Silviu's Blog

Roll Your Own Tailscale MagicDNS Using pfSense and Unbound

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 14:38:21 +0000

The Why First question that would come to mind is why bother ? Tailscale implements a perfectly usable MagicDNS feature. Well there are a few reasons I quickly discovered after telling myself “Looks great, let’s enable it”: Even if the issue is closed I still very often get DNS issues in Android if Tailscale with MagicDNS is active. UPDATE: having setup this d-i-y dns scheme I never checked again for MagicDNS.

Ubuntu 22.04 Dislikes RSA Keys

Sat, 18 Jun 2022 14:01:33 +0000

I wrote in a past article about how I’m setting up Hetzner dedicated servers with full disk encryption even if they miss an ikvm and why Debian 10 machines require a RSA key for this. But since I switched one of my workstations to Ubuntu 22.04 I was unable to login using this RSA key. Running ssh with debug enabled showed the likely culprit: debug1: Offering public key: /home/user/.ssh/id_rsa debug1: send_pubkey_test: no mutual signature algorithm The message sent me on the right track, Ubuntu 22.

Full Disk Encryption on Hetzner Dedicated and Debian 10 Woes

Sat, 18 Jun 2022 13:41:37 +0000

As absolutely nobody knows or uses I maintain an ansible role that can setup a Debian or Ubuntu machine with full disk encryption on Hetzner Robot (baremetal dedicated machines). But wait, you shout, Hetzner usually runs consumer grade stuff without kvm’s - how do you enter your password at bootime. Easy, the role sets up a minimal boot environment with a dropbear ssh server where you can login and do cryptroot-unlock.

I’m Back

Mon, 11 Oct 2021 10:06:37 +0000

For years I used to run both a tech blog and a blog in my native language. At some point I realized I haven’t posted in years, backed it up and shut everything down. Since then a few things happened: I got into 3D printing, have a sometime interesting $dayjob, gave up on Facebook (never been much active on twitter). All those are going towards me wanting to share stuff (I’m sure all 3 of you reading this will be happy) and having no place to do it.

About Me

Sat, 02 Oct 2021 16:44:48 +0000

I’m a DevOps engineer / sysadmin, tech and open source enthusiast by day and amateur photographer and traveler in my spare time. I also 3d print and build/repair/break stuff regularly in my garage. Sysadmin then DevOps engineer, probabbly doing DevOps before it was fashionable to be called that.

Oracle complains about long identifier on simple operations.

Fri, 25 Mar 2016 12:16:52 +0000

Soo, I’m going head first into the oracle db world. I was trying to create an spfile from the pfile and of course it didn’t work: SQL> create spfile from pfile="/oracle/app/product/12.1.0/dbhome_1/dbs/initORCL.ora"; create spfile from pfile="/oracle/app/product/12.1.0/dbhome_1/dbs/initORCL.ora" * ERROR at line 1: ORA-00972: identifier is too long The reason is simple enough, you have to use single quotes instead of double quotes. But it took me a while to find out this so here it is for all other beginners.

Errors in mail.log from nagios check_ssmtp

Fri, 25 Mar 2016 11:47:38 +0000

I got my nagios server banned by fail2ban because of errors in the postfix mail.log log. I know that I can simply whitelist the nagios server but I prefer it working perfectly. Checking the logs I could see this error repeating itself on each check: Mar 25 13:01:13 xxx-123 postfix/smtpd[17065]: connect from nagios.example.com[1.2.3.4] Mar 25 13:01:13 xxx-123 postfix/smtpd[17065]: improper command pipelining after QUIT from nagios.example.com[1.2.3.4]: Mar 25 13:01:13 xxx-123 postfix/smtpd[17065]: disconnect from nagios.

AIX git SSL woes

Tue, 23 Feb 2016 09:27:39 +0000

Oh joy and happiness I have to admin AIX boxes. One of the first things I hit was using git to clone some stuff from github erroring out with: SSL certificate problem: unable to get local issuer certificate Yep, simple problem, no ssl ca bundle on the system. You can use either the bulldozer solution and have either: export GIT_SSL_NO_VERIFY=true either: git config http.sslVerify false ( git config --unset http.sslVerify ) because who cares about MITM attacks especially to deployed software on production servers.

Use Vagrant on Windows with Ansible under Cygwin

Thu, 04 Feb 2016 11:24:45 +0000

If due to some reason you have to run vagrant under windows and plan on using Ansible you will need a couple of wrappers. ansible-playbook.bat has to be in the Windows PATH; ansible-winpath-playbook.sh is called by ansible-playbook.bat to change paths from Windows style paths to *nix style paths that ansible under cygwin can understand.

Creating new zfs pool mixing previously used drives

Wed, 03 Feb 2016 11:51:03 +0000

I am building a new homelab for myself using Intel NUCs. I need a NAS so I can test live migration and I was set to buy 2 bay synology. But when a 140$ HP Gen8 Microserver was on offer I couldn’t say no. FreeNAS might not be as polished as Synology but I would be getting 4 bays, two gigabit ports and iLO at a third of the price. Also it would offer the possibility of learning FreeNAS (my other, longtime NAS is slackware + zfs on linux).

Verify SMART details for members of an Intel RST RAID volume

Thu, 22 Oct 2015 06:02:14 +0000

Sooo, Be it because of the BIOS update to a beta or because of my drives but my RAID10 keeps failing. I documented before how to repair such a broken array but I didn’t want to go ahead with it too many times as data corruption is only one step away. Knowing that at least one of the disks has some minor issues (mdadm kicked it out some time ago when the disks were running under linux) I decided to check smart details and only keep only two of the disks in RAID1.

Intel RST RAID Non-RAID Disk after BIOS update

Wed, 14 Oct 2015 06:06:33 +0000

So, having nothing better to do and for no good reason I decided to update my workstation’s BIOS to the latest version released by Gigabyte. Since ignoring _the “__If it works don’t fix it” _mantra is always a good idea. Beautiful, after update two of my disks from a four disk RAID10 array were showing as Non-RAID Disk. I had backups but shuffling 2TB+ of data is never fun. Initial reports were all grim, the Intel RST BIOS does not allow repairing.

pfSense home router using the PC Engines APU1D4

Thu, 27 Aug 2015 09:05:18 +0000

My old home router based on a sandy bridge dual core celeron and a gigabyte motherboard got “stolen” by my wife to use as a desktop as her old laptop was getting pretty slow. I ran for a while Tomato on a Cisco E3200 router but it wasn’t able to keep up with my home connection (300 down / 100 up). Even if the router has gigabit ports it was only able to nat at ~100-150Mbit and openvpn was limited to around 10Mbit

Adding a form with autocalculated fields in squarespace

Wed, 26 Aug 2015 12:45:43 +0000

I had to build a form on a squarespace hosted site that has to auto-calculate a couple of fields and also do field validation and offer the option to email the whole calculation to a visitor chosen address. I won’t publish the complete script here, but it should help get you going. First of all you will have to build this in the HTML/CSS block, you won’t be able to use the squarespace offered form builder.

Brightness keys on Linux Mint for Acer E3-111

Sat, 27 Jun 2015 09:52:41 +0000

Enabling brightness control is moderately easy (I’m pretty sure they worked out of the box on slackware). Go to codingtony/acer-brightness-linux-acpi and follow the instructions. Change /etc/acpi/events/acer-tm-brightness-down and /etc/acpi/events/acer-tm-brightness-up with the correct events: event=video/brightnessdown BRTDN 00000087 00000000 and event=video/brightnessup BRTUP 00000086 00000000 Restart acpid and the shortcuts should start working.

Speed-up WAN-LAN speed on the Cisco E3200 using Tomato

Wed, 27 May 2015 10:15:43 +0000

There’s a really long discussion on bcm_nat and fastnat on the various forums like linksysinfo. The short version of this is: fastnat and bcm_nat are disabled by default because they break QOS and access restrictions. If you use any of those you’re done, you have to choose features or speed or another router. If you, like me, don’t use those you can do the following: ssh into your router and try: modprobe bcm_nat than speedtest your connection a few times you should see some improvement.

Subdomains pointing to private IPs are not resolved on Tomato

Tue, 26 May 2015 10:47:12 +0000

Some time ago I used to remember IPs on my home and work network but these days I rely much more on dns and dhcp reservation for this tasks. This has the advantage that I can easy move a service, say git.example.com to a new server. At home I switched (at least for a while) from a dedicated Debian router/gateway box to a router running Tomato. Suddenly subdomains pointing to private IP addresses were no longer resolved.

Missing 5Ghz WiFi settings on Cisco E3200 with Tomato Shibby

Wed, 20 May 2015 06:33:49 +0000

I followed the instructions and installed Tomat on my Cisco E3200 router without issue. I chose Tomato by Shibby specifically because it supports the 5GHz radio in this particular router model. But woe and behold after I installed the settings were not there, I could only see them for the 2.4GHz WiFi. Well it turns out instructions are made to be followed, I got curious after install and logged right in, but it turns out you really have to do the last 30-30-30 reset.

Repairing a Husky Hunter after reversing batteries.

Mon, 27 Apr 2015 06:15:58 +0000

Ok, I did it. For the first time since I can remember I inserted batteries wrongly and reversed polarity. And that in a device I’m pretty fond of, and I recently aquired: a Husky Hunter. It was only for a few seconds before I realized my mistake but it was enough, the computer was dead. I tried leaving it overnight with fresh batteries thinking that my mistake instantly depleted the onboard RAM battery (if it’s empty a Husky will just play dead until it gets a bit of charge).

Quickly disable email for one virtual host

Wed, 22 Apr 2015 09:28:09 +0000

If you discover that one site that you host is sending tons of emails there is an easy and quick way to disable email only for one particular virtual host. Add the following line in it’s virtual host or .httacess file php_admin_value sendmail_path "/dev/null" If you add it to the virtual host be sure to reload apache.

Migrating Gerrit to Google OAuth from Google OpenID

Thu, 09 Apr 2015 10:17:38 +0000

I expect this post to be obsolete pretty soon, but for now I expect this will help you skip many of the issues and questions I had going forward with upgrading Gerrit and switching to Google OAuth from OpenID. This post is not exhaustive, I trust that you are familiar with Gerrit if you’ve come so far. I am running a gerrit installation that was stuck at v2.10 as all our users used Google OpenID.

Running gcp.py from cron

Fri, 03 Apr 2015 10:16:22 +0000

On my backup server I run gcp.py from gdatacopier to backup my google docs. I had to fix two issues in order to get it to run from a bash script: the PYTHONPATH had to be exported prior to running, or the script will fail because it requires gdata-python-client the LANG envronment has to be set otherwise it will spill the following error in the log (if you bother to log the output from cron that is, otherwise it will just not work and you won’t know why, because the script works fine when ran manually) Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/local/bin/gcp.

mono 3.10 on slackware 64 bit

Tue, 24 Mar 2015 07:28:03 +0000

I installed mono using sbopkg and found the following issue while trying to run keepass: System.TypeInitializationException: An exception was thrown by the type initializer for Mono.Unix.Native.Syscall -> System.DllNotFoundException: /usr/lib/libMonoPosixHelper.so at (wrapper managed-to-native) Mono.Unix.Native.Syscall:get_at_fdcwd () at Mono.Unix.Native.Syscall..cctor () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 - End of inner exception stack trace - The fix was to edit [cci]/etc/mono/config[/cci] and remove the [cci]/usr/lib/[/cci] path from the [cci]libMonoPosixHelper.so[/cci] definition so that it looks like this:

Switched to Chrome but magnet links open with kTorrent instead of custom script

Tue, 17 Mar 2015 12:23:41 +0000

On one of my kde workstations I switched from firefox to chrome. One issue I found was that I have a custom script that takes magnet links and adds them to my NAS server instead of opening them locally. Chrome insisted on opening them with ktorrent instead of my custom script. The fix is to create a file torrent.sh.desktop inside ~/.local/share/applications/ with the following content: [Desktop Entry] Type=Application Exec=/usr/local/bin/torrent.sh %u MimeType=x-scheme-handler/magnet; Name=torrent.

Raspberry Pi A+ Nixie NTP Clock

Tue, 27 Jan 2015 10:30:49 +0000

Who doesn’t like a Nixie tube based clock. Even my wife loved it. Bonus points if it’s very accurate. I had in my parts box, for a very long time now, the display PCB from an old PH-meter. Old enough that it was done using Rusian 74141 clones - K155ID1 nixie drivers - a lot of logic chips (decade counters, serial latches, etc) and nixie tubes. It was also wired in a way that defied logic.

Build a Smart Scanner using a PI

Mon, 26 Jan 2015 21:44:09 +0000

I got a free all-in-one printer from a friend who didn’t need it (consumed way too much ink cartridges). Since I liked the idea of the ScanSnap Evernote scanner but not so much the 500$ sticker price I decided to build one using this all in one and a Raspberry PI. Fortunately the model I received is supported by SANE. I needed the following pieces put together: Interface (a few buttons to take color/grayscale lowres/high res photos) A command line utility to upload scanned pages to the cloud A daemon to monitor and trigger everything.

Prevent update-grub from finding LVM based virtual machines

Tue, 09 Dec 2014 09:12:54 +0000

I’m running a debian based XEN box to host various virtual machines. Lately I’ve been having an issue when running update-grub. All the partitions for the virtual machines are found and added to grub: # update-grub2 [...] Found Debian GNU/Linux (7.7) on /dev/mapper/vg0-vm01-disk Found Debian GNU/Linux (7.7) on /dev/mapper/vg0-vm02-disk Found Slackware Linux (Slackware 14.1) on /dev/mapper/vg0-vm03-disk [...] It’s not a big issue as the xen kernel is still default but it’s annoying.

Benchmark comparison of Intel RST RAID and Microsoft Storage Spaces pool

Tue, 04 Nov 2014 09:53:30 +0000

I posted last time that I upgraded my workstation’s mechanical storage. Since I had a hard time deciding between using storage spaces and my motherboard’s Intel RST sollution I searched some comparisons but couldn’t find any so I decided to make my own mini benchmark. Hardware Intel I7 2600k Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD3P motherboard 4 WD 2TB Green drives (actually 3 x 2TB WD20EARS and 1 x 2TB WD20EADX) Benchmarks Storage spaces three drive parity Originally I was using just three of the disks (wanting to keep the fourth for offsite backups).

Trick Windows 8 into creating a RAID10 (striped mirrors) array

Fri, 31 Oct 2014 13:00:35 +0000

I recently had to upgrade the storage for my desktop and I thought that since I have a few left-over disks I’d try to build a RAID10 array - RAID10 is very cool because it gives performance close to striped arrays but enjoys the reliability of mirrored arrays. Wikipedia has a nice write-up if you want it. I had two options - using the motherboard’s Intel controller or software RAID. Coming from the Linux world I was expecting software raid to be easy enough to configure - I was wrong apparently in the Windows world options are more limited (mirrors and stripes) with only recently in Windows 8 Storage Spaces offering more options.

Latest openssh disables arcfour and blowfish-cbc

Tue, 21 Oct 2014 10:01:26 +0000

If you move a lot of data using rsync/scp/ssh you probably found out by now that arcfour or blowfish ciphers are a lot faster than others. A comparison is found in this thread. (TL;DR arcfou256 is the fastest cipher). Today I updated openssh on my slackware servers only to be greeted by this error from scripts doing rsync to my backup server: no matching cipher found: client arcfour server aes128-ctr,aes192-ctr,aes256-ctr,aes128-gcm@openssh.com,aes256-gcm@openssh.com,chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (0 bytes received so far) [Receiver] rsync error: unexplained error (code 255) at io.

Use nagios to track and graph your twitter followers

Mon, 20 Oct 2014 08:23:31 +0000

2023 Update With the number of changes since Twitter is under new ownership I’m not sure this can still work. I’ve been using Nagios to monitor servers and devices for years now. Lately as an exercise to learn more about nagios I installed a private instance that I use to monitor everything I can think of - from my personal servers to the number of hours we watch TV. A nice use I found is to monitor the number of followers my twitter bots and personal account have.

Can you mirror a stripe? (a.k.a. 3 disks raid 10 or 1+0)

Fri, 17 Oct 2014 12:38:52 +0000

TL;DR Yes you can assemble a md device from a stripe and a disk. Please don’t shoot! 🙂 I’m doing this on a testing server, I don’t have any idea about the long term stability and/or reliability and I don’t care this is a personal testing server. I wouldn’t do this (at least yet) on a production server. The why, what and how below: I am looking to assemble a “Frankenstein” virtualization server (i.

Linux on the Acer E3-111 – Aspire E3-111-C5FN

Fri, 05 Sep 2014 08:39:49 +0000

I gave up on using a tablet and sold mine some time ago. My old toshiba m100 laptop was to heavy and too old to lug around when on holiday (mainly to download photos) so I decided to buy a small laptop to replace it. 10’’ is too small for me and so I decided on an 11’’ low cost system. I bought an Acer Aspire E3-111 instead of competing models from Asus and others because I found a good deal on it and because of the quad core CPU - Intel® Celeron® N2930 - that I couldn’t find on any other machine.

SSH key based authentication fails on a new computer

Mon, 02 Jun 2014 10:19:04 +0000

Having reinstalled one of my older laptops I noticed I cannot login using it’s private key. I was sure I backed up the original and properly restored it after reinstalling. I ran ssh -v to get more information:

Roaming not allowed by server caught my eye. What the heck is that?

Using a standard mysql function returns an error

Mon, 05 May 2014 05:44:19 +0000

While running some mysql scripts I suddenly hit the following error: ERROR 1305 (42000) at line 1: FUNCTION somedatabase.find_in_set does not exist Since find_in_set is a standard function I was kind of puzzled, especially since I ran the same script before on some other servers without error. Checking the SQL script I found the issue: I had update [blah blah] where find_in_set (id,(select [more blah[)) from [rest of blag]; and it has to be

Count traffic from an apache log file

Mon, 03 Mar 2014 07:12:19 +0000

I had to count traffic made by a resource from the apache log files. If awstats had been installed it would have been an easy job, but it wasn’t hard without it either. I used hints from here to build the following: awk '{ s += $10 } END { print "Total ", s/1024/1024 " MB", "- Average ", s/NR/1024/1024 " MB", "- Access ", NR }' access_log This prints a result like this:

Slow ZFS write performance

Thu, 30 Jan 2014 10:26:22 +0000

A note to self more than anything. While I was rebuilding my HP N40L Microserver storage to use new drives and ZFS I experienced very slow (<20MB/s ) First I thought that it was because the source was a degraded RAID5 and performance was lost due to parity. But when the target was a network share instead of the local ZFS pool write speeds went to a more respectable 60-70MB/s.

Error creating zfs pools using drives that belonged to a md raid array

Mon, 27 Jan 2014 06:37:23 +0000

While migrating a file server from mdadm software raid to zfs I encountered the following error while creating the pool: zpool create -f tank mirror /dev/disk/by-id/xxx /dev/disk/by-id/yyy the kernel failed to rescan the partition table: 16 cannot label 'sdb': try using parted(8) and then provide a specific slice: -1 Even if the old mdadm array was no longer being mounted (as more than one disk was missing and it was a raid5) they were still being added to md0:

Install blinkstick on Slacware

Wed, 15 Jan 2014 07:46:46 +0000

I recently built a blinkstick, a cool little device. Using it under linux is very easy using the command line, but I had some issues installing it under Slackware: pip install blinkstick Downloading/unpacking blinkstick Downloading BlinkStick-0.7.0.tar.gz Running setup.py egg_info for package blinkstick Requirement already satisfied (use -upgrade to upgrade): grapefruit==0.1a3 in /usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages (from blinkstick) Requirement already satisfied (use -upgrade to upgrade): webcolors in /usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages (from blinkstick) Downloading/unpacking pyusb (from blinkstick) Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement pyusb (from blinkstick) (from versions: 1.

Evernote under Wine: "already installed by another user."

Tue, 07 Jan 2014 12:34:01 +0000

Trying to update to the latest evernote version on a linux laptop I use I hit the error mentioned in the title: “evernote was already installed by another user.” Weird, but solvable. I ended doing the following: Uninstall evernote: wine uninstaller Trying to install still gave the same error and so I had to do some registry surgery (be sure to replace root with your username): grep "with upgrade" ~/.wine/drive_c/users/root/Temp/EvernoteSetup.log [01/07/2014 14:23:18] Located product {C2EECB42-2C7F-11E3-8960-00163E98E7D0} with upgrade code {AE2C091E-CF5F-4e30-8659-D640E23A8B99}.

Expose the sd-card of the Jolla phone over USB

Mon, 06 Jan 2014 06:41:03 +0000

I know there are many ways to get content onto the Jolla phone (rsync over ssh springs to mind) but for large files I still prefer USB. Having just bought a 64Gb micro-sd I wanted to copy the bulk of my music and videos using USB. BTW this is the card I bought and works great (formatted as btrfs): Kingston 64GB Class 10 There is one easy step to do. Start the terminal and create a symlink to the card on the phone:

Rename an application shortcut on the Jolla phone

Fri, 03 Jan 2014 13:55:16 +0000

Some time ago I bought OfficeSuite in the Google Play store and thought that it would be nice to have it running on my SailfishOS powered Jolla phone as well. I conacted mobisystems and they were nice enough to send me an activation code and links to the apk download. It installed and works fine (didn’t do any fancy editing yet though) but the shortcut was named “com” and the icon was blank.

[updated] List of Humble Bundle Games that work on the Sailfish OS Jolla Phone

Fri, 03 Jan 2014 11:53:50 +0000

Being and old time Maemo fan I went and preordered the Jolla phone as soon as I could (March 2013 IIRC) and I’ve been happily playing with it ever since I got it. I like to play the occasional game on the go and so I bought many of the bundles that humblebundle offered. Happily they also offer an android application that functions like a store - you can see all the games you bought and download/install/update them. Follow these directions to install the Humble Bundle app.

Read bellow is a list of the games I own and as I get time to test them I will update the status.

Starting 2014 Ad Free

Fri, 03 Jan 2014 11:16:20 +0000

As you probably failed to notice I removed from my blog the like/tweet/etc. buttons a while ago as I figured nobody is going to tweet about how he found the latest fix to some obscure daemon. As I find ads more and more annoying I decided to start 2014 Ad free and so I removed all the ads from the site. This is a big step as Ad Sense helped a lot to pay the server bill.

Stream music from home when you are away

Fri, 13 Dec 2013 07:03:11 +0000

I run a pretty powerful microitx system as my home router. Since it’s always on (as oposed to my nas) I decided to add some storage so I can host my music and some tv shows. I checked some projects and stopped to test Sockso.The site is simple and doesn’t really scream “open source project” but sockso seems really good at what it does. It works both as a gui and as a server tool and is available for windows, linux and mac.

The difference between exclamation mark and asterisk in /etc/shadow

Tue, 01 Oct 2013 10:45:29 +0000

So, with a terrible case of memory lapsus while wanting to disable password login for a user I couldn’t remember what the difference between “!” and “*” is in the /etc/shadow file. Well man 5 shadow to the rescue Refer to **crypt**(3) for details on how this string is interpreted. If the password field contains some string that is not a valid result of **crypt**(3), for instance ! or *, the user will not be able to use a unix password to log in (but the user may log in the system by other means).

Apache IP based restrictions based on a text list. No restart required.

Tue, 01 Oct 2013 10:31:32 +0000

I run a few services on a remote host that I want to restrict access to. For that I use both a password and IP based restrictions. The issue is that for example at home I have a dynamic allocated IP. One option would be to add a hostname in the apache rule, like this: Allow from example.dyndns.org But this has some disadvantages: it requires a dns lookup on each access it uglifies your access logs To get around this I moved away from Access control to a rewrite map.

CentOS 6.x misses nobootwait fstab option.

Mon, 30 Sep 2013 06:51:14 +0000

Recently I added a new storage disk to a cloud server. The issue is that this disk might not always be available at boot time. There is an easy fix for this kind of problems. The nobootwait mount option (like it would show in a fstab entry): /dev/xvdd1 /storage ext4 defaults,nobootwait 0 0 Note that the fsck order of 0 already ensures that fsck will not hold the boot process by complaining the disk is missing.

A simple retweet bot using a collocated Raspberry PI

Fri, 13 Sep 2013 08:57:10 +0000

2023 Update With the number of changes since Twitter is under new ownership I’m not sure this can still work. I have a Raspberry PI freely collocated by the nice people at pcextreme. Being a Jolla fan I found a new use for it. I made a Retweet bot that retweets everything #Jolla. It’s pretty simple. First you need to define your new twitter app here. Install on your raspberry the tweepy twitter python library.

Sending email from the Raspberry PI

Tue, 30 Jul 2013 11:17:32 +0000

I run a remote Raspberry PI gracefully hosted by the people over at raspberrycolocatie.nl Since one if it’s jobs is to run a few scripts monitoring various bits and pieces I want it to be able to send emails. Since I don’t want to use a full blown MTA I settled for ssmtp. It’s worth noting that this setup applies to any debian box, not only the rPI. sSMTP - Simple SMTP sSMTP is a simple MTA to deliver mail from a computer to a mail hub (SMTP server).

Streaming video with a Raspberry PI and a Logitech C270

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:31:57 +0000

Hi, I wanted to setup a live webcam using a Raspberry Pi (model B, first rev. with 256M RAM) so after checking and happily finding out that my camera is suported I went along. First I installed the support packages: sudo apt-get install gstreamer-tools gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad gstreamer0.10-plugins-good v4l-utils After that I wrote a small script that would start the stream: #!/bin/bash # set below your Raspberry PI IP address myip="192.168.xxx.xxx" port="5000" gst-launch -v v4l2src !

Regenerate SSH keys

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 12:04:43 +0000

I’m a big fan of virtualization. I find it very useful both on my workstation as for the servers. What this means is that I often clone virtual machines to repurpose, run tests or simply add web capacity for load balanced sites. One of the steps is that you have to regenerate the ssh keys (besides the usual suspects that are changing IP, hostname and so on) so you don’t have multiple hosts with the same ssh keys.

Dia crashes with latest updates in slacware-current

Thu, 30 May 2013 09:58:02 +0000

Having just updated to the latest set of slackware current packages I found that the trusty old Dia would segfault: ** (dia:26707): CRITICAL **: dia_renderer_set_size: assertion `irenderer != NULL' failed Segmentation fault With Ubuntu to the rescue 🙂 according to this report I found the fix to be: Edit $(HOME)/.dia/persistence and change the value from false to true. <dia:boolean role="view_antialised"> <dia:attribute name="booleanvalue"> <dia:boolean val="true"/> </dia:attribute> </dia:boolean> Please note that this fix works only if $(HOME)/.

Apache2 mpm-itk maxclients settings

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 06:09:05 +0000

I run the mpm-itk apache2 module on my server since it’s shared between a few sites. A few rogue crawlers brought it down a few days ago and while I was checking the logs I noticed a lot more apache children processes running than I had defined. One quick look in apache2.conf and I noticed my mistake. I had configured under a different prefork module since the default config shipping with debian has no section for itk.

Mount a remote fs after connecting to a vpn. (NetworkManager)

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 07:12:18 +0000

When away I use a vpn connection to connect to my home server. The first thing after connecting is usually mounting some resources using sshfs (yes I know, not very efficient but for personal use is more than enough). I wanted to automate that and so I dug a bit around NetworkManager. Apparently all you have to do is drop a script similar to this in /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d/ #!/bin/bash interface=$1 status=$2 LOG="/var/log/network_manager_custom.

Test degrading write speed on a system with lots of small files.

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 10:43:23 +0000

I created a script that generates random files in a random folder structure. I let it run for 1.000.000 files and than 1.000.000 more. Here are the results: #!/bin/bash DST=$(mktemp -tmpdir="/tmp/boatload" -d XXXXXXXXXX) let "no_of_files = $RANDOM/2" echo "Creating $no_of_files files in $DST" counter=1 while [[ $counter -le $no_of_files ]]; do # echo Creating file no $counter # dd bs=64 count=$RANDOM skip=$RANDOM if=/dev/xvda2 of=$DST/random-file.$counter; # this is useful for big files let "CNT = $RANDOM/40" dd bs=8 count=$CNT if=/dev/urandom of=$DST/random-file.

fail2ban and apache digest authentication

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 10:11:45 +0000

Although I don’t consider fail2ban something to rely on for security is just another piece of the puzzle when securing a server. When configuring fail2ban for a debian server I noticed that the defaults rules are missing failures if DIGEST is used for authentication instead of basic. I added the following to /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/apache-auth.conf: [[]client <HOST>[]] (Digest: )?user .* (authentication failure|not found|password mismatch) Restart fail2ban and try entering a wrong user/password while checking the fail2ban log.

cPanel IP migration

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 08:25:04 +0000

I had to switch the main IP address of a cPanel server. Basically you follow the IP Migration Wizard steps, but when I was done the A records for the main hostname were wrong (still having the old IP). If I went to edit the main DNS entry the IP was shown to be correct. What I had to do was to edit /var/cpanel/mainip Also I searched in /etc and found one more refference to the old IP, I replaced that as well.

What focal lenght I need a prime lens for?

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 12:16:54 +0000

If you are contemplating buying a prime lense and use digikam you might find this little script I wrote useful: https://github.com/filviu/digikam-stats It can show you the number of images shot at each focal length (grouped by camera or not) from your digikam library (as long as you use a mysql database).

Choosing a video player for the Nexus 10

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 12:12:24 +0000

So, I made the leap and I bought a tablet, a Google Nexus 10 to be more precise. Up until now I used vPlayer and the default video player on my Android Phone (galaxy S2) but on the tablet the default video player is very poor (or let's say simple) and vPlayer showed some weird artifacts, so to the search it is. I choose from other roundups and recommandations the following: BsPlayer FREE DICE Player MoboPlayer MX Player VLC Beta vPlayer All those players offer a nice, clean interface with similar basic functionality: resume position, some offer network playback, but not all video formats play the same in all players.

Speed-up X over ssh

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 08:07:16 +0000

Even though I run a pretty fast network and vpn at home I still have the occasional hiccup running demanding applications (i.e. digikam) at home. A few simple options can speed up X considerably. Connecting with the following parametters will enable a fast encryption cipher and also enables compression: ssh -X -C -c blowfish-cbc,arcfour user@host.example.com Of course you can make this permanent by adding the following to /etc/ssh/ssh_config or even better only for the specific host in ~/.

Using Xenu with authentication

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 12:10:21 +0000

I needed to scan a Joomla site that only shows most of its content when logged in in the frontend. Xenu FAQ suggests using Cookies. That didn’t work for me. So I used Fiddler web debugger and it’s scripting engine. First start Fiddler and set it to capture traffic. Log in in the site using a browser. Check and find the cookie data - copy it to the clipboard. Open ‘Customize rules’ in Fiddler and search for

Extending the range of a WiFi stick adapter

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 12:03:06 +0000

I relocated some of my networking gear and by doing that one of my pc’s found itself in a blind spot of the wireless network. I decided to try and see if I can extend the range of the usb wireless adapter it uses. I had a few antennas available but unfortunately the usb adapter didn’t have a connector. I decided to solder the antenna wire directly: First I pried open the usb adapter and located the internal antenna pads.

Debian squeeze laptop harddisk restarts every few seconds.

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 11:08:25 +0000

I installed a miniserver using a 2.5 WD Sata HDD. I noticed that the disk will park shutdown and restart every 10 seconds or so. This was far worse than what happened here: http://www.sgvulcan.com/load-cycle-count-of-western-digital-green-drives-and-how-to-fix-it-from-linux/ I’m pretty sure this bug is the cause but the only mention was that the apm value of 128 didn’t work on me. Since this is an always on desktop system I just set it to 254.

Load cycle count of Western Digital Green Drives and how to fix it from Linux

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 12:17:08 +0000

I run a NAS at home. It used to have 3x2TB WD EARS drives. At some point I saw online some remarks about increased Load Cycle Count when using these drives in a NAS/RAID setup but I didn’t have the time to check then. Modern Western Digital “Green” Drives include the Intellipark feature that stops the disk when not in use. Unfortunately, the default timer setting is not perfect on linux/unix systems, including many NAS, and leads to a dramatic increase of the Load Cycle Count value (SMART attribute #193).

mysqldump: Got error 28 from storage engine

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 12:05:07 +0000

This is a new one for me. I was dumping some databases on a server when I got this: mysqldump: Error: 'Got error 28 from storage engine' when trying to dump tablespaces mysqldump: Couldn't execute 'show fields from `xxxxxx`': Got error 28 from storage engine (1030) Fortunately the fix was easy, just clean the /tmp folder as it was almost full on that particular server.

Simple script to add multiple trackers to a torrent downloading in transmission

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 20:29:30 +0000

Sometime you might want to download some old or obscure distro that was once packaged as a torrent. But many times the tracker embeded in the torrent file has long been abandoned or it has no peers. But many other trackers might have cached your torrent and maybe those have seeds. So I wrote a quick and dirty script to get a list of online trackers from transmission. #!/bin/bash TRANSMISSION_REMOTE='/usr/bin/transmission-remote' # Below is a command that will generate a tracker # list with one tracker per line # i.

Useful oneliner: check the memory usage of apache / httpd processes

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 09:44:20 +0000

This is a handy one liner that reports the usage of the apache processes (apache2 on debian/ubunto or httpd in slackware, centos, etc) ps -ylC httpd | awk '{x += $8;y += 1} END {print "Apache Memory Usage (MB): "x/1024; print "Average Proccess Size (MB): "x/((y-1)*1024)}'

Email a list of updates from a Debian server.

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 12:49:40 +0000

Do you run remote servers? Me too. It’s a good ideea to keep them up to date. On the other hand I don’t like automatic updates, something might break when you least want or expect it. So I prefer to be notified of updates and choose myself the moment when to apply them. Following is a nice script that sends an email of available updates on a Debian system.

Tentakel on CentOS 6 / Python 2.6

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 10:25:41 +0000

Update: As useful as tentakel was in my young sysadmin days it was always dangerous (one wrong command or quote character away from disaster), non-reproducible, needing constant documentation on changes done. I really don’t know if tentakel even exist anymore but if it does I strongly suggest you consider ansible instead. You probably already know this old, unmaintained but incredibly useful software: tentakel. If not check it out, you might like it.

Remove duplicates from the current folder

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 12:01:28 +0000

I needed today to remove duplicate files from a big folder (8Gb+, 10000+ files). I use the nice fdupes program written by Adrian Lopez fdupes -rdN . Note the point after the parameters. That means to search inside the current folder. A path could be provided instead of it. The options are: -r means search recursively -d means delete. use carefully and read the man page to understand what could go wrong!

Optimize Firefox’s sqlite databases

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 11:51:25 +0000

Here’s a handy one-liner to tune a bit your Firefox: for file in ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/*.sqlite; do sqlite3 $file 'VACUUM;';done What this does ie optimize every sqlite database in your account’s profiles. You can even add this line to a script to start on boot or by cron. Worth noting that Firefox should probably not run while you do this.

Open a magnet link on a remote (or local) transmission server.

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 19:37:51 +0000

One of the services I run on my home server is a transmission daemon. I use it mainly to download images for my Raspberry PI, new distro iso’s to play with in Virtualbox and so on. Recently there’s been a move to replace torrent links with magnet links. I found a nice way to open those directly on the remote instance of the transmission daemon. First create a script, let’s call it simply magnet.

No album cover art in Symbian ^3 Belle on an E7

Fri, 13 Jul 2012 08:31:25 +0000

Sooo, my beloved n900 kicked the bucket and the fine folks at Nokia Romania decided it’s not fixable and they replaced it. With an E7. After 6 weeks. Hey Nokia still wondering why you’re going down the drain? I have my music neatly organized and with cover art embeded inside the id3tag. But it won’t show up. Actually it showed up for one album out of 15. So I started the hunt to see why.

Add a logging function to your bash script

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 12:56:22 +0000

I write a lot of scripts that do various jobs and most of the time I’d like to have some log of what happened. So for most of them I add a function that helps logging. #!/bin/bash # log date format, customize it to your wishes # see man date for help DATE='date +%Y/%m/%d:%H:%M:%S' # log file LOG='/var/log/script.log' function echo_log { echo "`$DATE` $1" >> $LOG } # start echo_log "Script running" # do something echo_log "Doing this" # done echo_log "Script ended

Microsoft updates Skype for Linux

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 06:08:55 +0000

Or in other news, hell froze over 🙂 Some people complained about the new interface, so I’ll try to be agains the flow here and say that I actually quite like it. It’s not like skype for linux was ever active but since Microsoft aquired them I pretty much wrote off any updates. It seems I, like many others was wrong. Probably it has something to do with the new advertising features introduced lately…

digikam 2.6.0 won’t start due to missing libavcodec.so.53 (slackware current64)

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 19:44:01 +0000

This was pretty simple but complicated :). It turns out I updated alien bob’s repo to ffmpeg 0.11, thus upgrading to libavcodec.so.54. I’m sure I could have gotten away with a simple symlink but I wanted a clean install. So I though I would simply rebuild digikam, right? Wrong. It failed, with weird errors like: make[2]: \*** [extra/libkface/test/detect] Error 1 or collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status make[2]: *** [extra/kipi-plugins/removeredeyes/test/testipp] Error 1 Face detect above sounded a lot like digikam built successfully.

libgdiplus-2.10.9 build fails on slacware current64 (2012-06)

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 06:01:08 +0000

Installing mono I needed to install libgdiplus. It failed with the following error: /usr/lib64/gcc/x86_64-slackware-linux/4.7.0/../../../../x86_64-slackware-linux/bin/ld: testgdi.o: undefined reference to symbol 'g_free' /usr/lib64/gcc/x86_64-slackware-linux/4.7.0/../../../../x86_64-slackware-linux/bin/ld: note: 'g_free' is defined in DSO /usr/lib64/libglib-2.0.so.0 so try adding it to the linker command line /usr/lib64/libglib-2.0.so.0: could not read symbols: Invalid operation collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status make[2]: *** [testgdi] Error 1 make[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/local/src/libgdiplus-2.10.9/tests' make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1 make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/local/src/libgdiplus-2.10.9' make: *** [all] Error 2 The fix is simple, thanks to a mention in slacky pkg reports:

Silly Android contact merging

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 10:36:54 +0000

So, for now my beloved n900 is in the service dead, so I started organizing contacts on the Android phone I have. First thing I did was to merge contacts (for example joining Jon Doe’s contact from google-phonebook, facebook, skype and so on) I’m used to doing this for years now as the old n900 but I noticed this strange behaviour with some of my frinds who use fake names /nicknames for skype or facebook, etc.

[Errno 32] Broken pipe in s3cmd

Mon, 28 May 2012 17:21:30 +0000

In order to backup a bunch of servers I’m using s3cmd to backup files to a Amazon S3 account. s3cmd is a really nice tool as it works from the command line, does encryption on the fly and can use the https protocol for upload. I used s3cmd -configure and set everything up. The first error I got when I tried to test it was: s3cmd put file.tar.gz s3://my_bucket_name/file.tar.gz [Errno 32] Broken pipe and it tried throttling down and uploading again.

Disable charging of a Nokia N900 while USB connected.

Wed, 16 May 2012 20:45:53 +0000

One of the joys of having a hackable computer serving as a phone is that you can do stuff which have no “option” in “settings”. Recently I wanted to see if I can connect it to an Android tablet (Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1). I couldn’t. Too bad as I could really use the extra 32Gb the n900 has to offer. It would connect but the tablet disconnects it as soon as the phone tries to start charging.

Black levels tool output in digikam after upgrading to 2.6

Thu, 10 May 2012 18:30:16 +0000

I tested the 2.6-rc version of digikam and found that the levels tool offers a black window instead of proper output. First I thought it’s a 2.6 issue so I reverted to my 2.5.0 stable version. No luck. I then thought it’s because some updates I ran for Slackware (I’m using current64) Not having any luck I opened a bug, thankfully the digikam developers were quick to reply: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=299755 To be short the issue will be fixed for 2.

Drop all databases from mysql

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 09:25:16 +0000

Sometimes I need to clean a mysql server so I can re-import it clean from the backups. A DROP ALL DATABASES; would have been nice, but the following does the trick. It will drop all databases except for mysql, test and information_schema mysql -uroot -pPASS -e "show databases" | grep -v Database | grep -v mysql| grep -v information_schema| grep -v test | gawk '{print "drop database " $1 ";"}' | mysql -uroot -pPASS Warning: It does what it says on the tin.

XBMC and Windows 8 on older hardware

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 10:07:27 +0000

Just wanted to note that older hardware works well with the new Windows 8 consumer preview. Since I had to change the hdd in my xbmc mediacenter I decided to give Windows 8 a spin on real hardware (not just virtual). Hardware: Gigabyte GA-MA78GPM-DS2H motherboard (AMD 780G +SB700 chipset) AMD 4850e dual core energy efficient cpu 250Gb hdd (all media is stored on a NAS) 6Gb RAM When I moved to a Full HD tv I found that I have to move away from XP to windows 7 in order to get decent hardware acceleration out of my integrated graphics.

Removed ntfs partition reappears

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 08:16:28 +0000

So, I was repartitioning a harddrive that used to be a windows disk. I removed the ntfs partition that was spanning the whole drive and created a linux layout instead (two linux partitions and one swap). After writing the partition table the first partition on the disk failed to format. Returning to fdisk I saw that the first partition was still of type NTFS. So I changed the type once more and wrote the partition table to disk.

request_module: runaway loop modprobe binfmt-464c

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 13:05:52 +0000

I added a new disk to my HP N40L and moved the boot disk to another SATA port, which meant reconfiguring lilo. Strange enough after setting everything up I got: request_module: runaway loop modprobe binfmt-464c right after the kernel loading. Long story short this message means you are trying to boot a 32bit system with a 64 bit kernel (maybe the other way around will spit something similar). I set the boot parameter wrong and I was actually trying to boot and old 32 bit linux install that was still around on one of the drives in the NAS

This guy deserves a beer

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 14:20:41 +0000

Chances are if you are a developer or a sysadmin you had to work with regular expressions. Well I hate them. With passion. So when I discovered this website I was jumping for joy: http://txt2re.com/ Basically you type in your clear text and select what you want extracted (certain word, integers, dates) and as a bonus you also get back code already written. Of course you probably have to adapt that one.

Transmission start-up script for slackware.

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 08:54:42 +0000

I installed transmission on a headless server so I need it to start on boot. The included start-up script was dependent on start-stop-daemon that is mission on Slackware. The examples on the transmission forums were ok but would resulted in transmission running as root and I want it to run as a non-privileged user. So I modified an example script to read like this: #!/bin/bash #Slackware startup deamon script # Name of Service NAME="Transmission Daemon" # Command to run CMD="/usr/bin/transmission-daemon" # Option to run with deamon # -a means from where to accept incoming connections, comma separated # you may want to add your local network if you have multiple clients OPTIONS="-a 127.

Adding pcntl_fork support on a cpanel server

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 09:20:13 +0000

A php application on a cpanel server kept throwing this: Fatal error: Call to undefined function pcntl_fork() in /path/blah.php on line 5 The fix requires recompiling php with -enable-pcntl Fortunately cpanel offers the Easy Apache script. The bad part is that it doesn’t have an option for pcntl. So you have to specify it as a custom compile time option. Edit (or create - for PHP5) and add /var/cpanel/easy/apache/rawopts/all_php5 -enable-pcntl On one line

Got a packet bigger than ‘max_allowed_packet’ bytes

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 09:02:49 +0000

I got this on a newly installed server when I tried to import a database: [root@host ~]# mysql -u user -pPassword database < database.sql Enter password: ERROR 1153 (08S01) at line 53: Got a packet bigger than 'max_allowed_packet' bytes It’s easily fixable. The default is probably 16M, I added the following in /etc/my.cnf max_allowed_packet=32M And restarted mysql (depending on your distro you will do this differently): service mysqld restart

Setting up master-slave replication for mysql

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:27:08 +0000

So, I had to set-up master-slave replication. Here’s how you do it: Why would one want to set-up this? Easy. Spread the read load across multiple servers: you can use the MySQL master for writing (inserts, updates) and the slave(s) for reading (SELECT) This should speed up things nicely for your application. Do the backups from the slave. You might have noticed that backing-up, especially big databases, slows things down. That happens because mysqldump locks tables as it reads them.

Make sensors report temperature on slackware64-current with an Intel I7 2600k

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:01:49 +0000

For some reasons the required modules don’t get loaded. Add the following to /etc/rc.d/rc.modules right above the line reading ### Mouse support: ### by SV for i2600k temperature /sbin/modprobe coretemp /sbin/modprobe pkgtemp Now sensors report the temperatures.

Recursively remove digikam’s xmp embeded tags

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 22:06:44 +0000

Because digikam made a mess of the tags I started to add to my pictures I decided to start from scratch. Note that I tried to get the max and I had set to write tags both to .xmp sidecar files and inside the image files. I also use the mysql backend. One of the above broken everything (I started seeing _digikam_root_tag) and some of my tags were doubled. So all in all I wanted to delete them all:

Unpacking a .deb file (including scripts)

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 10:11:54 +0000

While attempting to install a deb package on a slackware system I wanted to check the install script that the package runs. I tried the deb2tgz utility but unfortunately that only left me the files in the package in a ready to install .tgz file. Here’s how to unpack a .deb to obtain both scripts and files: cd /tmp/somefolder tar x somepackage.deb This leaves you with two files: control.tar.gz and data.

Log dropped packets using CentOS Firewall

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 07:16:42 +0000

Please take care modifying your firewall. If you don’t understand what’s being done here you may lock yourself out of your machine. You’ve been warned 🙂 ! In order to log dropped packets on the INPUT chain I replaced this: -A INPUT -i eth0 -j REJECT -reject-with icmp-host-prohibited with this -N LOGDROP -A LOGDROP -i eth0 -j LOG -A LOGDROP -i eth0 -j REJECT -reject-with icmp-host-prohibited -A INPUT -i eth0 -j LOGDROP Of course you can use DROP instead of REJECT -reject-with icmp-host-prohibited

Fixing a self pressing button on an Asus VW202SR monitor

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:51:16 +0000

Well, today instead of working I had the pleasure of fixing the monitor 🙂 The monitor is an older Asus VW202 SR that my wife uses connected to the laptop. I tried everything else (power cycling, another signal cable, another computer) but it turns out to be really the button. The issue manifested itself by the brightness setting window appearing and going eventually all the way to 100. First I thought that the button was stuck in the frame but it was safely depressed. That means a broken button on the pcb board. I thought it would be pretty easy to solder a new one in place.

Enabling the MySQL slow query log

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:32:49 +0000

If you have a slow web app or website it might be because of unoptimized sql queries. You want to track and fix those and the mysql slow query log is very helpful here. Enabling the slow query log MySQL prior to 5.1.0 requires adding a setting to the MySQL my.cnf file and restart the mysql daemon in order to log slow queries; from MySQL 5.1.0 onwards you can also change this dynamically without having to restart.

Limit number of related articles returned in Joomla 1.7 and Joomla 2.5

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:39:15 +0000

Joomla 1.7 has a nice module mod_related_items (Articles Related) that shows articles related to the current one the visitor is browsing. It has one issue though, you can’t set a limit. So a little code hacking is in order. Open modules/mod_related_items/helper.php and go to line 94 (right after the _Filter by language_ if_) and modify $db>setQuery($query); to read: $db->setQuery($query,0,10); Of course you can change the limit from 10 with whatever you like.

cbnet Ping Optimizer is killing a site

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 10:28:20 +0000

Some wise soul decided many moons ago that installing the aforementioned plugin on a site I host is a great ideea. The wise soul is long gone (admining websites for ngo’s as a volunteer is no fun for far too many come and goers:) ) Lately the site was getting more and more sluggish with no apparent reason. I decided to clean a bit the many modules he thought in his wisdom to install.

Cadsoft Eagle on Slackware Current 64bit

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 09:00:29 +0000

I want to start building some new electronics projects and I wanted to use some tool to build my schematics. Even if not open source Cadsoft’s Eagle seems to be the de-facto standard between hobbyists. Unfortunately trying to run the setup on Slackware gives the errors regarding to /.../bin/eagle: error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.1.0.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory libssl.so.1.0.0 and libcrypto.so.1.0.0 I run a multilib setup so that’s not it.

Search and replace text in many files

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 07:48:46 +0000

This is a handy one liner that searches and replaces text in multiple files. (You can use find for example to run it in multiple folders) perl -pi -e 's/old_text/new_text/g' *.conf This line replaces old_text with new_text in all the .conf files in the current folder. Of course you can use regular expressions.

New AdSense interface language

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 10:06:47 +0000

Though not my native language I like all my software in English. It always sounds weird to me to see it different. Ever since AdSense upgraded the looks it switched to Romanian. Today I wanted to tackle this: I went to Home->Account settings->Display Language It was already English US Well, it won’t be the first webapp displaying a default that was there in the interface but not in the settings database.

Quickly check if a process is running or not

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 08:29:02 +0000

When writting bash scripts one often needs to see if a process is running or not I like the following code; though I’m sure many ways of doing this exists, what’s your favorite? if [ -z "$(pgrep process)" ]; then echo "process is not running" else echo "process is running" fi

Cisco (Linksys) E3200 router triggers blocked host with DynDNS

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 11:11:54 +0000

I finally had to upgrade my home router from an aging WRT54GL and went (despite missing dd-wrt for now) with the Linksys E3200. I installed yesterday including dyndns support because I sometimes access my home network when away. I was surprised to receive an email from dyndns this morning stating that my host has been blocked because of abuse. It was strange since my connection is stable and even though some routers have flaky dyndns update clients linksys didn’t disappoint me until now…

flac2mp3 conversion bash script

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 18:40:42 +0000

I recently started buying some music in flac format. Though I’m content on storing it as flac on my NAS I don’t like filling up my phone’s memory and also I have the impression that listening to flac uses more battery on my n900. So I devised a small script that converts all the flac’s from a folder to mp3. It has some provisions to carry the metadata from one format to the other.

BackupPC – can’t find Compress::Zlib

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 07:19:55 +0000

It all started with an update for perl by our lovely CentOS. After that backuppc complained about Compress::Zlib. I tried installing it from CPAN but it didn’t work: Undefined subroutine &Compress::Zlib::gzopen called One proposed fix was to remove everything Zlib related from the perl folder in /usr/lib. It did work, as CPAN started working but Zlib refused to install due to errors. I finally stumbled to this fix: Turns out it’s a problem with List::Util.

Concatenate multiple *.vcf files into one for importing into gMail

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 13:46:50 +0000

I have a secondary phone that is running Android. My main phone is still a Nokia N900 for which I gave up trying to sync contacts with gmail. Two options basically exist for n900 none of which works for me: using MFE which works from time to time use syncevolution which invariably screws my contacts on the n900 (I guess google’s implementation of syncml or exchange support is dubious at best) So I devised a third.

Compiling audacious 3.1

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 09:18:26 +0000

I’m a big fan of classic media players (audacious, xmms, the old winamp, etc.) That’s why I wanted today to complile the latest version of audacious (3.1) for my slackware laptop. Since the audacious build scripts are kind enough to provide make uninstall I didn’t bother with package builds, I simply compiled the stock source. BTW that required upgrading libmowgli (got one from slacky). Audacious compiled succesfully but for audacious-plugins configure refused to run:

stdin: is not a tty

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 11:22:08 +0000

This was a new one for me. Received when doing automated remote log-ins on a cPanel server. The scripts would be confused by the following message: stdin: is not a tty It was caused by the following line in .bashrc (note that it could be in /etc/bashrc or /etc/profile, all those are on the target host) mesg y Often it can be caused by biff y as well. Replacing the line with the following should fix it:

Secondary DNS cannot transfer zone

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 16:14:24 +0000

I’m no Bind expert but I’m not a beginner either. I was configuring a secondary backup DNS for a master server and I noticed that after configuring everything the zones didn’t get replicated on the slave DNS. I checked the logs and saw the following: First I thought there was a mistake related to a missing permission on the master configuration allow-transfer { aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd; }; I double checked but the permissions were set correctly.

DNS::ZoneParse has an undocumented $ORIGIN

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 13:29:17 +0000

I was working writing a few scripts that should update a DNS zone file on the fly. I decided to use the DNS::ZoneParse perl module for convenience. The example there is straightforward for changing MX records so I thought modifying it to change an A record should be a piece of cake. Right? Wrong! For the love of it I couldn’t get my code to modify the record in question, it would always delete it.

Error noticed in Joomla site apache logs

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 17:50:23 +0000

Browsing trough my web logs I found the following error in the apache error log of a Joomla site: [Mon Oct 17 13:49:16 2011] [error] [client aaa.aaa.aaa.aaa] PHP Notice: Array to string conversion in aaa/libraries/joomla/html/parameter.php on line 83 One suggestion found online was: Edit parameters.php and change the line 83 as follows: Before: if (trim( $data )) { After: if ($data) { But modifying core joomla files isn’t such a hot idea as one user notices.

My fortune command line…

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 14:11:48 +0000

I take my bash profile very seriously 🙂 I use: fortune fortunes fortunes-o fortunes2 forunes2-o 30% startrek The above means to choose fortunes only from the 5 specified files and more it assures that I get startrek fortunes from time to time. Note that because lists are not equal in size it doesnt mean that I get them 30% of the time… Below is the fortune man page: Name fortune - print a random, hopefully interesting, adage

Optimizing all mysql tables (from all databases)

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 06:44:55 +0000

You want to optimize mysql tables from time to time in order to reduce fragmentation. Here’s an easy way to do it automatically (put it in a script and run it from cron for example) mysqlcheck -Aop -h hostname -u user -pPASSWORD What all those mean: -all-databases, -A; Check all tables in all databases. This is the same as using the -databases option and naming all the databases on the command line.

Working mediatomb config.xml for Samsung UE37C5000

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 14:11:47 +0000

I have a NAS and an Samsung UE37C5000 UPNP/DLNA enabled led TV. Streaming from the first to the second should be easy, right? Well after a few tweaks MediaTomb makes it possible. I don’t say this is the best configuration possible but it’s the one that works INCLUDING pause and fast forwarding. Relevant from the default are the custom header, extended protocol info and the mkv and avi lines. MediaTomb uuid:0f53d0ff-5951-4d27-8fa7-06ce378ae789 /var/lib/mediatomb /usr/share/mediatomb/web mediatomb.

Another issue compiling Digikam 2.0.0 stable on my Slackware current 64 bit (post 13.37)

Sat, 20 Aug 2011 18:14:01 +0000

This error is spit after compiling: Linking CXX shared module ../../../lib/kipiplugin_advancedslideshow.so /usr/lib64/gcc/x86_64-slackware-linux/4.5.3/../../../../x86_64-slackware-linux/bin/ld: skipping incompatible /usr/share/opencv/../../lib/libGL.so when searching for -lGL collect2: ld returned 1 exit status make[2]: \*** [lib/kipiplugin_advancedslideshow.so] Error 1 make[1]: \*** [extra/kipi-plugins/advancedslideshow/CMakeFiles/kipiplugin_advancedslideshow.dir/all] Error 2 make: \*** [all] Error 2 For whatever reason it tries to use the 32 bit version of libGL.so from /usr/lib Since I was annoyed at this point so I simply renamed /usr/lib to /usr/lib.old and compiled digikam than reverted.

Digikam 2.0.0 Export to Facebook not compiled / missing

Sat, 20 Aug 2011 17:48:36 +0000

I’m had finally found the time to upgrade to digikam 2.0 stable. I noticed that Export to Facebook it’s not getting compiled. Long story short you need qjson installed. I used sbopkg -ki qjson and now digikam is happy!

Web interface for Zabbix didn’t load

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 07:30:27 +0000

I was installing today Zabbix on a CentOS 5.6 machine and hit the following error when trying to load the PHP Web Interface: PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function bcscale() in /var/www/zabbix/include/defines.inc.php on line 797 The fix was one package install away: yum -y install php-bcmath

Enabling spell check in Mindtouch Core

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 09:18:27 +0000

After an update the spell checker I was used to disappeared. Here’s how to (re)enable the (new) spell checker: Go to Control Panel -> Configuration -> Basic -> Tick “Allow users to spell check while editing content” and hit Save Go back to editing and you should see the icon with “ABC” and a checkmark.

Add php APC and UploadProgress support to CentOS

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 08:25:40 +0000

I was playing today with some file uploading scripts and noticed that they require one of the two in order to be able to display a progress bar. Those are the steps required to enabled both of them on centos: yum install php-pear php-devel httpd-devel pcre-devel pecl install apc pecl install uploadprogress Than I created in /etc/php.d/ the following files: ; provides upload progress, installed using pecl extension=apc.so apc.rfc1867=1 and

I turned off my dell wireless card and couldn’t turn it back on

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 08:48:30 +0000

Among others I work on a Dell Vostro A860 Laptop. It’s running Slackware 64 Current. Yesterday I wanted to watch a movie while waiting at the airport for my wife so I turned off Wi-Fi using FN+11 (pressed a few times until both Bluetooth and wi-fi were disabled). Today when I booted wi-fi was not working. I kept pressing FN+11 (as the laptop toggles trough combination of bluetooth off/on, wi-fi off/on, and any other possible combination).

Make Joomla 1.0 work with PHP 5.3

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 10:43:03 +0000

With the recent posts regarding resurrecting old stuff, recently I had to resurrect a Joomla 1.0 site. Soon enough I discovered that the home page doesn’t display correctly. No errors, just lots of white space :). The problem is that Joomla 1.0 is not really made for PHP 5.3. Of course I could have started a virtual machine with the right environment but I wanted it running along some newer sites.

Automatically sync photos from digikam to your mobile phone

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 08:10:02 +0000

I shoot a lot of pictures. My collection keeps growing (for example ~90 Gb right now) and since last year I discovered the joy of using digikam to tag and organize them. I’m using the beta 2.0.0 version and use mysql to store it’s databases (as opposed to the default sqlite) as it’s easier to interact and backup. What I want is to carry some of those pictures with me, specifically on my phone.

Moving a solaris guest from VMWare to Virtualbox

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 12:01:50 +0000

I’m a big fan of Virtualbox. It’s easy, fast and free. Recently I had to revive an older Solaris guest that used to run under vmware, and to set it up to run under Virtualbox. I quickly found out that after the grub screen it enters a reboot loop and nothing seemed to help. I could boot into failsafe and mount the root partition as /a/ Someone suggested that the problem was that vmware had the disk as SCSI (c0t0d0s0) and virtualbox enumerated them as IDE (c0d0s0).

vi usage reference

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 11:35:00 +0000

Recently I had to do some work on a Solaris Server. This meant two things: finding a new appreciation for the user friendliness of the linux console and second it meant that I had to use the barebones vi. You know, the one where the arrows and backspace won’t work. Smart. So here’s a little list compiled with the more important functions First I had to export TERM=xterm before vi worked correctly.

OpenOffice.org / Libreoffice pasted numbers automatically get changed to dates

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 12:12:01 +0000

I’ve been pasting some information from some weblogs into Calc (the LibreOffice Excel equivalent) and some version numbers like 1.5.30 got changed to dates. All the documentation pointed me towards changing the cell format to text. That only works if you type the numbers, not if you paste them. When you paste them the cell format get changed to number again. Read more for the solution…

Akismet troubles traced back to DNS issues.

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 05:50:34 +0000

My API key for Akismet was suddenly unconfirmed by reason of not being able to reach akismet.com My provider had indeed troubles with their primary DNS so I switched to the google public one. (8.8.8.8). This is a server not a browsing machine so I don’t have any privacy worries. Long storry short, I changed the DNS and expected the problem to go away. Next day I was happy to find out that it didn’t.

MariaDB vs MySQL short benchmark

Wed, 25 May 2011 08:32:09 +0000

Considering switching from MySQL to MariaDB? Me too. I wanted to see if I can look towards any performance improvements (or drops). I don’t have high level needs, I’m sure more comprehensive tests exist. This is simple run-all-tests.pl from sql-bench suite. The test machine was a CentOS VM with 2Gb RAM and 2 CPU cores assigned. Mysql: Benchmark DBD suite: 2.15 Date of test: 2011-05-25 2:22:27 Running tests on: Linux 2.

network-manager-applet on Slackware 13.37 (current too) compile error

Wed, 25 May 2011 08:27:01 +0000

I took the time today to bring Network Manager and network-manager-applet (both very useful on my laptop where I have VPN’s, 3G modems and various networks I connect to) First I brought all the dependencies up to date but network-manager-applet still refused to compile: checking for GOBJECT... yes checking for NMA... no configure: error: Package requirements (dbus-glib-1 >= 0.74 glib-2.0 >= 2.16 NetworkManager >= 0.8.4 libnm-glib >= 0.8.4 libnm-util >= 0.

Shrink (resize) a LVM volume

Tue, 17 May 2011 09:11:18 +0000

I found a lot of resources on resizing LVM volumes or volume groups. But resources on shrinking were a little scarce and I couldn’t easily find a simple step by step method listed, so here you go. Please note that the volume you intend to shrink must be unmounted. If you want to resize the root partition (because like me you didn’t noticed that the ubuntu server installer will alocate the full 500Gb HDD for the root) you will have to boot off a LiveCD.

Firefox 4 on linux change to one button menu and make it nice and orange

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 05:13:32 +0000

When I upgraded to Firefox 4 on my linux machines I was disappointed to see that the classic menu bar remained. I’m not necesarily a fan of the new ribbon interfaces but since I don’t use the menu often and so prefer to use the space for something useful, like the tabs. Reducing the menu bar to a button is easy. Right click on the menu bar and uncheck Menu bar

Bad image quality from HDMI connected PC to Samsung LED LCD

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 12:20:20 +0000

So, we finally upgraded our old CRT TV to a newer, Full HD Samsung LCD TV (ue37c5000). Since we have a media-center PC the first thing I did was of course hook it up and test a few full hd clips to enjoy the new TV. Everything was nice and well until I switched the tv from the VGA cable I had lying around to a HDMI cable I just bought.

WebSVN and Mantis integration

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 11:20:19 +0000

While installing the above I found the following obscure error: The environment under which I run Mantis is a little broken I think and so svn can only work if called with -config-dir /home/svnuser/.subversion otherwise it tries to read /root/.subversion which of course fails Even if the above parameter is set in configuration the svn_check function appears to ignore it and calls svn help without it. Unintuitively svn help fails if it cannot read the configuration folder so the -config-dir must be applied here too.

Wake a host (wake on lan) from dd-wrt

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 13:45:00 +0000

WOL through Telnet/SSH Note: This is the preferred method to send WOL magic packets remotely. If you have local or remote Telnet/SSH access to your router, you can wake up a machine on the LAN by using the following command: /usr/sbin/wol -i 192.168.1.255 -p PP AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF Note that the full path to “/usr/sbin/wol” is important. Simply “wol” will not work. Substitute AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF with the actual MAC address of the computer which you wish to boot remotely.

Digitally signing email or documents.

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 10:16:00 +0000

What are email certificates used for? Email certificates provide the strongest levels of confidentiality and security for your electronic communications by allowing you to digitally sign and encrypt your mail and attachments. Encryption means that only your intended recipient will be able to read the mail while digitally signing allows them to confirm you as the sender and verify the message was not tampered with en route. How to obtain one?

BandwithD resets stats data after restart/reboot

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 11:49:51 +0000

This was a funny one: I have installed the Bandwithd monitoring software on a machine. I noticed that the monitoring data kept being erased between start/stop or reboot. There actually are two configuration settings which are false by default that allows BandwidthD to keep it’s data across restart’s (or system reboots) and those are (in /etc/bandwidthd.conf) #Log data to cdf file htdocs/log.cdf output_cdf true #Read back the cdf file on startup recover_cdf true (they are false by default, you need to set them true like above)

List crontab entries for all users on a linux system

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 10:00:20 +0000

This is a good one liner to remember: for user in $(cut -f1 -d: /etc/passwd); do crontab -u $user -l; done

Mysql authentication issues

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 12:57:47 +0000

Ever happened to you that you create a user with privileges to connect from any host but it won’t connect from the localhost? Like this: [root@18969_1_490528 tmp]# mysql -u test_user -puser_pass ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user 'test_user'@'localhost' (using password: YES) [root@18969_1_490528 tmp]# mysql -u test_user -puser_pass -h yourhost.com Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or g. Your MySQL connection id is 55 Server version: 5.0.77 Source distribution Type 'help;' or 'h' for help.

PHP code misses DNS updates.

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 12:26:00 +0000

Apache needs a full stop & start on DNS changes. While working on a test environment I noticed that php code was not finding new hosts. The hosts were served by an internal, private dns server which was configured as default in resolv.conf Warning: file_get_contents(http://www.testdomain.com/webapp/file.php) [function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error in /var/www/htdocs/test.php on line 4 [root@jentlaibm01 manager]# cat test.php Ping was working so any other test I tried, the only part not resolving the newly added host was the php application.

You’ll want to archive your joomla site using .tar.gz

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 13:26:22 +0000

I was building a script to archive my joomla folders on a linux server. I noticed it takes a lot of time to complete so I’ve run a few tests on one website. Here are the results: [root@host]# time tar cjf /backup/2010-11-30/test.tar.bz2 -C /var/www/site . real 0m55.299s user 0m53.929s sys 0m1.314s [root@host]# time tar czf /backup/2010-11-30/test.tar.gz -C /var/www/site . real 0m15.545s user 0m12.311s sys 0m0.947s [root@host]# time tar cf /backup/2010-11-30/test.tar -C /var/www/site .

After importing products from CSV in Virtuemart a discount is showed

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 18:21:26 +0000

After importing products into Virtuemart using CSV Import a discount is shown being available - although offering the same price as the list price. This happens because no discount id is set in the table. Running the following on the mysql table fixes that: UPDATE `jos_vm_product` SET `product_discount_id`=0 WHERE 1

Mount a FTP site from fstab

Sat, 27 Nov 2010 18:56:47 +0000

I still have clients or websites where the most convenient (middle ages based) method of exchanging files is FTP. Since I’m lazy by nature I don’t like firing up a FTP client, I’d prefer to just have it available on request. For a while the KDE Network Places did the trick. But I decided I want it even easier. Behold curlftpfs. One sbopkg -ki curlftpfs (replace that with apt-get, yum or compile from source depending on your distro) later and I could do this in fstab:

FreePBX fails uploading mp3’s for music on hold

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 14:41:03 +0000

This is caused by a couple of problems: the /var/lib/asterisk/moh is missing (or has the wrong permissions). Be sure it’s there and has the right owner (asterix:asterix) and permissions Sox has to be installed. What the error logs miss to inform at the first glance is that you also need mpg123 otherwise you’ll get this: Error Processing: "sox failed to convert file and original could not be copied as a fall back" for Johnny Cash - Solitary Man.

uuencode and uudecode are missing from CentOS 5

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 10:10:52 +0000

What a surprise. I need those sometimes when mailing things from cron so after a quick search around I found the (intuitive named) package that contains those utilities is sharutils. yum install sharutils Loaded plugins: fastestmirror Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile Excluding Packages in global exclude list Finished Setting up Install Process Resolving Dependencies -> Running transaction check -> Package sharutils.x86_64 0:4.6.1-2 set to be updated -> Finished Dependency Resolution Dependencies Resolved ======================================================================================================================================== Package Arch Version Repository Size ======================================================================================================================================== Installing: sharutils x86_64 4.

Disabling external access to the DD-WRT WebGui

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 19:42:18 +0000

So, playing with DynDNS and DD-WRT I worryingly observed that even if I set Administration->Management->Remote Access->Web GUI Management to off I can still ****access my router’s management WebGui via the external address. That seemed wrong, I was about to set firewall rules to block this unitl I tried from my phone using 3G. The WebGui was inaccessible. The WAN WebGui still works from the INSIDE! But don’t worry it won’t work from outside your network.

Close the Now Playing widget in KDE4

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 07:05:16 +0000

I’ve lost a good 5 minutes trying to close the damn Now Playing Widget in KDE 4 You’ll be happy to know that even with “widgets unlocked” the damn X button only works if amarok (or probably another player) is running Is it me or is this plain wrong ?

Nagios Grapher fun

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 15:52:38 +0000

I was struggling with Nagios Grapher (or was it nagiosgraph - I tested both) in Slackware 13.1 After installing all dependencies it would still refuse to work. I tracked the problem pretty easy to be related to Perl not being able to load the librrd.so.4 library. That was funny as I was sure that I did configure, make and make install the latest version. Well, by default, on slackware at least rrdtool installs in /opt !

BIOS Beep POST Codes

Sat, 11 Sep 2010 08:26:02 +0000

Ever found yourself standing next to a PC that won’t boot and emits all kinds of short or long beeps. Me too. Here’s a list of what these beeps might mean. Please note that because motherboard manufacturers often modify the code bought from these companies the beeps might mean something else. AWARD Beeps Error Message Description 1long, 2 short Video adapter error Either video adapter is bad or is not seated properly.

Killall for windows :)

Sat, 11 Sep 2010 08:11:59 +0000

Ever wanted to kill a process from the command line in windows? Here’s how: If you know the name of a process to kill, for example firefox.exe, use the following command from a command prompt to end it: taskkill /IM firefox.exe This will cause the program to terminate gracefully, asking for confirmation if there are unsaved changes. To forcefully kill the same process, add the /F option to the command line.

Updated Joomla Flowplayer plug-in

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 16:42:56 +0000

I use flowplayer for joomla quite often. I usually use this plugin: http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/multimedia/multimedia-players/video-players-a-gallery/7377 Unfortunately it uses an old version of flowplayer. So, since both are GPL I decided to update the plugin and share it. You can download it here: plg_upd_flowplayer_J15_v1-1-0

Mount a physical drive inside a Oracle VirtualBox Machine

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 09:17:47 +0000

Sometimes I have to check drives under their native operating system. Recently I wanted to access a ntfs partition directly under Windows running inside a virtual machine. Here’s how to (easily) do it: VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename ./ntfs_test.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/sdb -register VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 1.5.4 (C) 2005-2007 innotek GmbH All rights reserved. RAW host disk access VMDK file ./ntfs_test.vmdk created successfully. What this means? Well: We create a virtual machine disk (vmdk) pointing to you physical drive.

Apache 2.2 will not serve corectly from CIFS mounted share

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 09:09:40 +0000

I have a home server I use for all kinds of stuff when I’m away. I have set it up recently so that it can serve a folder mounted over the network from a Windows machine. And this is where the fun started! The folders and files appear correctly, I can navigate and I can download them. Only that the files, even if apparently having the same size are corrupted. I checked the FollowSymLinks and as expected was set as required.

Get the new Firefox 4.0 beta for Linux 64 bit.

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 13:36:18 +0000

I wanted to play a bit with the Mozilla Firefox 4.0 beta. Well, if you go to the download site there’s no apparent way to download the 64 bit version of Firefox. This is where I got it: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/4.0b1

How to check if TRIM is enabled on your SSD

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 10:07:24 +0000

God a fancy new drive? SSD maybe? TRIM support advertised? Well, here’s how you can check if TRIM support is actually enabled and working in your windows installation: Start a command prompt window (WIN+R, type cmd and press enter) In the command prompt window type the following: fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify You will get one of the following: DisableDeleteNotify = 1 (Means that Windows TRIM commands are disabled) DisableDeleteNotify = 0 (Means that Windows TRIM commands are enabled)

Core I7 and I5 throtle more than the core 2

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 18:51:12 +0000

I recently found out that the power management inside the new I5 and I7 Intel processors is much more inteligent than what the older core2 has. For example a core2 would throttle back based on temperature only just before the critical point. The newer I5s and I7s would turn cores on/off or independently, slow down depending on load, power consumption and temperature. Basically this means that you might get less from your cpu if it runs hot - either because of the weather or because of inappropriate cooling,

Network interface bonding in Slackware (version 13.1)

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 11:26:08 +0000

A backup NAS I set up for a client had some problems - i.e. from time to time the network card would hang forcing a reboot (the machine was headless). The disks in the nas are RAID 1 providing redundancy in case of failure. We wanted the same with the network. So, nothing easier than to install a second network card and set up bonding. What is network bonding? Bonding is the same as port trunking.

Force fsck on next reboot

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 08:07:25 +0000

Let’s say you run a headless server and you want to fsck the main partition. The easy solution in this case is (if possible) to force fsck to run on the next boot. If you run slackware than all you really need is to create an empty file in /etc called forcefsck You could do this by running: touch /etc/forcefsck Other linux distributions might check for this file elsewhere, for example in the root directory so the command would be

MYSQL: set first letter of field to uppercase

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 10:05:53 +0000

I recently had to set values of a set of values from a column from lowercase to Firstuppercase. Nothing easier, run the following code on the database: UPDATE `affected_table` SET `field_in_question` = CONCAT(UPPER(LEFT(`field_in_question`, 1)), SUBSTRING(`field_in_question`, 2));

Windows XP – prevent a user’s password from expiring

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 09:54:46 +0000

One of my clients called be mecause every now and then his was bugged by Windows XP to change his password. This seemed weird as XP doesn’t do this by default. Probably it was set to expire by someone or by some friendly security suite. Fortunately the solution for this expiring password problem is easy. You just need to tell Windows that you want your password to never expire. This is not necessarily a good practice, nevertheless if you want to, here is how you do it.

Good VPS hosting

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 11:44:59 +0000

Like I said some time ago I had to move my websites from a shared host (bluehost) to a dedicated sollution. Well, the websites I host (for clients, friends and myself) don’t account for the need of a dedicated server so I searched for a virtual sollution. I finally came to the conclusion that unmanaged is the way for me. I’m working on the old premise “give me a machine, an IP, a net pipe and some power” and I’ll manage from there.

Wma to Mp3 a folder in one command line

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 16:52:51 +0000

I have some albums that were ripped in wma form (yes a shame I know) and have since lost the original CDs. I wanted them converted into mp3 so my collection remains consistent and they also could work in my car. So this would be a command to run in a folder filled with .wma files. This keeps the names but not the tags so be sure to use something like easytag to fill them after.

Docx files in Office 2003

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 09:33:24 +0000

If you, like many of my clients regularly receive files from partners that have already upgraded to microsoft office 2007 have the annoyance that the files are always saved in the docx format (because people don’t go to the trouble to Save as office 2003) then you probably think that it’s time to upgrade. Right? Wrong! There is an easier sollution - not to mention a lot cheaper. Go to the microsoft website and download the

Is a site really down?

Wed, 26 May 2010 15:11:31 +0000

Sometimes I have to know if one of my websites or one of a client is down or not. More than once I’ve been tricked by the ISP’s troubles that a site is down. I use my smartphone to doublecheck but I’ve found an even better sollution: http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ You just enter your problem site and they will tell you if your site is really down or is just your ISP fooling around.

Mrvlusgtracking – is it spyware?

Tue, 25 May 2010 17:18:45 +0000

I found this weird looking process working on an infected computer. Further investigation revealed that it just came with a Marvell network driver. It just sits there and creates a log file, so leaving it in should not hurt anything. They should name their programs more peaceful 🙂

Running 16 bit apps in Windows 7 64 bit

Sat, 03 Apr 2010 10:17:50 +0000

We got for my wife a much needed upgrade for her aging Toshiba laptop. The new one came with Windows 7 64 bit. I managed to get all her old software working with the exception of Oxford Superlex. This one is a dictionary from the Windows 3.11 ages. It worked fine in all windowses we had (98, 2000, XP) but having a 64 bit Windows killed it because the support for 16 bits apps is dropped in 64 bits versions of Vista and 7.

Whitelist a host when using denyhosts

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 16:55:02 +0000

I’m using this excellent tool on my hosting server called denyhosts. It basically scans trough auth.log for repeated failed attempts to login in order to block brute force attackers. It can also get a list of offending ip-s from other usesrs of DenyHosts who configured their instalation to share attacker ip’s. All nice and well until you mistype your password one to many times. Or 127.0.0.1 gets added to the list like it happened today for me.

Easily send mail from a bash script

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:03:51 +0000

Did you ever need to have e-mail’s sent from within a bash script? Maybe alert you of errors encountered? Me too. Here’s an easy way on how to do it: #!/bin/bash # email send script example # # subject of email SUBJECT="BASH SAYS HELLO" # destination EMAIL="user@yourdomain.com" # Email body EMAILMESSAGE="/tmp/messagebody.txt" echo "Email sent from BASH" > $EMAILMESSAGE echo "Another text line" >> $EMAILMESSAGE # send message using /bin/mail /bin/mail -s "$SUBJECT" "$EMAIL" < $EMAILMESSAGE Easy.

Configure the behaviour of backspace in Firefox for Linux

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 21:18:15 +0000

It’s a mystery for me why on windows firefox developers have conceived one use for backspace and another for firefox on linux. If you are coming from windows and moving onto linux you might be used to press backspace to go back one page in Firefox. Well you’re in for a small surprise - id doesn’t work. You need to go to about:config browser.backspace_action as either 0 or 1.

Mobile formula one site and application

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 21:00:53 +0000

Hey, I used up until last race the nice live-f1 application to see live timings in the linux terminal. But starting with the last race I couldn’t. But today I got great news. The official Formula 1 website just released a mobile version available at mobile.formula1.com and oh joy and happiness they also released a mobile application that will offer Live Timings on your mobile phone. To my biggest surprise, my symbian based Nokia E71 is supported.

Authentication problems with postfix, courier, mysql and virtual domains

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:54:44 +0000

I outgrew my shared hosting and decided to go for a dedicated virtual server. I chose Linode but I will leave that for another article. I decided to use postfix + courier + mysql and virtual domains for my mail setup. Everythig was configured fine and dandy according to the documentation. But I kept getting this in the logs: Mar 6 13:54:42 saslauthd [5734]: pam_mysql - required option "db" is not set Mar 6 13:54:42 saslauthd [5734]: DEBUG: auth_pam: pam_authenticate failed: Error in service module Mar 6 13:54:42 saslauthd [5734]: do_auth : auth failure: [user=test@xxxxxxx.

Sendmail says "domain does not exist"

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 17:05:44 +0000

Recently I set-up a machine in my closet to act as a backup server. One of it’s jobs is to download via pop3 all the email from our Gmail accounts just in case the cloud goes puf :). For this job I used fetchmail to fetch the emails to local users on the machine. All nice and simple … you’d think. The mail didn’t get delivered because sendmail complained about this error.

Rename all files in a folder from upper to lower case.

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 10:49:35 +0000

Sometimes is needed to have all files in a folder in the same case. Here’s a small script to rename all files in the folder to lower case: for i in *; do mv $i `echo $i | tr [:upper:] [:lower:]`; done

Uploading big files via php

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 09:43:45 +0000

I’m updating a site for a client that only has file access to his hosting account via a php file manager (extPlorer for Joomla to be precise). He needed uploaded a few flash videos (in excess of 15 Mb each) but extPlorer stated that the file limit for php was set to 8 Mb. I already knew that .htaccess overrides were allowed since I used .htaccess to enable a seo component for the site.

Export a MySQL database using the command line.

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 07:16:55 +0000

Sometimes it’s easier to just drop to the command line then browse for fancy tools like phpMyAdmin. This is useful, especially for quick jobs. mysqldump -u user -ppassword your_database > database_backup.sql Of course you need to replace: user - mysql username password - the password your_database - the database you want to backup Adding -h host.domain.com would allow to backup a remote mysql database from YOUR shell, something like this:

How to mount a windows share (samba) from the linux command line

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 18:03:08 +0000

As you know Linux does not use drive letters like Windows does. All files are organized under a big tree hierarchy. We use the mount command to mount partitions and this is the same command used to mount remote windows partition or windows shares. Please note that you’ll need to know the following: Windows username and password (the ones needed to access the share) The machine and share name. Something like //xpdesktop/pictures Have root access on the linux machine Login on your linux machine as root.

Old Soundblaster Live 5.1 on windows 7

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 21:28:34 +0000

I tried running Windows 7 on a machine that had a Creative Sound Blaster Live 5.1 card inside. Since the 5.1 is a decent card I see no reason to replace it just because windows 7 came along. Please note that these unofficial updated drivers also bring along Windows 64 bit support. A quick google search revealed this: http://forums.creative.com/t5/Sound-Blaster/SB-Live-series-Support-Pack-1-5-08-09-2009/td-p/533861 Please note that this is an unofficial patch and that it has problems if your Windows 7 machine has more than 2 Gb of RAM.

Checking directory sizes from the BASH prompt

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 20:18:16 +0000

The command ls can be made to show directories and permission but it will not display directory sizes. Then it’s time for other commands. For example on my hosting account there is no file manager installed and evidently x and kde is missing too so, to find out directory sizes I can use the du command. It will show something like this: du -h -max-depth=1 3.2M ./wp-admin 24M ./wp-content 5.

Wake on LAN a machine using Python – WOL

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 21:50:17 +0000

This is something useful: code to wake up a machine on lan using python. Since python is available on most devices now (symbian, maemo, windows, linux and so on) it’s pretty usefull. So, if you have machines that you want to be able to start this is the code to do it. I found it floating on the internet but since it’s GPL I see no problem in posting it.

Memory limits of various Windows versions

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 21:02:40 +0000

Thinking of a memory upgrade? An operating system upgrade? Here’s a table from msdn stating the limits imposed by 32 and 64 bit editions of various Windows versions. Physical Memory Limits: Windows 7 The following table specifies the limits on physical memory for Windows 7. Version Limit in 32-bit Windows Limit in 64-bit Windows Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 2 (SP2), Datacenter Edition 128 GB 64 GB with 4GT 2 TB Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 2 (SP2), Enterprise Edition 64 GB 2 TB Windows Storage Server 2003, Enterprise Edition 8 GB Not applicable Windows Storage Server 2003 4 GB Not applicable Windows Server 2003 R2 Datacenter Edition Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1 (SP1), Datacenter Edition 128 GB 16 GB with 4GT 1 TB Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1 (SP1), Enterprise Edition 64 GB 16 GB with 4GT 1 TB Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition SP1 Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition SP2 4 GB 32 GB Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition 128 GB 16 GB with 4GT 512 GB Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition 32 GB 16 GB with 4GT 64 GB Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition 4 GB 16 GB Windows Server 2003, Web Edition 2 GB Not applicable Windows Small Business Server 2003 4 GB Not applicable Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 Not applicable 32 GB Version Limit in 32-bit Windows Limit in 64-bit Windows Windows XP 4 GB 128 GB Windows XP Starter Edition 512 MB Not applicable Version Limit in 32-bit Windows Windows 2000 Professional 4 GB Windows 2000 Server 4 GB Windows 2000 Advanced Server 8 GB Windows 2000 Datacenter Server 32 GB

Put an Online – Offline Yahoo Messenger button on your website

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 20:46:31 +0000

If you run an online business like an e-store or something similar you might want to show a button showing if your are available to chat via Yahoo Messenger. This is a fairly easy job to do. All you have to do is to show this code somewhere on your site: <a href="ymsgr:sendIM?YOUR_YM_ID"> <img src="http://opi.yahoo.com/online?u=YOUR_YM_ID&m=g&t=1" border="0" alt="" /> </a> Remember to replace YOUR_YM_ID with your Yahoo Messenger id and give t a value reflecting the button choice you like:

List of ISP DNS servers

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 20:26:12 +0000

This is a growing list of DNS servers. I consul it from time to time maybe you’ll find it usefull too. I also maintain a growing list of free dns servers. RDS Sibiu, Romania: 213.154.124.1 and 193.231.252.1 Romtelecom - ClickNet, Romania: 193.231.100.130 and 193.231.100.134

List of open dns servers

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 20:24:47 +0000

This is a growing list of Open DNS servers available around the world. I also maintain a list of ip address of various isp providers. Google Pubic DNS 8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4 OpenDNS **** 208.67.220.220 208.67.222.222. Open DNS also makes available a third and fourth dns server with identical service to the first two: 208.67.220.222 208.67.222.220 ScrubIT 67.138.54.100 207.225.209.66 Level 3 Communications 4.2.2.1 4.2.2.2 4.2.2.3 4.2.2.4 4.2.2.5 4.2.2.6 OpenNIC 58.6.115.42 (Queensland, Australia) 202.

Error getting the post list – Maemo WordPy

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 19:57:23 +0000

Today I tried again installing and configuring WordPy for Maemo on my Nokia N800 internet tablet. Since I can blog from my mobile phone I wanted to have a wordpress blog client on my tablet as well. I configured everything correctly but I kept getting the _Error getting the post list message everytime I wanted to refresh the posts list. I browsed the forum, tried everything than I realized the only difference between configurations posted on the forum and mine: http:// was missing from my Blog URL field in the configuration.

Your graphic drivers are written for an older version of windows

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 19:35:22 +0000

I installed windows xp maybe thousands of times and yet this is a new one. A client of mine has custom install cd’s that are Windows XP SP3 and include NVidia Graphics Drivers. All good and nice but they wanted to have the latest NVidia Graphic Drivers so I went on and downloaded the latest drivers and installed them. After reboot Windows greeted me with an ugly face in 640x480x16 colors.

Installing Debian using only SSH

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 11:40:32 +0000

I have a headless machine at home that I plan to use as a backup and development server. Even though I’m a Skackware guy I chose to install Debian on it. Of course I could have hooked a monitor and keyboard to it but for the sake of exercise I wanted to see if it’s possible to install debian using ssh from the very beginning. The short answer: it’s possible … maybe.

KDE 4, open terminal here

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 11:34:33 +0000

When I was using KDE 3 I was pretty fond of the right click Open Terminal Here command. I was disapointed to see it gone in the latest incarnations of KDE . Until I stumbled upon dolphin’s integrated terminal. All you have to do is hit F4 inside a folder and at the bottom of the file browser you’ll have a nice and shiny terminal. You have to remember though - and this can be both useful and dangerous if you’re not careful - that the cli current folder follows you around.

How to recover a lost Joomla admin password

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 19:32:41 +0000

I administer a few Joomla sites so from time to time I discover that I lost the admin password for the one I hadn’t had to update for a long time. There is no way to find out what that password was because they are stored as a one way MD5 but since I usually use random characters anyway I reset the password with a new one. For that you need access to the mysql database of that Joomla site.

Another free e-book about Microcontrollers

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 18:09:39 +0000

Mikroelektronica, beign the nice guys they are released another free e-book about programming PIC microcontrollers this time it’s about programming in C. The title is, unsurprisingly: PIC Microcontrollers - Programming in C What are microcontrollers, anyway? Electronics built in one single chip capable of controlling a small submarine, a crane or an elevator… It’s up to you to decide what you want them to do and dump a program containing appropriate instructions into the chip.

Three browsers on a phone

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:00:39 +0000

The current state of browsers available for the Symbian operating system are a proof that there isn’t such thing as a one size fits all._ ****_You have the default browser, opera mobile, opera mini, skyfire and some others. I have installed on my e71 nokia phone Opera Mobile 10 beta, Skyfire and of course the default browser. I tried to settle on using just one but I just couldn’t. If I want to watch some flash video online or browse a really heavy site Skyfire is really the only option.

bmp2h converter for ks0108 GLCD

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 15:41:43 +0000

This is a converter I wrote with the graphics library for the PIC16F microcontrollers. Others work but this one works for sure. If you want to see the source code (I’m not particulary proud of it 🙂 ) drop a comment and I’ll send it to you. If the bitmap is smaller than 128×64 it will be left as is, if not it will be resized proportionally to 128×64. You can set the name you want your variable to have and you can also set if you want the picture inverted or not.

KS0108 Graphics Library for PIC16F microcontrollers

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 15:23:50 +0000

Not that I’m not happy with the default mikroC library for the KS0108 graphic displays, as I always I wanted something with the source available. Considering that I’m a beginner with microcontrolers having the source available to hack around is a very valuable learning tool. The project is based on the source found here: http://en.radzio.dxp.pl/ks0108/ The source is made pretty universal, still it took some work and modifications to have it working in mikroC.

Installed Google Custom Search, no results are showing.

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 18:41:23 +0000

I did a website for a friend, a kind of a knowledge base and installed google custom search on it. To my surprise google stubornly kept showing no search results. I redid the custom search settings, paying close attention to the domains on which I wanted the search limited on, but still no results. I took a quick walk on the Google Help boulevard but I didn’t find anything. A google search later and I found numerous causes: wrong definitions for the domains on which the search is limited, wrong integration of the code, wrong definition of the result page the form should point to.

Grokking the Gimp

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:52:59 +0000

Since we were talking Grokking the Gimp is a free book by Carey Bunks. It’s an advanced book covering A LOT of what you can do with Gimp. For any of you who are at least a little bit interested in graphics Gimp should already be on your radar. I know that Adobe Photoshop is more advanced, but I also realized working with both that for at least 90% of the tasks (and for my webdesign and graphics design needs 100%) is good enough.

A free e-book from Texas Instruments – LED Reference Design Cookbook

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 12:23:38 +0000

The guys over at Make were kind enough to signal this free e-book from Texas instruments. It is a 41-page “cookbook” of circuit designs and application notes for TI’s LED-related components. Makes for an interesting read even if you don’t use TI’s stuff. What’s inside: Small LCD Backlight with Digital and PWM Dimming Small LCD Backlight from LDO Medium-Size LCD Backlight Large-LCD Backlight Driver Constant Current Driver with PFC Boost Controller with PFC Replacement for Standard Lightbulb 25-Watt Dimmable Driver with PFC 100-Watt, Constant-Current, Non-Isolated Driver with PFC 110-Watt, Constant-Current, Isolated Driver with PFC 10-Watt, Green-Mode PWM LED Driver Wireless-Controlled Triple LED Drive Low Voltage Buck Boost for LED Torch Boost Driver with Integrated Power Switch Nonsynchronous Boost LED Driver Wide Input DC Voltage Range SEPIC Driver 3-Watt Solar Lantern LED Reference Design Cookbook [PDF]

Chrome OS

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 22:40:52 +0000

Since everybody is talking about it I really wanted to experience the all new big thing Google is preparing for us. The fine people over at Techcrunch already prepared a nice tutorial on how to install and run a Chrome virtual machine image so I wont go on to reinvent the wheel. Let me just say that I am completely unimpressed. It’s a linux kernel with a browser on top of it.

Bye, bye, dual boot

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 19:10:32 +0000

Ever since I discovered linux I ran a dual boot system. Linux (usually slackware) + windows (first ‘98 than, as soon as it was available XP). Windows 98 was problematic because it needed frequent reinstalling, pleasently overwriting the boot sector everytime requiring in turn to reinstall lilo. Than XP solved this problem (not that it didn’t quietly overwrite the boot sector) by needing far less frequent reinstalls. When I found out about vmware I was very happy, dual boot seemed a thing of the past.

Cannot start a new chat in Yahoo Messenger, mshtml.dll error

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:10:29 +0000

I was called today by a client today with a strange problem: yahoo messenger would error as soon as she wanted to start a new chat. The error quoted mshtml.dll as the source of the problems. Reinstalling Yahoo Messenger (which I previously suggested over the phone did not help). I don’t know exactly how this problem started but the fix is the following: go to the Microsoft Website and download 912945 (http://support.

New menu items don’t appear in Joomla 1.5.14

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:27:47 +0000

I was configuring a Joomla installation for a client today and stumbled upon this little problem. No matter how I tried, new menu items refused to appear. Not only in the front-end, but they were missing in the back-end too. I checked to see, but the PHP settings were all correct. Then I noticed that the WAMP installation used PHP 5.3.0. A quick look on the Joomla Forums confirmed that Joomla has problems with this version of PHP.

Windows 7 small arrow icons for Desktop shortcuts

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 20:21:06 +0000

Many guides found online will show you how to completely remove the arrow of the desktop shortcuts. If you, like me, preffer the smaller shortcut arrow icon that Windows XP has, as opposed to the big one Windows 7 proudly shows here’s what you have to d: Start regedit (Alt+R, regedit.exe, enter)** ** Go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Icons If Sell Icons is not there, under Explorer create the new key. (Right cklick, new key)

My recomandations for Symbian 5th edition

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:36:59 +0000

Before you ask, no, I didn’t gave up my trusted E71. But my wife’s had it with her old 7610 so we upgraded her phone. After some deliberation, and her not liking the design of the e55 and e52 she finally settled for a Nokia 5800. As you know that’s a 5th edition, touchscreen phone. I was a bit reticent because it’s never a good idea to get the first product from a series (that being the first Nokia touchscreen), still after reading a few reviews getting the 5800 seemed like a good idea.

I’m building a decent HTPC

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 07:09:24 +0000

In the last years I always had some kind of pc hooked up to my tv. I finally got around to have the time (and money) to build a dedicated system. Not all the parts are new, just that I had enough spares and money for the case: Antec Fusion Remote 350 mini HTPC case. Gigabyte GA-MA78GPM-DS2H mini ATX socket AM2 motherboard. Western Digital 1Tb, Green AMD 4850E dual core, energy efficient processor.

Mini breadboard PSU

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 07:14:40 +0000

I bet this was discussed and sampled 1000 times before but here is the mini 5V PSU I use for my microcontroler breadboard projects. Usually you will use a 5 volt DC power supply for your microcontroller projects. Since I got tired of breadboarding the power source part all the time, I built a small PSU to power up my projects. I used a screw-in terminal for power input and I simply soldered pins that stick directly into the bread board for the output part.

Quick and dirty way to breadboard a circuit

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 20:17:07 +0000

Since I didn’t want to pay for a kit of precut and bent wires for a breadboard and I am also lazy enough to put up trying a few ideeas because it involves cutting wires, I looked around and found an easy way to make connections on a breadboard: staples! Just use a stapler so that it dispenses the staples without bending them or a cutter (watch the fingers) to obtain individual staples.

A little fun with the 12F675 and mikroC

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:19:19 +0000

I have a small example that should get you going with the PIC 12F675 microcontroller and mikroC PRO. I am using the EasyPIC5 development board but I am sure you can adapt it to many development systems. It’s just a small introduction you can use as a tutorial on getting started with a comon, cheap and simple microcontroller.

Keep the backlight on in Skyfire, Symbian

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 11:45:59 +0000

Keep the backlight on when playing movies in Skyfire on your Symbian Phone I noticed something annoying when watching streaming video in Skyfire on my Nokia E71. The official Youtube app and the built in media player don’t experience this but Skyfire does: the backlight turns off (according to the settings) even if a video is playing in skyfire - that’s pretty annoying. I had to keep pressing random keys so that the light comes back on.

Akonadi is not starting, refuses to run as root (Slackware 13.0/13.1/13.37/current installation).

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 18:10:04 +0000

Well, I am having fun lately with the latest incarnation of the Slackware Linux distribution. Like I said before I am a slacker, and I like Slackware a lot. In a way it’s nice that some things don’t work out of the box. You get to know how they work. Well, after my first startx I was greeted by a message stating that Akonadi failed to start / Akonadi fails to start.

Configuring Mysql in Slackware 13.0

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 16:46:12 +0000

Slackware 13 has still the same unintuitive style with some things - i.e. akonadi doesn’t start in kde and it doesn’t say why, and so on. One of the problems you will encounter is that Mysql doesn’t start. Yes, if you look in /usr/doc/mysql… you will find the reason. Here’s what you have to do: Run mysql_install_db This will configure the default databases mysql needs to function. Now, this is where you would normally start mysql using /etc/rc.

Slackware 13 is here

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 07:48:50 +0000

Yupeee, a new toy. Slacware 13.0 is out, with an official and in sync 64bit version too. Finally upgraded to KDE 4.2.x. Get yours while it’s hot. And don’t forget to support the project by buying the dvd’s from the Slackware store. Have fun!

Disable and Remove the ads in Yahoo! Messenger 9 or 10 beta

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 06:21:40 +0000

Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 is the current stable messenger version (Yahoo messenger 10 is in beta). As with any previous versions of Yahoo Messenger, there are various ads displayed in the bottom of the contacts list or inside message and chat windows. These ads can be disabled using a simple registry hack: Start regedit. (Run -> regedit.exe) Go to this registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\YahoopagerLocale On the right you should see a Value called Enable Messenger Ad.

I have a linux Jukebox !

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 19:30:04 +0000

Finally, after years of putting it away, after a few design changes and a fried motherboard I have a linux jukebox. Well, not a jukebox but more an internet radio. Check at the bottom for the latest updates. When I first had the ideea I noticed an old ~ ’50s Blaupunkt Radio my father had in his basement. I investigated if the radio was worth restoring but the inside was rusted, the capacitors were long gone and most of the tubes were missing.

I found the best themes for my E71

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 13:26:39 +0000

I gave up finding a nice theme for my E71 long ago. Even accepted the ugly icons. A few weeks ago I found a decent theme with ovi icons and got a bit happier. Today I had time to search a bit some more and I have some of the best Nokia E71 themes I found: Ovi Blue from Nokia Conversations Aviator, Enterprise and Zen Touch from Tehkseven - those are both with sevan and ovi icons.

Boot.ini and Quick Launch disapears after each boot

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:14:38 +0000

So, Microsoft took care of another hour of my life I’ll never see again… The problem: On a computer, after each boot the files c:boot.ini and the folder Internet Explorer from C:documents and settingsuserapplication datamicrosoftinternet explorer are erased. After fiddling with malware scanning, registry tweaks the problem was still there. The solution: I found someone on a forum noting that uninstalling Internet Explorer 8 fixed this problem for him. What? Ok, I understand that IE8 might screw around with the Quick Launch, but boot.

Yahoo Messenger Michael Jackson virus

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 09:59:09 +0000

A friend of mine got infected via Yahoo Messenger. The virus, spreads via mass messaging the following message: HAHA Michael Jackson Gay 😀 » http://looool.machiaeljack**ndied.com The link takes you to something that looks like a picture, but because the file name ends with what appears to the user as a web adress the final extension is .com not .jpg - and so you get tricked into running an executable.

Small but useful Windows junk cleaner

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 08:59:49 +0000

I just stumbled upon a nice little utility. It’s called ATF Cleaner. What it does? What you always do when you clean up a computer or remove a virus: it cleans temporary folders, temporary internet files and so on. It’s what you basically do manually every time you start working on a computer with problems. It’s small, fast and useful but as it’s always the case with utilities that erase files you should be careful.

I’m not using Gravity for Twitter access on my phone

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 13:06:23 +0000

Even though I like Gravity a lot, I chose a simpler FREEWARE symbian native application as a client for Twitter - Tweets60: It’s simple, fast, and has access point prioritization built in. It may not be as feature full as Gravity, but it’s free - so you can’t argue there. You can write your tweets, follow others and click links and more. Even more I find it faster than Gravity. Of course if you need or want to be able to upload pictures and other advanced features that Tweet60 misses for now you’ll need to shell out the (modest) price of Gravity.

My favourite microcontroler

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 12:56:54 +0000

My favourite microcontroler for now is PIC16F887. I will soon try to build some projects using the 18F series, but for now my Nixie clock and planned LED cube I will use the 16F887. No, I didn’t gave up, I plan to start work on the nixie projects ASAP. Program Memory Type Flash Program Memory (KB) 14 CPU Speed (MIPS) 5 RAM Bytes 368 Data EEPROM (bytes) 256 Digital Communication Peripherals 1-A/E/USART, 1-MSSP(SPI/I2C) Capture/Compare/PWM Peripherals 1 CCP, 1 ECCP Timers 2 x 8-bit, 1 x 16-bit ADC 14 ch, 10-bit Comparators 2 Temperature Range (C) -40 to 125 Operating Voltage Range (V) 2 to 5.

I’ve got Nixie’s

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 16:15:52 +0000

Thanks to a local electronics forum I managed to get my hands on some Nixie tubes. Two sets to be exact. One set came complete with the original driver circuit board which has some very interesting Russian made Nixie drivers similar to the venerable 74141 and 7441. I think they are pretty rare too. I hope that those drivers will simplify my circuit as they are high voltage drivers. I even managed to locate the datasheet !

Sweet mouse

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 16:04:19 +0000

My wife’s been to Brussels and I got a sweet mouse ! Cool. For now it’s alive, but I am sure it will not last very much.

Surround in Winamp with Soundblaster Live

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 08:07:39 +0000

I had some time last night and I wanted to listen to some music. I have a pc hooked to my tv and my surround system. I realized that I can only hear music in the front speakers. It took some time to find how to enable 5.1 sound using winamp and my creative soundblaster live. Long story short I had to install Creative PlayCenter (I didn’t install all the bloat of the creative drivers before) and start PlayCenter and enable CMSS.

Open source ADC read function

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:30:43 +0000

Yes, I know, mikroC has it’s own ADC library, but as always I am a sucker for open source. So I decided to write my own adc read function, so I can better understand the PIC ADC converter operation. And, in the good spirit of open source I decided to share my code. The following code is the ADC on LCD example supplied by MikroElectronika with their EasyPic5 board, and it’s written in MikroC Pro.

VLC media player 1.0.0 – Goldeneye is out !

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 08:27:43 +0000

In the good tradition of Open Source projects VideoLAN has been at a version < 1.0 for ages. Traditionally 1.0 would be a complete, stable release. Well VideoLAN is there. Actually has been there for some time, I use it constantly and besides an uglier than usual interface has been stable and useful for me. For those of you who don’t know VideoLAN is a full featured Media Player for Windows, Linux, OSX and many more operating systems.

Gears available for Firefox 3.5 – sord of

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 09:03:19 +0000

Like I mentioned in my previous post Firefox 3.5 is still not supported by google gears. I don’t need it for Gmail but I use the turbo feature of WordPress. Well, a good soul over at the Google Gears User Group made a custom build. You should treat it as beta quality. It works for me on Windows but YMMV. Probably official support is right around the corner if the fix is already in the latest source.

Firefox 3.5 fails to impress me. Google Gears also missing.

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 11:43:14 +0000

I’ve been using Firefox 3.5 for some time now - alpha, beta, rc and now final. In my opinion firefox fails to improve performance as promised. It has some new features, it has some bad new features and it misses the speed we want and need. Ajax sites seem just as slow as they were in Firefox 3.0. It still isn’t 100 on the ACID 3 test and so on.

A free book about PIC Microcontrollers

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 11:22:59 +0000

As you might have noticed from my posts I am always in for a free lunch. So, this would be free lunch for your brain. Even if you don’t use or plan to use Mikroelektronika products you might want to know that they have a free book about PIC microcontrolers on their website: here. It’s not tied up to any of their development systems but it does focus on the PIC16F887, and even if the English used is not the best possible it still gets the job done.

Star Trek S.C.E.

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 09:58:22 +0000

Have Tech, Will Travel is an anthology collecting the first four books from Pocket Books’ original eBook series about the Starfleet Corps of Engineers, depicting the missions of a rapid response team of SCE taking place during the 2370s. Several canon characters and concepts were included in the stories, but with new details not mentioned in televised Star Trek of the era. I have recently finished reading every novel in the Star Trek S.

Open office to the rescue

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 08:48:47 +0000

Last Thursday I was happily walking to the bus station to start a prolonged weekend when a friend and client rang. Microsoft Excel was giving her trouble: she was working on some inventory files with lots of records and pretty complex. To add to the problem the data was copied and pasted from an online list inside the browser. I suspect that some junk from the web inventory list tagged along.

Computer Networks, Fourth Edition by Andrew S. Tanenbaum

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 08:34:52 +0000

To most of you this is probably old news, but if you didn’t read it go out buy a copy and read it ! I thought I knew pretty much about networks, but after I read this book I knew a lot more. There’s no way around it. If you are involved with computer networks this is a must. It’s clearly written, simple explained, and one of the technical books I have enjoyed the most.

Permanently show the Hibernate button in Windows XP

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 13:38:03 +0000

You like to hibernate your Windows system instead of always turning it off? Me too! You still have to reboot or power off from time to time otherwise the system would slow down but at least sometimes you don’t have to wait for the lengthy Windows boot. This is how you can configure Windows XP to always show the Hibernate button when clicking Turn Off like it shows on some laptops.

You don’t need megapixels !

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:23:02 +0000

From time to time I get the feeling this is not said enough ! Every one in a while a friend or relative would ask me on advice on what digital camera to buy. Many of them are on their second or third model and realized that, even if they bought the camera with the most megapixels they could afford at the time, they didn’t get the quality they expected. That is also true and in part exacerbated with phones.

How I sync my phone

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 08:17:35 +0000

Like I said I used to have an Sony Ericsson phone that had Automatic Sync built in. Nokia has sync (SyncML) but no settings to automate that. I like the ideea of syncing a phone with an online service because it gives me access to my schedule and contacts on any pc I use without the need of additional software. Some time ago I tried goosync, Scheduleworld and others promissing easy sync between a SyncML capable device (my phone) and Google Calendar.

How to watermark you pictures for free

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:54:01 +0000

Ever since I post pictures on the internet I searched for a way to watermark them. I am not paranoiac but I want others to respect my work. I used to use Fast Stone Image Viewer. It’s fast, free for personal use and has an array of functions that can be applied in Batch Mode, many useful if you publish your pictures online. Here’s a quick step by step: Start Fast Stone, select the images you want to watermark and press F3.

Corel DRAW X3, X4 and X5 crashes on Open, Save As, Export. A.R.M. error.

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:21:02 +0000

Corel Draw is one of the most expensive pieces of junk I ever saw. I take that back 🙂 Considering that still X3 was decent compared to 11 and 12 and also that X5 is pretty good considering Corel’s history and also most important because I’ve seen much more expensive piles of junk since I wrote this. Nevertheless I, and probably you too have to use and maintain it. I had the following problem on a fresh installation of Windows XP SP3: every time I wanted to export, save as or open a drawing Corel Draw X3 would crash regularly with it’s darned Crash Wizard.

Pidgin would not connect to Yahoo Messenger

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 09:26:55 +0000

I run pidgin on my windows machines because, I basically hate the bloat of the official Yahoo Messenger and because I also need google talk. For a few days I could not connect to Yahoo. Going to Manage Accounts (CTRL+A) -> your problem yahoo account -> Advanced and changing the server to cn.scs.msg.yahoo.com solved the problem for me. Another reason to hate Yahoo, yet people seem to love it, and I need a way to chat with them too.

Temperature graph on GLCD with EasyPic5

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 17:17:46 +0000

This is a small project I did for school. I am using the easypic 5 board from mikroelectronica to display a linegraph of the temperature read every second by the DS1820 sensor and displays it on the KS0108 based GLCD. I am using the OneWire and GLCD libraries that come with the mikroC compiler. I am using a PIC16F887 mounted on the board. You might need to adjust the code if you use a different microcontroler / development board.

A good, freeware text editor for your nokia symbian phone

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 09:03:51 +0000

More and more phones have, these days, a decent text entry method - be it T9, qwerty keyboard or touch screen. Especially if you own a qwerty phone you might be interested in a good, native text editor application. I searched, and DEdit came up. It has a ton of features, but more important you can easily edit text files on your phone. From it’s features one can note: Remember last editing position in each text-file, that you edit; Remember user-defined positions in file Use many encodings, ascii and unicode Supports editing of big files (several megabytes or even more) Easy-to-use one-hand hotkeys Even more, it has versions for older phones too, like s60v2 not only s60v3.

This is how you can read your EXT2 and EXT3 partitions from Windows XP

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 16:15:25 +0000

My main workstation has a dual (sometimes tri) boot configuration: some flavour of linux (usually slackware) and some flavour of windows (usually xp). I have small partitions for the operating systems and one - two big ones for data. In the past, the data ones used to be FAT32 so they would be readable and writeable from both linux and windows. But FAT32 is no longer useful. It’s limitations forced me to use either NTFS or EXT2/3.

Smart connect update

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 15:53:18 +0000

Remeber my article in which I was praising Smart Connect for filling the inexplicable gap in the access point configuration on newer E series nokia phones? Well I have a small update. It’s crap. From time to time my phone was unnable to connect to the internet, be it 3g or wi-fi untill I restarted it. I kept thinking it’s the phones problem, and waited for a firmware update. Well I managed to track the problem: it’s Smart Connect.

The quest for mobile Youtube is over

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 15:44:03 +0000

Ever since Flash 3.0 came out and I managed to install it on my Nokia E61 phone I have been using one or other mobile youtube application. It’s a handy app to have when you want to kill some time. I started with emTube which was pretty good, but never got updated and for me it stopped working. Mobitubia saved the day, especially with it’s nice interface, ability to save files for later viewing and so on.

How to add a favicon to your WordPress Blog.

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:00:51 +0000

This was simple: I used The Gimp to create a file 16 x 16 pixels and saved it as favicon.ico Upload it to the root of your website Added the following to header.php: <link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico"> Fast and easy !

How to recreate the Show Desktop shortcut / icon

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 08:36:33 +0000

My wife erased by mistake the Show Desktop shortcut from the Quick Launch toolbar. So I needed to recreate it. Here are the needed steps: Start notepad Copy and paste this text in notepad: [Shell] Command=2 IconFile=explorer.exe,3 [Taskbar] Command=ToggleDesktop Save as Show Desktop.scf. Now move the shortcut anywhere you want it. Did you know that? I didn’t 🙂 Also you might want to know that WIN+D (Win being the button between left CTRL and ALT that opens the Start Menu) does the same thing.

Star Trek 2009

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 13:46:37 +0000

I’m a geek, that means I like Star Trek. That also means that I watched the latest Star Trek movie as soon as it was possible. I didn’t have many expectations. Nemesis was a bit of a disapointment, and with everything new and changed I just went to see it. I was pleasently surprised. I found it to be a good movie. A bit different from what I call Star Trek.

Removing a virus from an USB Thumbdrive

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 12:49:43 +0000

I have seen a lot of usb thumbdrives with viruses lately, even cards from cameras and mp3 players. When you insert a new drive windows will pop up a message with stuff you can do (play, open, etc). If you have the slightest suspicion of infection click cancel. Infected usb drive autorun message. Notice the two Open folder to view files? Most of the times, when the drive is infected some of the icons will look weird:

Custom csv export from virtuemart

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 09:11:43 +0000

One of my clients needed a custom feed of his virtuemart products. I did a quick google check and nothing came up, so I decided to write my own. Please note that I’m not a programmer and I bet it can be done faster, better and more elegant, still this works, so … <?php // Please note those was developed for a Joomla 1.5 installation // www.sgvulcan.com $host = "localhost"; //database location $user = "user"; //database username $pass = "pass"; //database password $db_name = "database"; //database name $wtxt="; //database connection $link = mysql_connect($host, $user, $pass); mysql_select_db($db_name); $myFile = "product_export.

The best freeware weather application for my Nokia E71

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:14:52 +0000

… or any symbian device for that matter - even s60v2 based devices. I like having weather informations at hand. At home I have a nice mini weather station, but I still like to be able to check it on my phone. I tried a few apps before this one, even commercial ones like Handy Weather, still I find M!Weather - Mobile weather from the ubahnstation the best. [404 as of 2002] It’s fast, it’s free and it’s acurate.

The revolution – desktop like experience on your mobile devices

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:03:38 +0000

Everytime a new mobile devices comes around or a new browser is announced all the news sites and blogs happily announce a revolution: the desktop like browsing experience on a mobile device. I remember when I researched a few reviews before buying my Nokia E71 phone that some reviewers complained about the qvga resolution of the device. I can only say this cow bagles ! First of all there’s no way that you can cram the 19" plus experience of a normal desktop monitor on a 2.

Why I don’t own a netbook …

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 15:48:03 +0000

As you might have noticed I am a big fan of gadgets and computers. A few months ago I was about to buy a small netbook for my needs. Fortunately I borrowed one from a neighbour for a few days. That was a lousy experience. Cramped keyboard, slow processor and inexistent battery life. I usually understand the limitations imposed by small and cheap devices, but I didn’t thought that I’ll get all of them.

Freenas and Bittorent/transmission problems

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 17:40:52 +0000

As I mentioned in another post I run a FreeNAS 0.69.1(at the time of posting) based machine on my network, for backup, downloads and storage. I also use it to leave downloads running when I’m not at home. FreeNAS is great but I had this problems when downloading torrents: Yesterday I left it downloading the latest ubuntu version. (Yes I know I’m behind), it’s been out for some time now. When I got back from town I just shut down the nas without checking on progress.

What I add to a fresh install of Windows XP

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 08:30:23 +0000

Yes, yes, I know, Windows 7 is all the rage today. But, XP is still widely used and for now is the operating system I need to install on 90% of the cases. Of course first I install Windows XP, then the pc’s drivers and utilities, then I add whatever commercial software the client uses. After that, from case to case I always add some of the following: Security If it’s a home user that doesn’t have a paid antivirus solution I install AVG free or Avast Home edition.

4×20 LCD screen with USB interface.

Sun, 31 May 2009 15:50:54 +0000

Attaching an LCD screen to a pc is a pretty easy job. I am working on a jukebox that I wanted to a screen attached to. Although a HD44780 based LCD can be attached to the parallel port with almost no additional parts I wanted a more flexible solution, and I thought about microcontrollers with usb support. I found a thread here, where all the work is pretty much done. Thank you ch424.

Recover your lost linux slackware root password

Thu, 28 May 2009 13:31:13 +0000

I’m an avid Slackware user. It was the distro I started using back in ‘98 and, even if I tried and used many others I still like it the most. Anyways these rules apply to many other flavours of linux. One of the problems I faced is needing to make changes on inherited machines that nobody knew the passwords for. So, if you face the same problem, or you simply forgot the root password because you usually use a normal user account here’s what you have to do to reset the password.

Take your mobile phone for a "Swim"

Thu, 28 May 2009 08:08:46 +0000

At one point I’ve been the shamed user of a Sony Ericsson v610i. Pretty simple candybar phone. Although it had one function that put my next phone (the Nokia E61) and my current phone to shame. It had syncml capabilities with the option of automatic, periodic syncing. Guess what… the flagship E series device of its time didn’t! Open source to the rescue. I searched for a sollution for some time, eventually giving up, until I discovered, recently the Bergamot Project with its Swim project.

Skyfire updated to v1.0

Thu, 28 May 2009 06:09:53 +0000

Just wanted to let you know that Skyfire has updated it’s browser to v1.0 Update was smooth on my E71. What’s new: Thumbnail interaction. You can click links without zooming in. A change I welcome. Improved Zoom. Enhanced Navigation. iFrame handlin. Fast start. Another change I like. Reconnect to last state. Remember last connection (Symbian only).

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Wed, 27 May 2009 19:58:40 +0000

I’ve been a member of one or the other Star Trek mailing list ever since I had an email account. By the way should anybody remember the old trek and seaquest mailing lists owned by Leigh Wolenczack I’d love to get in touch and find out what happened to you guys. I had this file around ever since and, even if it’s probably posted in one hundred other places, I had to have it on my blog:

New life into an old Nokia 7610

Wed, 27 May 2009 10:04:23 +0000

As promised I follow with an article on how to breathe new life into an aging phone. Well, the 7610 was never lightning fast and over the years it became more and more troublesome, to the point where my wife thought it was about to break. She also got a good deal on a 500 Mb/month data plan so new software was in order. Although the prospect of a new gadget in the house was appealing I decided to see what was to be done with this one.

N800/N810 tablet as a Canon camera remote

Wed, 27 May 2009 09:37:46 +0000

This post is also on the talk.maemo.org forum, but I decided to host it here too. N800 camera remote control I followed a thread regarding the port of gphoto for the Nokia Internet Tablets. Unfortunately gphoto never got me further than list the photos in the camera and then hang and reboot. Well then I noticed Eostimesync. Eostimesync is a nice utility that syncs the time of your camera to the time of the n800.

FreeNAS

Tue, 26 May 2009 10:32:42 +0000

Ok, so I wanted a NAS on my home network. Having just aquired a shabby XPC SK43G that simply refused to work as a htpc (it’s original purpose) I decided to set it up as a NAS (Network Attached Storage). I went out and bought a Western Digital Green 1 Tb Sata2 drive. The xpc refused to detect the drive until I set it via jumper as Sata1. I had to search on the Western Digital support pages, as the jumper settings are not documented on the drive itself.

What’s installed on my Nokia E71 and why.

Tue, 26 May 2009 09:37:18 +0000

As you might have noticed I am very fond of open source or freeware software. I like the community and the development pace of such projects, and of course I am fond of the price. So, before watching another top 10 freeware list, here’s a list from someone who actually used the programs for months or years and uses them on a daily basis: 1. Home screen From left to right:

Wordmobi

Mon, 25 May 2009 20:27:30 +0000

Another nice little app. Having started this site, I wondered if it is possible to update my blog from my mobile phone. (Nokia E71). Well, WordPress does offer the option to post by email but I didn’t find that option too appealing. So a few google searches after I found Scribe and Wordmobi. Both are nice symbian mobile blogging tools. I chose Wordmobi because of the more beefier feature set, suport for the Python 1.

Combofix

Mon, 25 May 2009 13:09:15 +0000

When I first discovered malware that was not a virus I simply used regedit to remove it’s entries and prevent it from starting at boot, then I simply erased them. After a while, as spyware became more and more sophisticated I discovered Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware. Than Spybot Search and Destroy. Lately it seems to me that Ad-aware is lagging more and more behind Spybot. A friend of mine recomended Combofix so I gave it a shot.

Getting sound to work on an old Deskpro EN and Slackware 12.2

Sun, 03 May 2009 14:08:05 +0000

I was trying to get rid of the separate sound card in an old Compaq Deskpro En (Pentium III) I use on a jukebox project. Alsa-conf would only detect some weird isa-pnp card that did not work. After searching a bit I found out that the card is an ESS 1869 and is not autodetected. Reading on the alsa website I found that these are the settings that work: (set in /etc/modprobe.

Access point groups on the Nokia 71

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 14:42:01 +0000

When I upgraded my phone from a venerable and branded Nokia E61 to a more modern Nokia E71 I quickly found out what most of the reviewers missed. The E71 has no Access Point Groups - one feature that I used a lot. I usually have just two groups - wifi_first and wifi_only - one for always connected apps (fring, email, etc) and the other for data intensive apps that I usually only use at home or at work (youtube, download and the like).