How to Update Linux on Amazon EC2 with Yum

It’s really quite straightforward to update your Amazon EC2 instance to the latest versions: Login with your secure key via your terminal window; then Type “Sudo -i” and hit enter Type “yum update” and hit enter Hit “Y” to agree to the updates Wait for the software to carry out the update. That’s it! The …

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Silicon Dales Cloud Hosting Clients – Servers Updated

We have this morning upgraded the instances for all clients using our managed Cloud hosting accounts. Those of you who are using our full maintenance packages for cloud hosting have had those instances upgraded. This means that your hosting is using the latest stable release – which is good news for stability, security and software …

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Sell Tickets Online without Merchant Transaction Fees

We’re always reviewing and recommending various digital products to our clients, and one service which we are in the habit of recommending to venue and events in order to sell tickets online is called EventBrite. EventBrite has a range of features which make it really useful for event organisers to sell tickets online, not least the …

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Summit Retreats Website Nominated for AWWWARDS

The fresh new website for Summit Retreats (luxury alpine getaways) has been nominated for an AWWWARDS. Created by Silicon Dales, the responsive, full-screen design took 2 months to build owing to thousands of high-res chalet images and data points needed to feed the new website. The AWWWARDS prize aims to “discover, recognize, and promote the …

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18th Century Web Fonts

We have been looking for some really fancy 19th Century web fonts as part of a project to put some information from 1800’s history books onto the internet. Here are a couple we found: Unifraktur Maguntia This is a fancy poster display font inspired by German 19th Century foundries who originally made fonts for paper …

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How to Do a Screenshot

Sometimes, people ask us how we’ve done things on the Silicon Dales website itself, as they’d like to take a technique and put it into their own website. Today, I’m going to be letting you know how to do a screenshot of a website or other item on your computer screen. Free Screenshot Softwares / …

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How to Italicise Text in Skype / Make Skype Text Display in Italics

This tutorial describes how to make your text display in italics using Skype. For example of italics at work, this paragraph is in italics. It is also in bold. Formatting text in Skype can be somewhat counter-intuitive. Luckily here at Silicon Dales we’ve gone through all the pain on your behalf. Text in italics leans …

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Tutorial: Fix Magento upgrade fails with “Unknown cipher in list: TLSv1”

Have you tried to upgrade Magento from the command line (or some other way) and discovered the delicious error message: Unknown cipher in list: TLSv1 Returned to you in your terminal window? There is a fix which can work for this, below. Edit the file downloader/lib/Mage/HTTP/Client/Curl.php, type the following command from the Magento installation directory: …

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