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Volume licenced Office 2016 Repeated Activation Prompts

Had a situation that seems to be fairly common – get laptop, uninstall “Get Office” program, install Office 2016 and activate using KMS server, which seems to work fine. Then when you fire up one of the programs you get the “Lets get started” screen. You can close this and it works ok, but it is annoying.

To fix this see https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3170450 (deleting a couple of registry keys that make Office think it’s still in OEM mode).

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Installing Jekyll on Debian 8 (Jessie)

Install ruby-full:

sudo apt-get install ruby-full

Install ruby-ffi

apt-get install ruby-ffi

Install Jekyll

gem install --http-proxy http://wwwcache.gla.ac.uk:8080 jekyll

install node.js

apt-get install nodejs

Should then work for normal user.

Quick test – (from https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-deploy-jekyll-blogs-with-git)

jekyll new awesomeblog

This will create an awesomeblog directory containing the configuration files, posts directory and other required bits.

cd awesomeblog
jekyll serve

Jekyll will build your blog, and after a few seconds you should be able to visit http://host:4000 in your browser. Or skip the serve bit and check in the _site subdirectory.

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Raspberry Pi networking notes for connecting directly to laptop

If running normal raspbian edit the file /etc/network/interfaces to add in two blocks:

iface eth0 inet dhcp

and

iface eth0 inet static
    address 169.254.210.230
    netmask 255.255.0.0

Comment out the block not in use. For networks that have a dhcp server running use the first block, for connecting to a Windows computer via a private network use the second (If Windows connects to a network, is set to obtain an address automatically and can’t get one then it self-assigns a 169.254.x.y address). Static address can be anything of the form 169.254.x.y.

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Installing MATLAB 2015b on Debian Jessie

Ran into a couple of problems here:

Default Debian behaviour is to mount cd’s with noexec option. Thus you get permission denied even as root when you try to run the install script. Solution; remount cd:

sudo mount -o remount,exec,ro /media/cdrom0

or whatever path the cd is mounted at. You need the ro otherwise it complains.

Other more general problem: sudo ./install just results in Installing... Finished and a silent fail. In the old days using gksudo fixed this but apparently it’s deprecated now. It does work when running as normal user, so tried:

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Ubuntu 14.04.3 administrator group membership

First user in Ubuntu 14.04.3 has membership of groups:

Another user created as administrator from the GUI gets: