Monthly Archives: December 2010

Diaspora Buttons

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Posted by mac9416 on December 14, 2010 – 2:56 am
Filed under Uncategorized

If you use a social network such as Facebook and haven’t looked at Diaspora yet, you should have clicked that link and never read this far. Diaspora is open source social network software designed to allow users to share information while protecting their privacy.

There are a couple of ways to try Diaspora. The easiest way is to know someone already on the network who can invite you. If you don’t know anyone with invites to give away, you can head over to the Diaspora website and sign up to get an invitation.

Diaspora will get better as more people learn about it; so I want to do my part to spread the word. I’ve created a button to put in my blog’s sidebar and a few more to place elsewhere. Here they are:

With all this greyscale, I figured it would be a good idea to throw in some color.

A couple of things to note:

  1. I’m no graphics designer.
  2. I’m not using the official Diaspora font in these. It’s close, but not exact. I hope to get my hands on an SVG of the official logo and redo these buttons correctly.

These are better than nothing, but there is certainly room for improvement. Feel free to leave your constructive criticism in the comments section below. If you have any ideas for slogans, please leave those as well.

I’ve packed these PNGs and their source SVGs in a zip file here.

Monitoring Mobile Broadband Bandwidth Usage

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Posted by mac9416 on December 10, 2010 – 1:51 pm
Filed under Uncategorized

A while back, I blogged about how I connect to Verizon mobile broadband in Lubuntu. Now that I am connected, I have to worry about the monthly 5GB/month limit enforced by Verizon. In order to avoid the very high overuse fees, I must carefully monitor my bandwidth usage.

I’ve chosen the easy to set up vnstat to monitor bandwidth and vnstati to output the stats as an image. Installing vnstat and vnstati in Ubuntu is as simple as:

sudo apt-get install vnstat vnstati

Once vnstat is installed, I must tell vnstat to start monitoring my network interface. For my mobile broadband setup, the interface is ppp0.

sudo vnstat -u -i ppp0

After running that command, I rebooted to make sure the vnstat daemon was running.
Now vnstat is storing network usage information in a database. But how can one see this information in an easy-to-understand form? This command will output an image with a nice graph showing daily bandwidth usage:

vnstati -i ppp0 -o ~/vnstat.png -d

Of course, I don’t want to run that command every time I want to see up-to-date stats. So I create a cron job to run the command every five minutes by running

crontab -e

copying

0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * vnstati -i ppp0 -o ~/vnstat.png -d

into the editor, and then saving the file.

Cron will immediately start doing its thing and within five minutes an up-to-date image will appear in the home folder.

For convenience, I have made file:///home/mac9416/vnstat.png my home page in Firefox. When I want to check the latest stats, I simply refresh the page.

http://mac9416.com/2010/06/12/connecting-to-verizon-mobile-broadband-in-ubuntu-10-04/