viewer. In comparison, Windows has Preview and Ubuntu has the Gnome Image Viewer both of which are great. I did some research and the image browser i found was Lyn Image Browser. I like it so much… I thought I would put write a little review for it.

So why is it so good?

1 – Great Thumbnail Viewer
Lyn Image Browser has a great thumbnail viewer where the images are large enough to actually see them. You can browse through folders really quickly and easily.

lyn_image_browser_thumbnail_view_2

You can also view all the image information:

lyn_image_browser_image_imformation

2 – You can flick between images
This might not sounds like much of feature but frankly it is. Apple’s Preview is missing this key feature and is super annoying while both Windows preview and Gnome image viewer both have this feature.

lyn_mac_osx_image_viewer

Finally… its fast and lightweight
I hate slow applications and this one is very fast and lightweight and doesn’t hog the cpu.

So, if you are looking for a image viewer for Mac OSX then I can highly recommend Lyn Image Browser.

How give a user permission to run a specfic command as root Ubuntu

james Leave a comment

Sometimes it can be really useful to give a user privileges to run a specific command as root. For example – if you wanted to allow a user to restart a specific service or run a specific program as root without given them access to the whole server. You can configure this using visudo command as root. Note: you really must be root when you do this and not a sudo.

 sudo su -

Then..

visudo

You can then modify the configuration file. There are specific sections in the config file which are show below. For example – I want to give a user called debug permission to run supervisorctl as root.

....

# User alias specification
debug ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/usr/bin/supervisorctl

Hope this is helpful.