Expanding a KVM guest disk without LVM!

I recently ran out of space on my primary home server kernel virtual machine (Linux Mint) because I created the disk with a paltry 20G of space. To remedy this, I decided to add 30 additional gigabytes. The following are the steps I took.

Note that step 4 is potentially dangerous (specifically deleting and then re-creating the root partition), and setting the system up with LVM would have prevented me having to do it but if you are following this guide you are in the same situation and can't really benefit from could have/should have thoughts. :-) Anyway, everything worked fine when I was done.

1. Shut down the guest (on host)
1. virsh -connect qemu:///system
2. shutdown your-guest-domain-name
2. Expand virtual disk (on host)
1. qemu-img resize guest-disk.img +30G
3. Restart virtual machine (on host)
1. virsh -connect qemu:///system
2. start your-guest-domain-name
4. Expand ext4 partition and filesystem on bare disk (on the guest)
1. I followed this guide to the letter to resize the root os partition, reboot, and then expand the filesystem

Jawbone UP24 App Crashing After Personalization

Recently I got a nice large persimmon Jawbone UP 24 after seeing how useful my wife's was for fitness and sleep tracking, and the persimmon color is pretty cheap and looks good on either sex. Unfortunately, I was very frustrated trying to get it to work with my Android-based Oneplus One due to app issues preventing me from completing the setup. After lots of trial and error, I finally figured out an odd set of steps that got it working:

1. If you haven't signed up for an account already, sign-up in the app. During signup the app may become non-responsive and crash. This is fine.
2. Now sign-up again with the same account information and uncheck the e-mail notifications before proceeding. If you are getting a message about the account already existing, something is different than what I ran into and my solution probably won't work.
3. When you hit next/okay at this point it may just return you to the e-mail/password screen. Keep at it, eventually it will move on. I theorize that something at this stage causes the problem to be resolved.
4. Run through personalization, and you will be rewarded by it completing successfully.

RDP broken on Linux Mint (possibly after upgrading)

Background:

I am a fan of SSH of course, but RDP is pretty rock solid and easy to set up for remote desktop sessions and has given me a lot less trouble than nomachine setup that I used to use.

Problem
You used to have nice RDP sessions to your Linux server with xrdp. However, suddenly you get to a grey or checkerboard screen with an X for your cursor that never goes away after entering your login credentials. I encountered this after I took my main home server virtual machine from Mint 14 to Mint 17 in a single step.

Solution:

Specify the use of a mate session (if using mate) rather than an X11 session as described in this forum post.