I was trying to use iotop yesterday on my workstation and it was complaining that “CONFIG_TASK_DELAY_ACCT” was not enabled in the kernel. “OK,” I thought, “I can rebuild the kernel, no problem.” So I went to rebuild the kernel and discovered that CONFIG_TASK_DELAY_ACCT was already enabled along with the associated config options needed for iotop, so I was confused.

After a little spelunking of old mailing list entries (which I am trying to spare you with this post, dear reader), I discovered that the Ubuntu folks flipped around how the “nodelayacct” kernel boot parameter works for various arcane reasons. Here’s the short version of how to enable it.

1) Edit /etc/default/grub, adding “delayacct” as an option to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT entry. If you hadn’t already modified that line, it would go from


GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""


to


GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="delayacct"


2) Run “sudo update-grub”
3) Reboot, and you should be good to go

My MendelMax is built! Now I need the printrboard in the mail, and to wire it up, and then it’s printing time!

I scaled up the rabbit heart a bit and flattened the base. It prints much more nicely now.

This is a model I have seen on my computer screen over and over since 2002. Now I can print it and hold it in my hand! Look for me at HRS next week if you want one.

Here’s a video of it printing:

I have a couple of businesses, plus my own personal transactions, and every year come January I have to make sure I have all of the appropriate financial documentation for them, including copies of invoices and receipts. Fortunately, most of my invoices and receipts are now in email form, though I still get some paper ones (which go straight into the ScanSnap). Unfortunately, emails and attachments can’t go nicely in a reference folder in my Dropbox.

Thunderbird to the rescue!

I use Mozilla Thunderbird for my email for mostly the same reason I still use FireFox to browse the web: there’s a plugin for almost anything I want to do. Also, in Linux it’s easy to use a CUPS-PDF virtual printer to print to PDF. Combining this with the attachment extractor Thunderbird plugin allows me to dump all of the attachments and emails to files on my hard drive in just a few clicks.

I have ‘Invoices’ and ‘Receipts’ email folders that need to be dumped, so I just go into each folder, select all messages, print them using CUPS-PDF, and then right-click and tell AttachmentExtractor to dump any attachments as well. Done, in about 5 minutes. Trying to do this manually would take countless hours, meaning in reality that I would just never do it, and if my taxes were audited, it would be a total nightmare.

Hopefully if you have this same problem google + this post will help you out. Enjoy!