Archive for November, 2008
How to update Windows Vista style
I am usually a big fan of Windows Vista, it seems to work really well. However, there are some aspects of it that seem, well, so half arsed.
For example, this morning, Vista was moaning at me that it had some updates to install, but as I had some work to do, I clicked on the Postpone button. Ten minutes later up popped the reminder again and I clicked on Postpone again, but this time selected 4 hours. Obviously Vista didn’t like this, because, ten minutes later, up popped a command prompt, all my programs closed (giving me no time to save) and Vista logged off to install updates…….and then it BSOD….nice one Microsoft 
After an automatic restart, a few seconds of some weird looking command prompt view, Vista loaded in Safe Mode and it informed me it had suffered an unexpected shutdown and that updates had failed to install. Hmm, you don’t say.
Open source programming sketchpad reaches version 1
Processing is an awesome open source programming language and sketchpad that allows you to write graphical and audio applications, as well as other tools. It has been embraced by the artistic programming community and has spawned countless beautiful and interesting images and videos.
processing
After what seems like an eternity in beta, is has finally reached version 1 (Gmail, are you listening?). I am not a programmer and so never have got to grips with it, but I am always impressed by what people have created using it. One such example is the Audi TT Movement advert that went ‘viral’ last year.
How to manage your time with Windows Mobile
If you are like me and are a Windows Mobile user, you might feel a little left in the shadows by all the iPhone love out there. I use the HTC Vox (actually Orange’s SPV E650) and find it a great little app. It’s got a slide out keyboard and is nice and small.
SPV E650
I am always trying out new ways to best use this device, so I thought I would share what I currently have settled on. First off, a little background about what I want to achieve from this device. I, like most normal users, am stuck behind a desk most of the time, I am not a road warrior, so I only need my device to help me out, not run my life. I mainly use it to manage my time and make notes, not as my only work tool. Thus, I have concentrated on time management tools.
My main task management tool is WebIS’ PocketInformant, a replacement to the default Pocket Outlook installed on my phone. PocketInformant has a huge amount of options and allows you to define different calender views, add reminders about meetings, tasks and notes, as well as manage your contacts. My main use is to simply add any reminders that I need about project and task due dates, and also write notes about projects I am working on, alongside reminders for these notes.
PocketInformant
My next tool is SBSH’s Facade. This is a home screen plugin that alongside adding shortcuts to as many apps as you want, meters for various phone stats, it also adds a handy calender preview right on the home screen. You can use it to instantly check up on task that day, simply by unlocking the phone to operate the screen. I find it incredibly handy.
Facade
Finally, as a bonus, if you also have SBSH’s Pocket Weather, you get a weather forecast in your home screen to
Pocket Weather
Finally, to help me manage all my thoughts and ideas I have when I am on the move, I simply whack them down into the phone’s built in notes application – or Pocket Word depending on how big my blabbing will be. Then, I transfer over the file and copy and paste into a tiddlywiki file. Not the most elegant of solutions and I could edit the tiddlywiki file on the phone, but it seems like PIE isn’t designed for such a java heavy page.
So, this is how I work and it works great for me.
Does success destroy a blog?
Some of my recent posts have definitely had somewhat of a lifehacker bashing feel to them. And, well, that is because I feel lifehacker has moved away from the reasons I first started reading it three years ago.
lifehacker
When I first came across lifehacker whilst I was teaching English in China in 2005, it was full of great posts about how to be more techy and geeky and use software and web apps to make your life easier. It was choc full of recommendations of software to download, new websites to try out and clever hacks to make software do things that weren’t in the script. However, these days, although those posts still exist, they are swamped by useless posts about software/OS not yet released (Windows 7 being the current culprit) or gushing about the iPhone and iPhone apps that are simply re-inventing things that can already be done on a Symbian or Windows Mobile device but that, wait for it….USES YOUR FINGER as an input device.
Lifehacker has also failed to introduce a forum, even though users have been calling out for one for years, a restriction apparently demanded by lifehacker’s owner, Gawker Media. Instead it has implemented a comment system, that although quite powerful, still does not really allow its readers to have any real form of discussion other than about the posts themselves.
I guess the reason for these changes is, as lifehacker has grown, and good on them for that, it has taken on more editors to create more content and thus keep increase the number of readers thus produce more advertising revenue. Since there is only so much news or hacks to write about, it becomes harder to find original content and thus the quality of the content goes down hill. I wonder if this is the curse of successful blogs, or is it possible for a blog to maintain quality, even when it gets much more popular? Another blog I like to read is Ghacks, this blog seems to be where lifehacker was a few years ago. Its author now writes the blog as his full time job and has taken on a number of contributing authors. So far, the quality of the blog has remained and it still offers original content. It’ll be interesting to see what continued success has on Ghacks and to see if it goes down hill, the same way lifehacker has.
Remember, of course, this is simply my opinion, you might still love lifehacker. I just hate having to wade through the crud to get to the good stuff, kinda like why I hate eating an artichoke.
Filter posts from RSS feeds
Ever had any posts from a feed you wish you didn’t have to read through (I know, the pain the heart ache, you have to actually scroll through a post you don’t like, man, we are so lazy us modern humans)? For example all the incessant drivelling about iPhone apps, or annoying adds in feeds, such as the ones that lifehacker have started to add, like the one below:
lifehacker feed add
Now, if you are like me and find these adds annoying, you can get rid of them. There are a number of possibilities, but so far only one works at the moment, the rest might take time to work.
If you use Google’s Feed Reader and Firefox, you can try the Google Reader Filter for the Greasemonkey extension (and as mentioned by lifehacker themselves). This allows you to add filter words so that posts containing them are greyed out, the advantage being you still have the post to read if you want. However, I couldn’t get it to work and it only works in the list view. In fact, some comments on the scripts page indicate that it doesn’t work in Firefox 3 and that the script author is no longer maintaining it, so this might be a no-starter.
Next, you can try to write a Yahoo Pipes filter, such as this one here that I created. However, it doesn’t seem to work for me 
. This is more than likely due to my naff programming skills, you might have better luck.
Finally, there are two web services you can use, FilterMyRSS and FeedRinse. I haven’t had any results from FilterMyRSS yet, but so far FeedRinse has worked wonders. I simply added the full lifehacker RSS feed, then added a filter to block posts that contain [Sponsored] in the title. Then, subscribe to the feed in your favourite reader, and tada, gone are those annoying adds. Of course, you might have to update the filter based on how lifehacker changes how they present these adds Of course, you can add any other term to filter out, like “iPhone” to remove all the iPhone drivel that fills lifehacker’s pages these days. The disadvantage with this solution is, you can’t see what feeds have been filtered out, so you don’t know if you are missing loads of posts that you don’t actually want to be filtered out. But hey, at least the adds are gone
Linux commands to be aware of
Just came across this excellent little article about some dangerous commands that the less than chivalrous Linux user might give out to Linix noobies, for a joke. The only problem is, these jokes will kill your hard drive and/or PC. Not cool.
The NSLU2 is awesome
I have already mentioned Linksys’ NSLU2 in a previous post and I thought I should go in some more detail about this great little product. As mentioned, it is a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device, allowing you to attach two USB hard drives to it, so they can be accessible on your network. The standard firmware also allows you to run an FTP server off it and carry out backups to and from the device.
However, it really comes into its own when you install some custom firmware on it, available from here and here. This site gives access to a variety of firmware, from one based on the original Linksys firmware (probobly the easiest to use, but based on an old Linux kernel) called uNSLUng to full blown Debian.
unslung
This opens up a whole world of possibilities, as you can then install loads of apps to the little device, and since most of these firmware types allow you run the firmware from an attached drive, you then get past the limited memory of the device. You can visit here to find out what people are doing with their NSLU2s, commonly called slugs. Examples include using it to host Apache2 and Wordpress (as I did to run my website for my wedding), run an iTunes mt-daap server called firefly, run various backup solutions and even as the basis for a Digital Photo Frame.
Personally, I installed openWRT on it, as it is designed to be run from memory (so the hard drive aint running all the time) and it has a nice web interface. I use it to run a number of rsync jobs, as described in a previous post, to back up my media files occasionally, so it acts as a redundant drive. I might also get it to act as an FTP server and I am considering installing the IDP program snort on it. It wont be a Gatekeeper but it will be a start. There is a huge amount you can do with this device and it is great to use for task that need a computer to be on all the time, but doesn’t require much processing power. Since the slug uses very little power when running, it will save on your electricity bills
More backup goodness with rsync
So, a while ago I posted about how to use rsync and rsback to backup important files and folders. Wanting to be extra safe, I decided to create another backup on a separate disk stored somewhere else at home. This will act as a form of redundant backup. It wont backup everything that often, but I will always have something to fall back on in case both my main drive and backup drive fail, which is quite unlikely.
NSLU2
This solution uses the rather fabulous little NSLU2, a great little NAS device made by Linksys, I will post more about this little tool later.
Once again I decided to make use of rsync, since it seems like the best option and I was now more comfortable with it. I wanted my NSLU2 to pull data from my Ubuntu server onto a USB disk attached to the NSLU2. The best way to do this, is run an rsync daemon on the server and run rsync on the NSLU2 scheduled via cron.
First, you need to install rsync on the server, which I had already done for my previous backup solution, use synaptics and search for rsync if you haven’t got it installed already. Next, to get rsync to run in daemon mode automatically, you need to edit the /etc/default/rsync file and ensure that
RSYNC_ENABLE=true
Next, you need to create an rsyncd.conf file, located at /etc/, that controls how the daemon will operate. Now, you have to be carefull here with permissions, I had loads of problems with permissions before I figured this one out. You can set a number of options in the rsyncd.conf file to do with security and what folders can be accessed. Here is mine:
uid = root
gid = root
motd file = /etc/rsyncd.motd
log file = /etc/rsyncd.log
pid file = /var/run/rsyncd.pid
lock file = /var/run/rsyncd.lock
[backup]
path = /mnt/media/backupsfolder
comment = Media Disk Backup
uid = nobody
gid = nobody
read only = yes
list = yes
hosts allow = 192.168.1.142
The most important part is uid and gid, which determines what user the daemon runs at, whichever you choose, that user MUST have the correct permission to write to the directory that the log and pid files are stored. If you don’t choose a user with the correct permission, you will find that the daemon will run, but wont be able to transfer anything. The motd location and file is for the Message Of The Day, the file can contain whatever little message you want the rsync daemon to show when the rsync client connects. [backup] and what follows lists the folders that you want to make available for copying. You can have as many different folders as you want, each with their own [name] and file location. You can also change which rsync clients are allowed to read which file lists, using the hosts allow field. There are other options you can add here, to do with users and passwords, but I haven’t bothered since no one else on my network is using rsync.
Now that that is set up, you then need to set up the actual rsync client that does the pulling of the files on the NSLU2. I have decided to do this by a script that is run via cron. So, go create a script somewhere, I have stored mine at /etc/rsync/backuprsync.sh. When you create the file, make sure you make it executable, I chose chmod 744 /etc/rsync/backuprsync.sh. I wanted to have some details about the rsync process logged to a file, that was emailed to me, so, I added some extra code to the script. Here it is:
#!/bin/sh
echo Subject: Backup Backup Started on `date "+%m/%d/%y %l:%M:%S %p"` > /mnt/disk/backuprsync.log
rsync -av --stats rsync://192.168.1.111/backup/ /mnt/disk/backup/ >> /mnt/disk/backuprsync.log
echo END: Backup Backup Complete on `date "+%m/%d/%y %l:%M:%S %p"` >> /mnt/disk/backuprsync.log
cat /mnt/disk/backuprsync.log | ssmtp someaddress@gmail.com
What this does is first removes rm the old logfile (so make sure when you first run this, there is a log file there, otherwise the script will fail It then prints the time the backup started echo Subject:... to some location I have chosen /mnt/disk/backuprsync.log. Next is the actual rsync command. The -av --stats options creates an archive file (a), creates detailed output (v) and creates some stats at the end (stats). rsync://192.168.1.111/backup/ is the address for the Ubuntu server based on its IP address, whilst backup is the name of the file location set up in the rsyncd.conf file. If you want to change the backup job to another file location, then just change backup to whatever you called the other job. /mnt/disk/backup/ is the location on the NSLU2 where the backup is stored. Finally, >> /mnt/disk/backuprsync.log will output the results of -v and –stats to the log file (by the way using >> instead of > means it appends the output, instead of overwrites it).
The next echo command prints when the job has ended to the end of the log file, as before (note the use of >> to append, rather than overwrite). Finally, cat /mnt/disk/backuprsync.log | ssmtp someaddress@gmail.com takes the log file and emails it to me using ssmtp. I had to use this as the OS I am using on the NSLU2 doesn’t have its own mail command. There will be more about setting up ssmtp in another post.
Finally, you’ll want to run this job via cron, so, add
01 1 3 * * root /etc/rsync/backuprsync.sh
To your /etc/crontab file. Ensure that your crontab file knows to use the sh shell, so it should have SHELL=/bin/sh at the beggining of your crontab file. This crontab entry makes cron run the script at 01.13am on the 3rd day of every month.
If all goes to plan, rsync will connect to your server’s rsync daemon, suck all the changed files from last time to the NSLU2 and then email you the results. Sweet.
SAFB and the Apple product life cycle
In my on-going mission to make SAFB (Sad Apple Fan Boys) an accepted internet term, I came across this excellent parody of the life cycle of an Apple product.
In my eyes it seems to have hit the nail on the head with all that is wrong with those that vehemently support Apple’s products and with those that try to compete against Apple.
SAFB
Fonejacker
Here’s something to bring a smile to your face. One of the funniest things currently on TV here in the UK is Fonejacker. It is truly excellent stuff, poking fun at every part of society. It is a program performed by one man, who is great at different voices and accents. It features recordings of real phonecalls made by ‘The Fonejacker’ to members of the public – accompanied by amusing video clips to illustrate the call as it progresses.
See below: