The backlight on my new laptop was not working - a Toshiba KiraBook running Ubuntu 14.04. The buttons for screen brightness (F2 and F3) did not cause the brightness to change. Also, the OSD feedback incorrectly showed “Power Manager” for brightness-down and no OSD feedback for brightness-up.

I have changed the BIOS to recognise the keys as F1-12 keys, requiring the Fn key to activate the hotkey functionality (default is to have them as hotkeys and Fn makes them F1-12).

Setting brightness manually

Following the steps at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/Debugging/Backlight I found that I could manually adjust the brightness from a terminal with

sudo su
cd /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight
cat brightness
echo 400 > brightness

The value of cat brightness at boot (which seems to be full brightness) is 765, so 400 should be about half way, and certainly appears to my eyeballs to be...

Recently I submitted an issue for a software project. It was something like “The column for total shows NaN when it should be a number” and a bit of speculation about why this may be happening.

Turns out I was wrong with why it was happening and the issue was caused by something else. It was closed within minutes of being opened with the response “The server was restarted and had to resync. When it’s finished resyncing it will display the right value.”

This is an engineering response.

In contrast, a quality response is slightly more useful, and follows roughly this pattern: “This is feedback. Something in our product has not met their expectations. What is it that didn’t meet their expectations? How can we change it so it would meet that expectation?”

Blaming resyncing is not a resolution to the issue. The real resolution to the issue is handling resyncing in a way the customer would...

Is bitcoin a good option as a way of obtaining cash when traveling? On my recent travels from Australia to Singapore I decided to test this. The hope was to save myself from high fees and bad exchange rates at airports and banks.

Here’s the comparison of various different methods of obtaining Singapore Dollars using Australian Dollars

The goal was to keep it as simple as possible; to start with cash and end up with cash, without having to set up or link any accounts. Thus, bitcoin exchanges and anything which requires registration such as travelers cards are immediately excluded. Some people may think this condition...