Linux goesZen

Often you need to simply convert a JPG or PNG image into a one-page PDF document. The easiest way is to do this from command-line on Linux, a simple one-liner command: convert some.png some.png.pdf But on more recent Linux installations, this makes problems, as some security settings prevent gs and convert to work properly. convert-im6.q16: […]

So your Epson printer won't print anymore. And pressing the "rubbish bin" icon button on the front won't move the ink head sled into the "change" or "identify empty color" position? Well, this happened to me on an Epson WF-2010 and here's the fix. The manual states that you need to press the "rubbish bin" […]

So you've downloaded a streaming video somewhere, probably with youtube-dl. Or you ripped a live stream from a site like Twitch or trovo.live. Or you've downloaded a mp4 video from somewhere else. And all these downloads have in common that at one point you suddenly, out of some impulse, or due to a network error, […]

The rise, market turmoil and steep decline of floppy disks is an adventurous story best told through who were the largest floppy disk manufacturers of their time - over the heyday of the floppy disk during the 1980s and until its demise in late 1990s.

If you followed the guide on how to install a WF-2010 Epson ink jet printer on Linux here, after a few weeks of happy printing, you might run into a strange issue: the printer which worked flawlessly over some weeks suddenly isn't printing anymore! When you send a job to it, it will process it […]

In case you want to record analog audio on your Linux machine, here are some hints on how to get it working, debug muted audio or unmute channels and how you can actually hear what you are recording. Monitoring your Line-In Interface So you've plugged a line-out audio source (like the cinch cables coming from […]

How to add a add custom launcher to the start menu of Ubuntu and other distros

Recently I had to move a large directory containing many files having xattribs (extended attributes or file attributes). These xattribs are also sometimes called "file metadata". And the mv I wanted to execute wasn't only renaming the directory locally BUT I wanted to move a directory across file system boundaries!What I asked myself is: would […]

For quick lossless cropping of JPEG images on Ubuntu Linux, cropgui is a perfect little tool. Yes, you've read that right: lossless cropping. That's because it builds on libjpeg, which has the ability to crop jpeg images lossless by discarding data blocks instead of recompressing the image. First, install the prerequisites: sudo apt install python3 […]

In case you want to run a persistent daemon, some script or service upon every login, here's how to do it on Ubuntu 20.04. On older versions of the distro you would use the /etc/rc.local script or similar file which are executed/run on every system boot or restart, or when a specific user logs in. […]

Epson over the years has proven to bring joy into the Linux community by providing great support of their devices under the linux operating system. Scanners and printer, laser and inkjet, workcenters, whatever has seen a release of up-to-date and easy to install and use drivers for Ubuntu Linux, Debian and the open source OS […]

In case you've migrated to a fresh install of Ubuntu 20.04 and are wondering why in Ubuntu / Gnome's file manager Nautilus your nautilus-actions do not show up, here's why: Nautilus on a stock Linux comes with a default but limited set of pre-installed extensions. The one to enable user-defined file-manager actions is not among […]

Did you ever finish an animation only to learn then that you've worked at a "project frame rate" of 24 frames per second but you needed to render out to 25 frames/seconds or even 30fps, 60fps? Well that's a common problem, as Blender is frame based not time based. That means, your animation and its […]

This articles explains what DPO and FUA mean and why these abbreviations usually pop-up when you configure a drive's read/write cache.

Here are the steps to add WebP support to ViewNior on Ubuntu 20.04

If you are running a LAMP stack, with Apache serving your web-app you probably already know how to enable simple logins via BASIC Authentication on your webserver. (usually you'll use a Directory Apache directive, with AuthType Basic and a htpasswd file..., we've all been there) It's n easy way to authorize only a select group […]

Upgrading from 18.04 LTS to Ubuntu 19.04 intermediate release in January 2020 wasn't such a smooth experience. The most annoying bug I've encountered was a sound issue. I had no audio coming from the speakers after the upgrade and not a single fix from the many similar reports on the Internet brought a solution. Until […]

[preisrechner] On a machine with Intel on-board graphics (i915 driver/ OpenGL MESA) and a fresh install of Ubuntu 17.04 I've seen strange flickering on application chrome and whenever something from Unity triggered an animation (over overlays - I'm not sure), like the Dash being opened, the docker appearing, etc. - then Compiz crashed. This is […]

LinuxLookup has an excellent step by step guide on adding Spamhaus DNS / IP based blacklisting of incoming emails with Exim4 configured with split config files. Go there.

There are only a few providers, or better Certification Authorities, that do hand-out "proper"/non-self-signed SSL certificates and do so for free. I've done a re-evaluation of these today (June 2017). Here are some findings and pointers for anyone interested: StartSSL certificates are around for a number of years now, and the basic version is free […]

I had a number of .m4a files which I wanted to burn on a CD. The thing is that I was mixing these files with a few other .wav files from elsewhere which had a very different (actually a proper) audio level. The bunch of files in the first dir were all levelled too low. […]

Recently I've noticed on a small website running Dancer that my mode of deployment had a hard-to-find error. "Hard to find" as the website was behaving correctly - by accident - while the Apache configuration wasn't working as it should. I found this specific bug in my setup by noticing that byte range requests were […]

While preparing a website for serving larger files via Apache 2.2, I recently noticed that downloads were not resumable on this web property. To pinpoint the problem (and fixing it in the end -spoiler: wasnt' Apache's fault) I dug through the whole stack and came up with some findings others might find useful: First of […]

This might be totally obvious for some but it took me some reading until I found how to backup some local directory location 1 into some other local directory, location 2 with bup. Use the -d switch (for "use this directory"). By default, bup will use the target/destination directory which is in the $BUP_DIR environment […]

After re-using my VHS mencoder avconv capture pipeline today, on a Ubuntu 14.04 system, I've found that things had degraded since my last post. It seems the stk1160 driver, in relation to my kernel, or my halfbaked install of it, or anything else was raising issues again. Capture framerate dropped to an unusable rate (with […]

As you might know (or have found out): AtomicParsley doesn't do batch processing. It does not suppoort it via some switch, nor does it allow to be fed with multiple files via shell's file globbing like "./*". Here's how to do it. We combine a simple shell scripting one liner introduced in the post "call […]

On one machine, a laptop with 4GB RAM but a slow HDD, I've come to experience very slowed down bootup times in comparison to 14.04 LTS after upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. (We'll ignore the less-snappy UI experience for now, like Nautilus opening or SMPlayer creating and drawing the windows when I click a video, […]

So you've switched some website ad inventory/ property/ tag to using a "responsive ad" unit tag/format? And then you head over to the website and check if ads are served correctly. And the ad slot remains blank? No ads are serving? You already checked the Google console and it's doesn't show anything (helpful or at-all)? […]

m4a containers for audio files have become quite common. Adding metadata via ffmpeg's -metadata mechanism works well with them, except for album art. The current solution is to use AtomicParsley: On Ubuntu (14.04 at least), the atomicparsley package has problems. So we need to install it manually from its homepage: Go to https://sourceforge.net/projects/atomicparsley/ Download and […]

Here's a handy CLI one-liner to add a date timestamp to a file, in case you want to mark a certain position/date/time in a log-file, for example in case you are doing changes to a web-site or want to separate events on an Apache instance, events which are before and after a certain time: echo […]

It's common to compress/optimize/bundle multiple CSS or JavaScript files into one file, so you minimize HTTP requests when a client prepares a website. Similar to what file asset tools like File::Asset do. Here's how to do it with YUICompressor: $ cat style.css media.css | java -jar ~/yuicompressor-2.4.8.jar --type css > bundle.min.css What it does: cat […]

When you try to run The Legend of Kyrandia via ScummVM on Ubuntu (actually any platform), you'll learn that some games need an additional .dat file in order to run. In my case I was trying to run Kyrandia 1 PC disc version, and while I had installed ScummVM via package manager, it kept complaining […]

Did you notice that anyone else on earth seems to have Emoji render correctly, for example the smileys and stuff people add to instagram or twitter posts, while you running trusty Linux have some garbled placeholder icon there? Something like this: Well, I've tried two (actually three) solutions which are commonly presented online, and it […]

So you suddenly have no network after you booted Ubuntu today? You did a package update upgrade recently? Well you probably did, even if you don't remember. You probably noticed it when your browser told you it can't connect to the Internet, or by the missing network applet icon in the upper right corner of […]

optipng and pngcrush are well known tools to optimize data structures within PNG images without actually re-compressing image data. These tools are quite effective in shaving off a few bytes, and sometimes can lead to 20-30% reduction in file size. JPEG images on the other hand can't be optimized the same way. (There's no such […]

This post chronicles my ultimately failed attempt to extract subtitles with ffmpeg / avconv from a .ts DVB-S video-file recorded from live television. I started with a search for anyone else having tried that and found many pointers on stackoverflow and such, but all were referring to .srt subtitling. As it seems a lot of […]

Do you notice the similarities between the above characters? When you see them side by side it's quite obvious: their basic shape is spherical, an orb. Their body is a ball. Just look at Disney's very early rendition of Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie. Stemming from Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Ub Iwerks designed Mickey's lower […]

Moving your WhatsApp chats, groups, images and videos from one android based phone to another android based phone is a common "problem" - so here's how I made it work in roughly 6 simple steps: 1. On the new phone: install WhatsApp verify your phone number and such (we do this so WhatsApp will init […]

Any fan of Disney's 1982 movie TRON surely remembers Kevin Flynn's arcade, the hero's "real" world den. If you watch the movie closely you'll notice a street sign reading Watseka Ave. And guess what: the building is actually there, in real world Los Angeles. In Culver City, on the corner of Washington Blvd. and Watseka […]

Wenn man mit Ubuntu die Mediatheken der privaten TV Sender (VOX, RTL, SUPER RTL, NTV-Now, RTLNITRO-Now etc.) nutzen möchte, wird man recht schnell feststellen, dass die Werbung zwar läuft, danach der Player aber seinen Dienst quittiert. Die Video-Wiedergabe bleibt einfach "stecken". Man mag das als einen glitch abtun, in der Tat steckt aber ein lösbares […]

Ever since BMW introduced the new light design for the 7 series limousines in 2010, whenever one of these models is driving in-front of me at night-time, I've got the feeling that I'm looking at something familiar. Yet, it took a while until it finally occurred to me what it was. It looks angry, that […]

For decades, composers have been battling in and off court about stolen or "borrowed" melodic ideas, patterns or even whole songs. In recent years now, I've been observing a new way of ripping of - or let's say - finding a creative way of making your own profit off from someone else's work. Something that […]

So, how do you ... call a script on each file from a file glob / wilcard selection pattern? ... call a script on each file in a dir with a bash script one liner? ... call a script for each / foreach file in a dir? ... do something for each file from a […]

If you've got an Android smartphone or device, it's quite probable that you've come in contact with a way of configuring WLAN access by scanning a QR code. WiFi password handshake via QR code is also quite common when your DSL router is a fritzbox - so you might know it from there. I don't […]

Marking or preselecting an entry in a list-dialog in Zenity, to my knowledge, is not possible. So you can't set the list cursor on one of the list-items programmatically, before generating the dialog, and indicating some sort of "current state" to the user. Or again in different words: you can't highlight one of the entries […]

Quite often I have scoured the web on how to allow the "local" or "private" IP range behind my router, this 192.168... subnet, to enable one machine to access another machine on my local LAN, or in other words allow clients to connect to one another within my private LAN network, and keep everyone else […]

In case you want to extract images from a PDF, and I mean really extract what's embedded in the PDF, not just taking a screencap or something, here is a low-level way of saving embedded images from a PDF file: Extracting is possible via poppler-utils. This comes with a small tool called pdfimages, a "PDF […]

AWStats may look a little dated, compared to Analytics, Metrika and the like - I mean, just looks at its, well, "efficient" website. But still, it's a very powerful tool to tell you what's going on on your webserver. So, in order to make it yet a little more useful, here are some ways of […]

Similiar to the posts Comparison of lossless video compression options and Recompress DV lossless?, where we look at options to compress or re-compress video without sacrificing quality, or introducing a new generation - now, here, we'll have a look at schemes to compress lossless audio losslessly. In particular, how can we get the size of […]

Ffmpeg and it's guise avconv are the swiss army knife of video transcoding and handling. We've already looked at editing out segments from a video using avconv, using it for simple "subtractive" video editing. Here now, we're specifically looking at concatenating or merging a number of video files into one continuous video, "additive video editing" […]

So, it finally happened: Amazon opened a real, physical, brick-and-mortar book store called Amazon Books (stylized as amazonbooks) in University Village of its home city Seattle, Washington, USA! Most book retailers amazon has pushed out of business over the years are probably glowing red with fury right now, but from a dry business perspective, it […]

Web images, HTML and high DPI displays - or, how do you develop, write HTML, for "retina" displays, displays with more than the usual 72 dots per inch (DPI)? Images on mobile device displays sometimes look blurry. That's because smartphone displays are, for example on a Samsung Galaxy, 360 pixels wide - but, here's the […]

Capturing frames from a video with avconv or ffmpeg... I keep looking this up in search engines over and over again, yet I end up getting the wrong commands every time! - so here it is: extracting frames with avconv / ffmpeg and keeping quality high. ("Keeping quality up"?, you ask? Well, yes, that's what […]

In case you forgot to set the internal clock of your point-n-shoot or DSLR camera, use this command to adjust the time skew in EXIF tags and the file's modification timestamp (mtime): $ exiftool "-alldates-=00:09:36" "-SonyDateTime-=00:09:36" "-FileModifyDate-=00:09:36" -overwrite_original DSC03485.JPG alldates, as stated in the docs, "AllDates is a shortcut for 3 tag names: DateTimeOriginal, CreateDate […]

Recently, I did some development of a webapp which was using threejs for display of geometry in a WebGL view. The prototype worked great when I decided to move it into a cordova based webapp, to remove the need for a webserver, and make it self-contained, it stopped working. The surprise: what was working in […]

Here's what to do when CMAKE_C_COMPILER is set to a C++ compiler. While compiling openCV, I ran into this error message: "The CMAKE_C_COMPILER is set to a C++ compiler" when I executed cmake -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RELEASE -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local .. according to the openCV install guide Via a github issue (more exactly here) I found the cure […]

This is a rather amateurish Perl cheat sheet for when you're starting with trigonometry in Perl. First, Perl uses radians instead of degrees, so you'll have to use Math::Trig's rad2deg and deg2rad functions to computer the one or the other, compare Perl Cookbook, ~ chapter 2. Then you might want to calculate the arcsin of […]

In any case, do your first steps with myrobotlab - from myrobotlab.org Build instructions are on https://github.com/MyRobotLab/myrobotlab Within the myrobotlab GUI, you can then use opencv as a "plugin" and you can test the various processing features of opencv, prototype a pipeline etc. - it's easier than diving in via the python bindings as first […]

So you want to add more email addresses or email users to a system running exim? Here's how: Make sure an alias is defined How do you "add" users to your exim configuration, so mail sent to one of your domains hosted on this machine is properly delivered to the user's inbox? Well, first you […]

Wer möchte kann seine Webcam abkleben - das kann helfen, wenn man unter Paranoia leidet und sicher sein möchte, dass auch kein Flash Plugin oder anderer Software Fehler ermöglicht, dass jemand über das Internet auf die eigene Webcam zugreift und heimlich mitschaut, was man macht... Also, Post-It raus, zuschneiden und fertig:

DV video, as found on MiniDV video cassettes, is already a lossy compression, you can't re-compress DV files without introducing another generation. Period. You may decompress the DV material, and re-compress it with a more up-to-date compression scheme, but that, again, is another generation in terms of compression and quality loss. What you can do, […]

Here it is, an unscientific comparison of lossless video encoding / compression options on Linux with avconv: Input material was 20 seconds of digitized, interlaced PAL VHS video encoded as HuffYUV video. Regarding the table of files below, "_interlaced" means avconv was passed the interlaced flag: -flags +ilme+ildct and "_masked" means the "noisy" VHS overscan […]

One thing I've overseen for quite a while is that VHS is interlaced and the mp4 x264 codec does not handle it correctly automagically. That means: you have to tell avconv or ffmpeg to pass a switch to the x264 lib, to turn interlaced mode on and store the video actually interlaced. As it seems, […]

After re-using my VHS mencoder avconv capture pipeline today, on a Ubuntu 14.04 system, I've found that things had degraded since my last post. It seems the stk1160 driver, in relation to my kernel, or my halfbaked install of it, or anything else was raising issues again. Capture framerate dropped to an unusable rate (with […]

Much of the free floating documentation found on forums and blog posts has been cut off when some developers forked avconv from ffmpeg. I made this experience when I was looking for advice on how to capture images (screen caps/thumbnails) from an anamorhic video (for example from a DVD) in it's correct display aspect ratio. […]

Logrotate is a utility which rotates logs in regular intervals. The main: logrotate config file is at /etc/logrotate.conf, but as with most things on Debian, there is a hierarchy of more config files in /etc/logrotate.d/ depending on what services and packages you've installed. For example if you run Apache, there will be an Apache config […]

So you want to configure your desktop to be animated, probably having it display different things over time and the course of a day. Short answer: it's not possible (yet). The updated answer: it depends on how you'd define animated. If you mean really animated, like video, many frames per second, then the answer is: […]

Recently, I was annoyed by the way my display went to sleep (power off/ stand-by mode) on Ubuntu / Linux. I have no screensaver installed so everything what happened was that after a few minutes of idling, the display would go to sleep (into stand by). But I had no means to speed this up, […]

A few days ago, Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit started to show a bug: occasionally, when I resume the machine from hibernation (sleep/suspend mode), it came back okay, except sound was not working, was muted, no audio. Quite puzzling, as a search for "Ubuntu 14.04 Audio mute after resume from suspend / hibernation" "Ubuntu 14.04 restart no […]

Dear Amazon, Zappos, or Dear any-other-online-retailer thinking about going "brick and mortar". And Dear high-street retailers, here's an idea that might bridge the gap between your modes of operation, or it might be an idea for fruitful cooperation or a joint-venture. Also, Dear power-sellers. Let's consider, for a moment, this crazy concept of, well, let's […]

Very often, when you hear music or go away, your machine will first idle for a few minutes (whatever your screensaver is set to), then go to screen-saver mode and in case you have that set, after a few minutes your screen / LCD / monitor will completely shutdown, mostly first the LCD backlight, followed […]

A bit of reverse engineering of Amazon's internal workings and logistics, through their abbreviations, and only from what's publicly available: A2SAmazon Associates Web Service, old abbreviation for Amazon's Product Advertising API, see also ECS A9former startup, now A9.com is a subsidiary of Amazon that develops search and advertising technologies AFNAmazon Fulfilment Network, compare MFN AMIAmazon […]

Some insight on subject preferences, from Michael Mann: "...directors who grew up in the city. (are particularly keen on shooting urban environments) The directors who grew up in the suburbs make comedies. That's the rule." --Michael Mann, in WIRED 23.01 (Jan 2015)

Recently, I wanted to find out where the file I was currently using as GNOME/Unity Ubuntu desktop wallpaper - as it had been quite some time since I've selected it, and wanted to move somethings around my system, without breaking stuff, or accidentally deleting the background image I was using. First, I tried the GUI […]

Probably it's just me but adding platforms on cordova CLI wasn't so intuitive for me at first. Following the guide on the cordova docs didn't tell me everything that was needed to get it up and running for Android. The thing is, npm installs cordova, but not the Android SDK (or the iOS SDK, or […]

Does anyone still remember this pilot project in Manhattan, where eBay, I think, tried offering same-day delivery, by bicycle messengers? Manhattan: one big warehouse, right? What happened to that? Now, from reading the news, Google's Shopping Express is gearing up, again - after years and years of hibernation, after the Froogle years, after years of […]

With apple-touch-icon vs. apple-touch-icon-precomposed, the difference is that apple-touch-icon is a square bland rendition of your logo or icon, without any shadows, rounded corners or glass effect applied - iOS will do that for you, in case it want to (looking at you iOS 7) - while apple-touch-icon-precomposed is the icon just as it will […]

What's the big thing about these shopping apps? I don't get it. When I enter Fancy, or Wish, or Wanelo, 3Crumbs, et al, they do little aside from replicating what's already there, on amazon, or the multitude of web-app based e-commerce sites out there. I think their overall design shortcoming is that they are suffering […]

Two things you can do to boost the reputation of your exim server (apart from having a correct reverse DNS record)  is to enable the smtp_banner, and enabling TLS (or https, SSL) encryption for mail relay. SMTP Banner Actually, I think it is enabled by default now, and ignored by many relays, as it had […]

In one sentence: Make sure you have "third party cookies" enabled/allowed in your browser settings! I can't stress this more, I lost hours of bug hunting until I finally thought of this setting, which was the root of my problem. It was this Mozilla bug report which directed me into the right direction. It tells […]

These days, US and International barcode consortium GS1 is celebrating the unification of member organisations that led to common standards for scanning and identifying merchantable goods - products. 40 years ago, on June 26th, 1974, a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit Gum was scanned at a Marsh food store in Troy, Ohio. Now, five billion […]

I've encountered a strange error when I bundled a well-working Userscript with Scriptify into a Firefox Extension: The summary: this is not a Scriptify issue! The verbose explanation: My userscript was using the @require marker to use jQuery and it's matching engine to do some of it's magic. Problem was - as soon as my […]

Just in case you haven't noticed: upon install, Scriptify will add a bookmark to your browser, pointing to the internal docs at: scriptify://locale/help/main.xhtml (Welcome to Scriptify)

Userscript are a great way to add functionality to your browser. And many people have Greasemonkey installed. But if you want to reach people without GM installed with your script, you need to wrap it up as a real, native, full-blown Browser Add-On, for example a Firefox extension, an .xpi file. The BabelExt framework, once […]

Announced today and to-be-released on July 25th, 2014 in the US, the Amazon Fire Smartphone, officially "Amazon Fire Phone", can be pre-ordered now. The quick facts: good camera: 13MP, a unique "Dynamic Perspective" mode that displays maps, for example, in a visually pleasing way, and - Firefly. Firefly is supposed to enable users to identify […]

On Linux its common to log into a system via SSH or serial console. There is a standard message that welcomes every user. It can be changed, which is handy to pass on any introductory information to new users or to identify the system on logon. /etc/motd The text you receive after login via shell […]

This is an important hint in case you switched from a "plain" RSA SSL Certificate, for example for Apache, or Dovecot, to a new certificate *with* password protection. Although having a passphrase on the cert adds another layer of security around your SSL certificates, it also raises burdens for programs that rely on access to […]

Handy command in case you want to get rid of the pass-phrase wrapper of a cert key: openssl rsa -in example.com.key -out example.com.key_no-passphrase

In case you want to whitelist multiple IPs or IP-Ranges in mod_evasive, for example localhost and bing, you'll have to use multiple lines (NOT a comma or space separated list!): DOSWhitelist    127.0.0.1 DOSWhitelist    192.168.1.* # next is bingbot: DOSWhitelist    131.253.24.4 I didn't find a direct explanation of this anywhere else...

When you set up Ubuntu, and when you're coming from a Windows world, your first move is probably to install a firewall. Well, wrong. No need to. Ubuntu, and Debian, on which Ubuntu is based, comes with iptables, a very low-level, very strict and very secure "firewall" - actually it's a front-end for the internal […]

With every release of Ubuntu, one of the first things I do is getting rid of these space-saving scroll-bars called overlay-scrollbars that only appear when you hover over a window's edge. I want the traditional old-skool always visible scrollbars back! On older releases of Ubuntu, you could adjust a setting in gsettings to toggle between […]

Huh? Yes, that happened to me after installing Ubuntu 14.04 - in my case it was Italian! I don't know how that came out, but I remember that during install, the keyboard layout was initially set to Italy, and sometimes other GEOIP stuff seems to set Italy for nearest mirror servers... Anyway, here's how to […]

On Ubuntu/Debian/Linux/*nix, the dotfiles (and dot-directories) in your /home folder contain all your settings, and also your emails (if you use thunderbird) and your browser configuration/history/add-ons/etc. (if you're using firefox). So it's handy to back all this up. If you want to use tar on the CLI, here it is: ls -A | egrep '^\.' […]

It happened to me before, and it happened again the day before yesterday: Ubuntu refused to boot, and the only thing that greeted me was a blinking cursor (or dash) in the upper left corner of the blank black screen. I couldn't remember if there had been an upgrade of the kernel or grub, but […]

Hilfreich: https://github.com/isync/www-derspiegel-videos

As sort-of follow-up to my earlier post, I want to set bookmarks in videos!, here's another feature / app request for the developer community: I want to have looping MJPEG files, and broad support for it in browsers and image-viewers! Why? Well, everyone knows: tiny "videos" that start more or less instantly, without any pesky […]

Sphinx, just like Julius, is an open source speech recognition tool, relying mainly on Hidden Markov Models (HMM). It's not about voice recognition, which is sometimes used interchangeably but means speaker recognition, while speech recognition is about transscribing ("understanding") a spoken text. Get CMU Sphinx from its website: You'll need sphinxbase, and we'll run pocketsphinx […]

Well, because colour-film deteriorates differently. Colours "fade" away or shift. Separating the colours from a good negative onto black and white film eliminates that. B&W film is very stable. Like "good for 80-200 years". And at any given time you want the colour composite back (nee the original print), you scan the separated film strips, […]

I've noticed that within the Iron Man films, particularly in part 1 and 2, our hero Tony Stark is rendered as having capabilities within electro-mechanical as well as software fields. And that's remarkable. Even at the first occasion where we witness Tony Stark's wizardry - remember the scene, in the cave - a bulky laptop […]

...without cropping, or resizing, keeping the original SD image size. While digitizing analogue video, one of the things you'll notice is that a source like VHS introduces quite an amount of noise into your input signal and this noise plays particularly bad in relation to how modern codecs compress video. Some people thus use a […]

When you want to get a grasp of what a video is about, a visual timeline is quite helpful. YouTube has integrated such a feature into their player - when you hover of the timeline, scrubbing along the seek fader, a small popup comes up and gives you a glimpse into a video at a […]

While digitizing VHS material, I had to inform myself about horizontal compression in relation to interlaced standard-def SD video. VHS already uses a slight horizontal squish to save bandwidth on recording. Then, when you read about digitizing VHS elsewhere, you often hear that it's okay to capture VHS at 360 or 352 horizontally. Also VHS […]

For video and audio encoding in mencoder, you can tell mencoder to act as the front-end while the real work is done by the libav library in the backend. You do this by stating lavc as the codec for audio or video and then by passing additional lavcopts to the underlying avconv/ffmpeg library. Well, some […]

Why would you want an alternative for eog on Ubuntu/Debian Linux?, Well... eog https://projects.gnome.org/eog/ is still not lightweight enoug (means: fast startup) no proper previewing of large JPGs (loads whole file instead of preview first, then full res) the annoyance of opening images at 95% even when there's enough screen property around it left after […]

Over and over again I am asking myself: is there a standard, a spec, some application or similar that would let me set bookmarks in videos? I want to bookmark moments in videos! Soundcloud, has a feature where you can add comments on the timeline of the playing audio, below the waveform display of the […]

Sometimes, tables grow big and changing the structure of these tables with ALTER TABLE statements can take a loong time. (As MySQL first copies the full table with the changed schema and then interchanges the copy with the primary one) Or your server might run out of space while executing the alter table command. Usually, […]

In case you wonder if it is possible to bake a visual timecode reading into a video... it is possible! And depending on your version/build of ffmpeg (or avconv, respectively) it is dead simple. In case you are unfamiliar with the video-filter (-vf) switch of ffmpeg (docs here), go over to this page to see […]

Embedding Video natively into HTML is a dream come true, finally, with HTML5. But the video tag has it's own quirks. While Firefox mostly asks for ogg/theora video+audio and "just works", serving the right video to Apple+Safari users or users with Opera, IE, etc. on all sorts of hardware/devices gives us cause for new headaches […]

Some notes about Oblivion (2013), revealing the strong intertextuality of film in general, and Kosinski's work in particular: (spoiler alert!) Slipstream Plot elements, flying over devastated landscape, the overall mood, etc. Steven Lisberger He directed Slipstream, knows Kosinski since Tron:Legacy, Kosinski probably then saw Slipstream. The Stahl House Clearly the blueprint for the tower/apartment. In […]

When it comes to life-logging, I've already outlined how important it is from my point of view to make it *reasonably*. Even the CEO of Memoto, reminds us to keep it easy, so we don't invest more time in logging than in living. And that's important from the maker of a camera that takes pictures […]

I often splice audio out from videos to have the audio track as a separate audio file, a mp3 or aac file depending on what's in the original video so the audio is copied over unchanged, lossless. When doing so, the simple metadata syntax of ffmpeg (or avconv now) is very handy to properly tag […]

Grabbing VHS video or capturing VHS tapes is essentially like digitising a TV video signal with means of a hardware grabber, some capture video card, or as in my case, with a USB video capture solution. And: it's perfectly doable on Linux. In my case, I was using a stk1160 based USB stick, a cheap […]

The stk1160 based USB TV grabber/cpaturing stick is a cheap $20 EasyCap / Mumbi labeled device manufactured in China based on Philips compatible chips coming from Syntek/Silan. To start, just hook up your VCR with the USB stick via Cinch Audio and the yellow Composite or the S-Video In. On recent kernel versions, getting the […]

This post is a mere collection of pointers into the realm of "remote shopping", means: you buy stuff you can't easily get, products that are only sold at a remote location, not easily/regularly available for mail-ordering, or to get a hand at inventory/stock that's only available at a specific store somewhere you would have to […]

In case you can't connect to your local SMTP server, for example from Perl's Mail::Sendmail, make sure to check the following: It might be that localhost and the IP address Exim is listening on are not the same! Do this: $ netstat -anp | grep " LISTEN " This will output all the ports local […]

An interesting (and beautiful) tool to weave your yarn is Twine and the CLI companion twee. Formatting a Story from Chris Klimas on Vimeo. Chris Klimas came up with it and published a few short interactive stories written with the tool on his eyes pleasing website Gimcrack'd.

A few days ago, after unplugging my Amazon Kindle from my computer, I switched it on and to my horror - the device was empty! All my clippings, all my books and PDFs transferred via USB onto the reader - gone! Just the default manual and the dictionaries where there. But then I thought: hey, […]

Wget's resume option is named "continue". You can resume a broken, partial or incomplete download by adding the -c or --continue option to your set of switches. Just a note...

After debuggin the ssl_error_rx_record_too_long problem myself, it seems there is no one root of the error, not a single point to change. So here is how to track the error down on your system: Go to Apache's /etc/apache2/ports.conf and comment out Listen on port 443, restart apache and see if you can connect to the […]

Got that?! (In case you want to do one of these really creative timeline cover images...)  

Manchmal kommt es vor, das Spiele nicht im Fullscreen mode angezeigt werden, oder anders, das Spiele, sobald man sie startet, nicht den ganzen Bildschirm ausfüllen, eben kein Vollbild. Vermutlich ist es das erste mal, das du ein gekauftest Spiel spielst, keine Demo, denn sonst wäre dir schon aufgefallen, dass Spiele immer nur verkleinert dargestellt werden... […]

So you've bought this new PS3 game, inserted the disc, started it up from the menu, and "what's that!", the game only fills about half of the screen, only the center is the actual game, with black bars around all four sides of the game, the game is not fullscreen, like a demo! Well, as […]

On one of my systems I had to set my network to a strange configuration to get reliable connections: sudo ethtool -s eth0 autoneg on speed 10 duplex half I did this via ethtool after login, but then, I wanted this setting to be the default, after boot, automatically - I wanted to make the […]

Life logging. Yes, I know. Some people tend to overdo it, but hey, there's an interesting concept here - easily capturing what you did, when, where and what you feel about it, if it was a good experience or a bad one, musings, etc. Most people using facebook kind of do it already. But there […]

One of the central things to get mobile commerce (m-commerce) working is that customers, when asking for a product which might be sold out where they are right then, can find out if it is available somewhere nearby. One step-stones towards this goal is what makes Milo tick behind the scenes: Milo taps into the […]

For many years now, has refused to open shops. After their support for the showrooming concept, now in retrospect, this mindset makes even more sense. And now, with Amazon Lockers, Amazon has found a way to get closer to costumers, finally. Amazon Lockers are micro warehouse systems, closed shelves, mostly installed in partnering retail stores, […]

In case you are developing web applications in Dancer or similar "first local then online" frameworks one common setup is to use SQLite when you run your app local in development mode, and then you take it online into the production environment where it utilises a MySQL server for the database work. One thing is […]

These photos illustrate how to do a RAM expansion on a Lenovo U160 - quite a few screws to undo.

While developing a Dancer application recently, I started using SQL sentences with a REGEXP filter in them. Which resulted in a strange error... As I found out, SQLite's implementation of the REGEXP function is quite incomplete. Solution for now: Make sure you've got a properly updated DBD::SQLite driver for your DBI. Newer versions have a […]

Recently, it happened to me that Firefox started loading a completely white, blank page. Strangely, always the same pages remain empty while other pages load without problem. My first hunch was a misbehaving Add-On or Greasemonkey script. Deactivated everything - no effect. Then I began searching Google, mostly discovering Windows related threads with people tracking […]

If you're a bit old school or if you tend to work with multiple editors (multiple windows) of one application open (vs. having applications that offer tabs inside, like Firefox) you will get a problem when you want to cycle through these windows by pressing ALT+TAB. Unity by default groups windows of one application into […]

With Amazon decidedly promoting showrooming, it's time to think about when the online retail giant decides to offer a compensation structure for real-life, high-street brick-and-mortar showrooms (formerly called "shops")? Amazon's Associates program is one of, if not, the most successful referral program on the web. They've got a rich history of letting everyone who helps […]

What is Showrooming?? Wikipedia defines Showrooming as "... the act of examining merchandise in a brick and mortar retail store without purchasing it there, then shopping online to find a lower price for the same item." This definition is unsatisfactory. A better work-thesis kind of definition might be: Showrooming, from a customer perspective, is the […]

This new section on goesZen is meant as a hub and post collection to keep tab on new developments in the online and offline retail world - the next version or final revolution, evolution?, that might transform our inner cities, that might change how the High Street works. Will online shopping evolve? Is there a […]

This post is related to the popular question "How to change the hostname on Linux?", as exim pulls the hostname from the "official sources" on debian. Edit /etc/hostname and set the short system name there. Edit /etc/hosts which contains the localhost entry and the system name entry, in the form <IP>   <Hostname_FQD version>   <Hostname> compare […]

In this post we learn how to configure exim4 on Debian with Spamassassin and the sa-exim module. Installing and configuring We do the routines suggested here, only without clamav virus scanning. apt-get install sa-exim spamassassin spamc Then, as the installer tells us, we edit spamassassins config file to enable the spamassassin daemon called spamd by […]

So, you've forked a repository on github or created a new one from scratch? And then, you decided to work on it on your local computer, and not with the online editor? Ok, Probably after you've changed something in the local cloned repo, you'd like to push it back to the online master repository at […]

If you end up with no wlan after upgrading your Ideapad to Ubuntu to 12.04 Precise, then you are victim of a rare case: Ubuntu switched the wlan driver to an open source one for the b43 series of wireless card, like the Broadcom BMC4313 with PCI id 14e4:4727 that is used in the Ideapad […]

After attaching a ReiserFS disk to a devel box, after sudo fsck /dev/sde2, I've got this error: fsck: Error 2 while executing fsck.reiserfs for /dev/sde2 This is not an issue with permissions or so, it's simply the error that fsck can't find the reiser related tools. Do this: sudo apt-get install reiserfsprogs and your're all […]

While the Dancer documentation recommends deploying Dancer apps + Apache with Apache being configured as a proxy, I wanted to run my Dancer app as I was used to from CGI::Application applications, as simple cgi script. This means I use the dispatch scripts located in /public, triggering them by the CGI interface of Apache with […]

Most formats on YouTube already contain AAC audio. Thus it is possible to convert the videos you downloaded from YouTube (for example with the YouTube Video Download GreaseMonkey Plug-In) to audio-only files without transcoding (!) the audio once again (=preserving quality). $ ffmpeg -i "<input file>" -vn -acodec copy -metadata title="<Title>" -metadata artist="<Artist>" -metadata comment="Ripped […]

Im Zuge der Astra Digital TV Umstellung gab es kürzlich Probleme mit einem TechnoTrend Görler tt-micro S835 HD+ PVR: ohne eingesteckte HD+ Karte, also wenn er nur in der Lage war free-to-air HD Sender aus dem Buquet der öffentlich-rechtlichen und SD Sender zu zeigen, dann fand ein Sendersuchlauf keine SD Varianten der privaten Sender (!), […]

This here is a simple cheat sheet of CLI commands to move or migrate directories and sql databases from one machine to another: Dump a database table from MySQL: $ mysqldump -u <db-username> -<db-password> --opt --quote-names --allow-keywords --complete-insert <db-name> <db-table> > <output-file> Slurp a database table back into MySQL: $ mysql -u <db-username> --password=<db-password> -D […]

Today, after I moved the database around on MySQL for one of my WordPress installs, I was suddenly greeted with this error after logging in: "You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page." Following some of the guidance on the Codex' Login Trouble page brought no resolution, some even felt simple-minded, like deactivating […]

If you see an error in your Apache2 logs "mod_fcgid: HTTP request length 131198 (so far) exceeds MaxRequestLen (131072)" The defaults for fcgi have changed from Lenny (was 1GB) to Squeeze (is now 128KB) Solution is: Go to /etc/apache2/mods-available/fcgid.conf and add (here for 2GB): <IfModule mod_fcgid.c> ... ... # 2GB FcgidMaxRequestLen 2147483648 </IfModule> via Simple […]

Ok, read: http://www.g-loaded.eu/2007/08/10/ssl-enabled-name-based-apache-virtual-hosts-with-mod_gnutls/ http://forceping.com/2010/03/18/mod_gnutls-sorgt-fur-namebased-ssl-virtualhosts/ http://www.outoforder.cc/projects/apache/mod_gnutls/docs/#example then install $ apt-get install libapache2-mod-gnutls then run $ a2enmod gnutls check if anything is configured in these files that would prevent apache2 from working with gnutls: nano /etc/apache2/httpd.conf nano /etc/apache2/apache.conf configure your virtual hosts, refer to the manual mentioned above on how to do that nano /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default Possibly your […]

tar cf - <path or file> | 7zr a -si <output>.tar.7z This means: tar "c" creates an archive, to "f" file (or device), in this case stdout ("-", the minus), all piped to 7-zip, here 7zr, reads from stdin ("-si") and outputs a 7zip file - all connected by the pipe. An interesting variant might […]

If you, like me, get many "temporarily rejected RCPT <mail@example.com>: remote host address is the local host" messages in exim's /var/log/exim4/mainlog log, then here's what I found out to be the solution. So you've freshly installed exim or got a fresh install with Debian Squeeze? You did not tinker with the config files manually but […]

If you want to trim, cut, chop or in any way edit a video on the command line, these commands here help you to get simple editing done with ffmpeg: (If you're looking at combining or merging videos with avconv, additive video editing, read this article.) Editing a section out from the middle of a […]

Here's how to convert a video to a series / sequence of jpeg images, effectively converting every still frame into a jpg, with numbering, using the magic of ffmpeg: ffmpeg -i <input_video> -f image2 <output_name>%03d.jpg a more verbose variant: ffmpeg -i <input>.avi -r 1 -s WxH -f image2 <output>-%03d.jpeg To create a video from a […]

Spring Sommer 2012 has some very strong colour trends, yellow, mangenta and cobalt blue, blocked with each other and black. (c) Zara, image linked from their website This insta-glow-ish yellow top from Zara is a good example of trendy yellow SS2012. 19.99 GBP Link (c) Louis Vuitton, image linked from their website The Louis Vuitton […]

Recently, on a very fresh install of Debian Squeeze I've noticed that on boot, the log said "Activating Swap... FAILED". A look into /etc/fstab brought up nothing helpful: UUID=xyz none  swap    sw 0 0 seemed okay. So as it seems there was an error with the volume that was listed as swap. Then, listing partitions […]

Go to the start page dctp.tv, and find the URI of the video you want to download. From the Flash caroussell, the links are a little hard to extract. Look at the source and look for URLs starting with "/filme/". You'll also find the cloud front URL there, or visit: http://dctptvv2.appspot.com/streaming_servers/   Then visit the […]

Spring Summer 2012 is gaining momentum. With the temperatures rising and the sun peeking through the clouds, occasions to wear bright summer clothing. Bold colours in blocky patterns Mangenta/Pink, Lemon/Yellow, Cobalt/Blue in blocked patterns. Zara yellow pumps wih silver heel similar to Casadei's Blade which Cameron Diaz could be seen wearing a lot, recently. Burberry, […]

As a personal reminder, here's the dir layout or directory structure Dancer implicitly recommends by making it what the "make application" switch generates: $ cpan Dancer # or cpanp, or cpanm $ dancer -a MyApp Dancer version ?: + ./MyApp + MyApp/views + MyApp/views/index.tt + MyApp/views/layouts + MyApp/views/layouts/main.tt + MyApp/environments + MyApp/environments/development.yml + MyApp/environments/production.yml + […]

Installing the newest generation of Wacom Bamboo, Bamboo P&T (Pen & Touch), Bamboo Pen, CTL-470, CTH-470, etc. tablets under Linux can be a pain. We hear that in kernel 3.3 they are supported out-of-the-box, but that's in 2013! Until then, here's how to do it under Ubuntu 10.10+, current Debian etc. Forget all other guides. […]

While reading David Bordwell's blog, I came across a post (about Obama's campaign being a narration) that relit my interest in a topic that I am from time to time investigating into: transmedia storytelling. As it appears, transmedia storytelling (ts) is the latest hype in the industry, as it caters to the business aspects of […]

The sitemaps protocol (help at Google, official homepage sitemaps.org) as proposed by Google is gaining wider popularity. When you are running a site and want good visibility in search engines, you surely want to have it crawled regularly and completely. One stepstone into that direction is to serve your content in the form of a […]

Keeping files in sync is an ongoing struggle, and with most people having a multitude of personal computing devices, it's becoming more of a ubiquitous problem. Just think of the nightmare of shuttling files back and forth between your home desktop, the office desktop, your laptop/netbook and your mobile phone. At some point, you will […]

With the grey trend still going strong and the temperatures getting warmer, designers are trying to merry the mute winter trend with more vivid hues reminiscent of the nearing summer. The result is neon/stark colors blocked with mute shades of grey or black. Neon colors, "high vis" or "insta glo" or however you may name […]

When you've seen A Christmas Carol (1983), that 80s holiday flick, you might remember the infamous "leg lamp". Wheather or not it was a joke of Production Designer Reuben Freed, since then this unique lamp design (a no-brainer if you think about it) has become a classic. The most beatufiful rendition of the idea comes […]

Switch on debugging and depending on your swfupload version it tells you either "Invalid function name: StartUpload" or "Call to StartUpload failed". Even more strange, it sometimes happens, sometimes doesn't, depending on if the page was loaded or reloaded. The solution is: it's caused by the swfupload element, the button, being inside a DOM element […]

Simply put, scp can't skip existing files on the target, nor can it compare them based on size or timestamp. Thus you can't resume a former incomplete recursive copy of a directory without having to re-copy everything what's already there. You have to use rsync for this more advanced logic. rsync -av --bwlimit=350 --progress --stats […]

In case you want to simply see the traffic going in/out of your system, use ethstatus. Period.

I recently tried disabling a CPU in a multi CPU system to save power. The interesting find, it actually increases power draw on the system! Although this is far from being a scientific test, I saw on an idling system with two Xeon 5140 dual-core CPUs a 216-219W power draw. When I disabled core 1 […]

fdisk does not support the newer very large disks, thus we need to rely on parted, which has the GPT option already built-in. In my case, I was installing large Hitachi HDS723030ALA640 3TB drives. > parted /dev/sdb (parted) mklabel gpt (parted) mkpart primary 0 -1 (parted) print (parted) quit The mkpart primary 0 -1 means […]

Download balder10.img Wipe the stick with the proper drive /dev/sdb location with: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdd bs=512 count=1000 Go into qemu with this qemu -boot a -fda balder10.img -hda /dev/sdb a:> fdisk and create the primary drive exiting from qemu starte qemu again qemu -boot a -fda balder10.img -hda /dev/sdd format c: sys c: xcopy /E […]

"mysqli extension is missing" error coming from phpMyAdmin means it can't find the php-mysqli module, which is pretty standard. Install apt-get install php5-mysql then, php5-mysql replaced mysqli or integrates the fixes it originally supplied. After the apt-get install you will still get the error as you need to restart your server after that! Otherwise, in […]

On ./configure, audacious-plugins may report that you will compile with AudioScrobbler client : no. In this case install libcurl4-nss-dev (curl with SSL support), run configure again and it will indicate yes.

Do apt-get install mysql-server to install the MySQL client, server-core, server-5.x and setup the daemon. A small wizard will come up to ask you basic things.MySQL has its own user-permission system, so it asks for the  database root user's password first. If the wizard doesn't come up, you can create the root user manually: $ […]

On Debian Squeeze do this apt-get install fail2ban to install fail2ban on your system. Fail2Ban's conf files live in /etc/fail2ban,  the structure of these config files is explained here. Fail2Ban comes with a number of prepared config files for various services.But these templates have to be "activated" by editing the /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf config file. It is […]

When I scan images, or paper notes, I like to leave a short note on the document I scanned referrring to my scanned digital copy of it. For example, when I scanned an image, I note on the back of it that this one is already scanned and I don't have to rescan it over […]

Just doing apt-get install apache2 will give you a working Apache web server, but not one of the optimized variants. As a rule of thumb: apache2-mpm-prefork: every request gets its own (memory-separated) process apache2-mpm-worker: the multi-threaded Apache2, uses threads instead of processes and is generally faster than -prefork and might use less memory. As PHP […]

Installation of the sshd on Debian is not by apt-get install sshd but by doing apt-get install ssh which will ask you (or assume) that you want to run the ssh-daemon. You can check after installation by doing ps aux | grep sshd if the daemon is actually up. No that you've got direct access […]

The IBM x System server x3650-7979 51G came with two SAS 73GB drives. First I went into the Adaptec ServeRAID 8k menu by pressing CTRL-A on bootup. Ran the basic check drive function and then formed an array out of the two drives by ~preparing the drives indivdually for the array, then formed an array […]

The xmms fork and winamp clone Audacious stores it playlists in: ~/.config/audacious with ~/.config/audacious/playlist.xspf being the default playlist. All user added playlists are then stored in ~/.config/audacious/playlists/playlist_<number>.xspf

This regular expression here can be used to match YouTube IDs: $youtube_url =~ /watch\?v=([\w-]{11})/; In words: \w: match any alphanumeric chars including _ (the dash), means letters, numbers; also match - (the minus); match eleven chars.It ignores further url query parameters.

Off-topic, but related, somewhat, to defunct websites: Help, my Google AdSense account is active, but the ad units placed on my site don't display ads! Hilfe, auf meiner Website werden keine AdSense Anzeigen eingeblendet, die Werbung wird nicht angezeigt! It's quite probable you knowingly or unknowingly violated Google AdSense program policies: AdSense program policies Google […]

In case you want to auction or sell your Laptop or an old hard disk, make sure people have a hard time retrieving your data. Download SystemRescueCD, for example. Boot into Linux (could be you have to change the boot order in BIOS) Use # fdisk -l to list installed drives on the machine. Use […]

As shown in Merging two or more PDFs into one, combining pdf files is simple with gs (ghostscript): gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=finished.pdf inputfile1.pdf inputfile2.pdf I should be equally simple if you've got some JPG files among the files you want to merge, through gs input filters, but I couldn't get it to work. […]

No need to worry: this is the Apache's internal dummy connection. Apache / Apache2 uses it to wake up dormant processes/ requests. Read this. There are a couple of ways to remove this noise from your logfiles. On my system I went down this path: Go to your http.conf file, or the file containing the […]

Recently I've came across an error where I updated a RapidSSL certificate on a server. A first indication that things are a little different than a few years ago was that RapidSSL issued a 2048 instead 1024 bit RSA key. Still, I didn't expect anything to behave differently  until I opened Mozilla Thunderbird. It complained […]

Los Angeles KML file for Google Earth and similar GIS systems. Mostly high-precision polygon regions of places and real estate properties. Mostly film-related places. Licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND license. Please report errors via comments.

Cilegon_Java_Indonesia KML file for Google Earth and similar GIS systems. Mostly high-precision polygon regions of places and real estate properties. Been there during 1983-1985 as part of a Thyssen Consulting job for PT Krakatau Steel (PTKS). Licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND license. Please report errors via comments. Also comment if you've been there […]

Waikiki, Hawaii KML file for Google Earth and similar GIS systems. Mostly high-precision polygon regions of places and real estate properties. Licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND license. Please report errors via comments.

StLucia KML file for Google Earth and similar GIS systems. Mostly high-precision polygon regions of places and real estate properties. Licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND license. Please report errors via comments.

Westenschouwen KML file for Google Earth and similar GIS systems. Mostly high-precision polygon regions of places and real estate properties Licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND license. Please report errors via comments.

Benidorm KML file for Google Earth and similar GIS systems. Mostly high-precision polygon regions of places and real estate properties Licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND license. Please report errors via comments.

At least on Ubuntu, you shouldn't! sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr (and more language specific packages available via apt!) This here are the basic steps to compile tesseract, the open-sourced OCR software that rivals commercial packages (on Ubuntu 11.04 and similar): sudo apt-get install subversion automake libtool leptonica-progs libleptonica libleptonica-dev svn checkout http://tesseract-ocr.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ tesseract-ocr ./runautoconf Patch […]

Der Fehler sieht so aus, dass wenn man in Sage Handwerk 2011 z.B.  auf Auswertung > Rechnungsausgangsbuch geht, der Datumsbereich außerhalb jeder vernünftigen Regionen ist: 1.1.1899 - 21.12.2999. Und wenn man versucht diesen zu ändern bekommt man eine Fehlermeldung über ein ungültiges Datum. Ähnliches gibt es zu bestaunen, wenn man ein Projekt öffnet und die […]

Der Fehler tritt auf Client-Installationen auf. SCHRITT 1: Schaue nach, ob die lokale HWP Installation korrekt registriert ist! Wenn es sich um eine Demo-Version handelt, geht kurz nach dem Programmstart oben rechts ein Fenster auf und sagt, dass das Programm an "Sage Software" lizensiert sei! (Das passiert, wenn man bei der Installation eine der mitgelieferten […]

Bei mir sah die Systemumgebung so aus: Ein im Netzwerk erreichbarer Server fährt eine "Einzelplatz/Server"-Installation von HWP2011.2 nebst MSSQL Server. Die Fehlermeldung erscheint auf einem Arbeitsplatzrechner, auf dem gerade von CD-ROM eine neue Client-Installation des "Handwerk" HWP 2011.2 der Sage Software GmbH installiert wurde. SCHRITT 1: Schaue nach, ob die lokale HWP Installation korrekt registriert […]

Bei mir sah die Systemumgebung so aus: Ein im Netzwerk erreichbarer Server fährt eine "Einzelplatz/Server"-Installation von HWP2011.2 nebst MS SQL Server. Die Fehlermeldung erscheint auf dem "Server" selbst. SCHRITT 1: Schaue nach, ob die lokale HWP Installation korrekt registriert ist! Wenn es sich um eine Demo-Version handelt, geht kurz nach dem Programmstart oben rechts ein […]

While you may use tools like dvddecrypter under Windows to rip (decrypt or mirror, without shrinking) a DVD 1:1 to disk, vobcopy is the weapon of choice under Linux. How to use vobcopy to decrypt the DVD to disk that means, you want to make an exact copy of the DVD file and folder structure […]

Many modern filesystems provide the user with a facility to store arbitrary key/value-pairs along with files, so-called metadata. Wikipedia's definition: Extended file attributes is a file system feature that enables users to associate computer files with metadata not interpreted by the filesystem, whereas regular attributes have a purpose strictly defined by the filesystem (such as […]

When you want to get your nVidia graphics card working or similar tasks with restricted drivers, people on forums might refer you to the restricted-manager. In case you wonder why you can't find it, can't install it via apt-get etc, the answer is simple: it has been renamed to jockey. From the Applications Menu it […]

Table of Contents: Continuus asf/wmv video streaming The http interface and “403 forbidden” errors Running vlc or cvlc as daemon service Adding metadata to asf streams vlc as Relay-Server for an asf stream Flash Video streaming with vlc Streaming MP3 and publish via shoutcast (live) HTTP Streaming (iPhone-style streaming) vlc and the Video Lan Manager […]

This article is an unfinished sketch! Automating tasks in in Blender's NLE, the Sequence Editor, via the Python API can be a tricky task. Most I've achieved so far I managed by trial and error. For example, I've found the docs to be quite unclear on how to add Video Effects via the API, so […]

Sometimes, for example when you've got games from the 90s on CD-ROM lying around, you might want to back them up to preserve the data before the CDROM becomes unreadable - especially when the only copy you've got left is a backup itself 😉 Many games in during the nineties where so-called Mixed-Mode CD-ROMs, which […]

Here is my log of what I did to get a decently running Ubuntu Linux install on a Lenovo U160 11" subnotebook. Now with updates for Ubuntu 11.04 (scroll down)! 1. Display trouble - black screen on boot As of this writing, a specific bug-fix addressing issues with the U160's display panel has not yet […]

Clone To get a remote mercurial repo local, we use the clone command. If this repo does not expose a public URL, we can do this clone equally well via ssh: hg clone ssh://user@server:port//path/to/repo/ /path/to/local/repo hg clone [OPTION]... SOURCE [DEST] Notice the double slashes after the server's port, it doesn't work with a single slash. […]

The most elegant, open-source and completely free solution: use ghostscript. $ gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=finished.pdf inputfile1.pdf inputfile2.pdf ghostscript (gs) is pre-installed on most Linux distributions. Note: Learn about Merging multiple pdf files and jpg files into one PDF in this related post where files of different types (JPGs and PDFs) are merged into […]

This is a follow up post to Creating a software RAID 1 as basis for an LVM drive. The basic steps of adding a disk to a volume group are for example explained here. What makes our process described here unique is that it uses an underlying set of two disks bundled as RAID 1 […]

Coming from Window, audiophile users probably miss EAC (exact audio copy) as a reliable application to rip CDs as accurate as possible. Others relied on dbpowerAmp and it's network of CD track checksums to verify what has been read from a CD by the disk drive. On Ubuntu Linux, mostly Rhythmbox or banshee will take […]

Often, you may ask yourself what version of a specific perl cpan module you've got installed on your system. So here is how to find out what version a perl module is, as an example on CGI.pm: perl -e 'use CGI; print $CGI::VERSION."\n"'

Varnish is a high speed caching daemon or HTTP accelerator. I recently learned some lessons while implementing it on a host. I'd like to share here some bits of information which might be useful to others struggling with their install. Config file locations If you've installed varnish via apt-get install varnish, on Debian 5.0 the […]

In order to upgrade a running server via ssh from Debian Etch 4.0 to Lenny 5.0 I basically followed these steps here and had a perfect result. Change every line in /etc/apt/sources.list having "etch" to "lenny", then: > aptitude update Once this is done we will want to upgrade first the core apt packages > […]

In some cases it might be wise to spin down a hdd in order to save power, reduce noise or whatever. Most people will tend to let the system manage spin up/down of a hard drive, and mostly this feature is used on portable laptops to save battery energy. On an always-on desktop machine it […]

SD cards and portable storage is getting increasigly large. So before you dump gigabytes of data onto these chips, it's a good idea to check if the SD card, SDHC, CF-Card or USB Stick is actually in good shape by thoroughly testing the preformated media. On Windows, there are some nifty focused utils to do […]

One of the first things you might do, probably after your PC broke down or the OS got unbootable, is to do a copy/ snapshot of the system hdd drive before you do a clean install of Windows XP, try to repeair the existing one or do something else. In my case the machine in […]

As a privacy concerned person you might walk away from Google as your primary search engine. You just don't feel comfortable about how they store or keep your searching habits? You have switched to Linux as you regard it as more stable, more secure and more streamlined than other OSs? You promote the open-source movement […]

"You look like a radioactive tampon." -- Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell in Moon (2009) Anyone who've been to Moon's Sundance screening in 2009 might remember the strange yellow suit writer/director Duncan Jones entered the stage in. And if you've seen his film Moon, wheather at Sundance or at home, you quite surely remember that […]

When you do backups with rdiff-backup, browsing snapshots older than the current one might quite quickly become a cumbersome command-line orgy. There are a number of tools out there to ease the pain with a graphical frontend. The rdiff-backup Wiki neatly lists them here, but you will soon find out that they are cgi based, […]

Writing applications in Perl with WxPerl for GUI layout is nice. Decorating your apps with images is even nicer. Now when you go the extra mile to package your apps as compiled binaries, it can be regarded as messy to have the used images as external dependencies outside your code. One solution around this is […]

Not everyone is using *nix OS on their computers. Recently, I had a problem with another machine that was stuck in an endless loop of the login screen, completely preventing a proper startup of the machine. The story was that the machine got a few hardware problems after transport which lead to DRAM replacement and […]

Lightstorm Entertainment Santa Monica Headquarter Ever wondered where Avatar happened? This three-storey building in Santa Monica customized by Koning Eizenberg Architecture is James Cameron's LA home base. Streetview is available so you can do a virtual tourist drive-by.

While wanting to use DVD::Rip, Thoggen DVD Ripper and GnomeBaker to copy (or backup) a DVD today, I encountered the strange "Error trying to open: device or resource busy" on my Ubuntu box today. I solved this by freeing the dvd drive from system access with: sudo umount /dev/sr0 and everything worked. BTW: For DVD […]

Update: Note that the vlc streaming guide has some pointers on how to do HTTP streaming with vlc as all-in-one solution. Live http streaming (specs here) is essentially a number of short video segments (~10 seconds each) and a permanently updated index file (.m3u8) that tells the iPhone where to fetch the next segment. Each […]

Today I banged my head for a few minutes against a strange error: I got a print() on closed filehandle from a simple code passage: open(my $out,">>", "/some/file") or die "File error: $!"; print $out "sometext\n". close($out); Can you spot the error? After reading through two good help threads here and here, I came to […]

Compiling a recent/up-to-date vlc from source, from the latest SVN can be a pain as vlc has LOTS of dependencies. It can be, but it must not. Below I'm goint to present a number of strategies to take the hurdles and get a (more of less) working version of a recent vlc. I'd like you […]

When you use ffmpeg to, for example, extract audio and video as seperate streams, or if you import it into Blender's fabulous NLE, the Sequence Editor, you might encounter a different length of the audio and video part of the video. Call this audio video offset, audio video mismatch or simply audio video runtime/length difference […]

This post is meant as a FAQ, an introductory guide and a general reference manual for  streaming video with ffmpeg's FFserver. It's is mainly the stuff I found out while setting up ffserver myself, and fills in some bits the official docs leave out. It is in no way complete and a "work in progress". […]

This guide is mostly referring to Debian Etch (4.0). Go to the bottom for ffmpeg on Debian Squeeze (6.0) Before you start, it might be useful to again read the post How do I compile stuff. Okay, here is how you build a recent binary of ffmpeg from source. Please be aware that configure switches […]

Having an eye on recent developments in the field of storage, data archival and file systems, I think one can say that one of the more interesting approaches towards saving data on disk is the idea to flatten folder hierarchies and in turn introduce a filesystem that is based on tags. Each file can be […]

If you are not so much into reading (yeah, as if...), then be sure to check out these video tutorials: Screenplay How To: Bob Fritchey gives step by step insight into the process of developing a screenplay in short video clips His website: http://www.screenplayhowto.com/ The Script Code: Rick Barretto goes into elaborate detail on some […]

Today, lucky visitors had the chance to see the maintenance crew of German nightlife and entertainment guide virtualnights.com do their work:

Recently, while using an USB memory stick formatted in FAT32, I accidentally deleted a few files. My first idea while sitting on a Windows machine was to seek for a simple utility from the DOS world to get the files back. I thought it would be a no-brainer, but after wading through tons of Google […]

Recently, I installed a dual-boot OS on a brand-new laptop, absolutely fresh system, no OS, no formatted disc. I started with Microsoft XP and after the basic install was complete, I added vlc-0.9.9 to test DVD playback. Surprise: I did not work. Although vlc should be able to playback a DVD without any further decryption […]

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Lucasfilm Digital Arts in SF Ever wondered where the new home of one of the larger divisions of Lucasfilm is? Well, the Letterman Digital Arts Center (official) or Lucasfilm SF (which many confuse with Skywalker Ranch in the hinterland of SF) is at The Presidio‎, Gorgas Ave, San Francisco, CA‎, USA - just across from […]

A minute ago I had problems running the cpan install of Crypt::SSLeay under Windows + StrawberryPerl: cpan -i Crypt::SSLeay Before I tried the cpan module install I downloaded and installed openssl and Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package. When cpan asked me where I installed openssl I pointed it to the right directory, but still […]

Often while debugging nasty "500 Internal Server Errors" and when everything seems to work on command line but the webserver refuses to properly serve your script's output (btw: check if you set permissions right, twice!) you might want to feed the query_string to a script on command line. Running a script in default mode, without […]

The leggings trend has its first specialist: Costume Dept. from Los Angeles. Every time an upstart label manages to talk a celebrity into promoting a style (ex Black Eyed Peas Fergie wore CD's "piano lesson", via), it only takes minutes until blogs, shops and magazines have it on their radar. Costume Dept's mission: to give […]

Basically, every dir that is under your world-browsable path in your www directories will be accessible. Under normal conditions, that's exactly what you want. For example a domain example.com pointing to /var/www/example.com will allow users to browse around in all subdirectories of /var/www/example.com. Now, what if you add directories to this path you want to […]

Shortly after learning about StrawberryPerl (which I documented in my post about it as replacement for ActivePerl) I was tempted to actually try it. Well, tempted..., more like forced to try it. A script I am developing needed HTTP::Proxy and I was just unable to fetch it/get it working in the ActivePerl environment - even […]

Today I had a strange error while trying to download my emails from my POP3 account. I am using Thunderbird and after downloading a few messages it stopped and spit out an error: "The RETR command did not succeed. Error retrieving a message. Mail server mail.example.com responded [SYS/PERM] could not read message file." on a […]

Although the email protocol (RFC2822) is one of the oldest of all the "Internet protocols", getting perl to handle it is actually not that simple at first. Heading over to cpan it took me some minutes and a prototype script to get it do what I thought would be a one-liner. My scenario was that […]

Following Alvaro's guide today, to repair my broken printer support after my dist-upgrade from 6.04 to Ubuntu 8.04 (amd64!) with version 3.9.2 of hplip from sourceforge. I ran into some issues I'd like to share. After the process, the printer properly showed up in the System Setup > Printer Window and seemed to work okay, […]

From New York to Tokyo to provincial Germany: the classy Gucci Sofia pumps with tortoise shell heel are everywhere! In case you need to spend a little bit of your spare money, head over to Gucci and buy yourself a pair, fairly priced at $610. Done so, you can get in line with Kristen Steweart, […]

WxPerl (Wx::App on cpan) is a great tool to design visually rich graphical user interfaces for your scripts. But the downside is that the learning curve is quite steep. There were many incident when I was banging my head against the wall for hours until I finally got what I intended. This post is meant […]

Windows and Perl - that's quite a story. For a number of years now I've been using ActivePerl, not without encountering some problems along the way. One of the most annoying is that ActivePerl relies on ppm packages to install modules, not the original CPAN modules. So it takes some time until ppm versions of […]

1. BCBG Max Azria These gold leggings rock! (via, more) 2.  Christian Lacroix We especially like the left one, the one Tilda Swinton chose for her appearance at the 2009 Cesar Film Awards.  (via) 3.  Behnaz Sarafpour Look out for the clean lines of Behnaz Sarafpour, the upper left is just gorgeous! (via) 4. Preen by […]

I recently had the idea of trying to use a NFS (Network File System) share over the network and did a bit of research about it. Here are my results: As became obvious, the idea is not that new, with threads dating back to the 80s (here and here). The most important concern seems to […]

Using mercurial (hg) recently, I came across an interesting problem. I had a number of files, properly dated back to their modification time by the filesystem (file_v1.ext was from 2008-June, file_v2.ext was from 2008-Aug etc...). In order to get versioning on these files finally right, I thought about adding them to a mercurial repository, thus […]

Mattel, maker of the classic Barbie doll, celebreated the style-icon's 50th birthday/ 50th anniversary with a celebrity-studded runway fashion show. As part of the Mercedes-Benz New York Fashion Week, on February 14th, the event took place in the Bryant Park Tent. Both, a birthday party and kick-off event for an upcoming fashion brand (According to […]

Zaha Hadid, one of the most promising and most celebrated architects of the last few years has a well filled book of architecture challenges won. Anyway, besides the impressive number of awards and prizes the grand dame of deconstructivist architecture is not so strong on the side of works actually built. Only in recent years, […]

Hussein Chalayan is surely one of the most promising and innovative young fashion designers in the business. His runway shows overflow with ideas, edgy new concepts and an aire of techno-savvy contemporary designs. Chalayan was a strong and very early adopter of the wet look leggings trend (if not creating it altogether) in his 2007 […]

Two of the better games on the Commodore Amiga were Rick Dangerous I and Rick Dangerous II. Designed, developed and coded by the then up and coming CORE Design (who later came to fame with the Lara Croft franchise), these simple yet very entertaining platform jump-and-runs were a delight to play - despite their relative […]

Using redundant drives, keeping backups etc. might help to keep your data save. Anyway, being a bit more ahead of the curve is better than just waiting for harddrive failure. Now, how can we improve the overall management of our drives and how can we estimate when it's getting likely that a drive fails. What […]

A recent discovery is LF Markey, the UK fashion label founded by Louise Markey centering around the ideas of "minimalism, bold colours and shapes, comfort and natural fibres, understated luxury, high-quality manufacture". Go and check out the SS09 catwalk collection or visit their homepage lfmarkey.com for the complete picture.

After 3 years of solid service, it was time to update a few machines running Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Dapper Drake. A complete system wide upgrade is called a DistUpgrade - in contrary to updating/upgrading individual packages installed on your system, usually done with apt-get update &amp;&amp; apt-get upgrade . Be sure to read some more […]

One of the fixed dates right at the start of a new year is the cpd in Düsseldorf, the"International Trade Fair for Womenswear & Accessoires" by the Igedo Company. So if you are in Germany: still some hours left to get an immediate glimps at the trends for Spring/Summer 2009. If you can't attend personally, […]

Today, the largest search engine in the world - Google - went down - well, sort of... Actually, due to human error, on all search results Google tagged the entries with "This site may harm your computer". The error appeared for about 40 minutes, was dicovered quickly and then removed. As in the official statement, […]

Following our regular parole of "...is the color", the next rising star is strong blue, or cobal blue or royal. Rolling in from Fall 2008 Fashion Week, blue is everywhere. Eva is digging it and this striking color has popped up on all the runways (i.e. Stella McCartney) and surely will be big. Okay, it's […]

The handy nano editor (official homepage, wikipedia) on linux/unix type systems is a very easy to use little text editor (far more intuitive than the much followed vi) and allows very efficient text editing once you get the knack of the keyboard shortcuts. Read the manual if you are completely new to it. Most functions […]

When starting the coding/design of a new search engine crawler (a challenging task, read What I've learned from writing a large scale search engine), some input from people who've been there and done that might be quite helpful. Of course, there is the original Google paper and some other stuff around that I like to […]

Recently I've been doing a bit of research towards Nintendo DS emulation (NDS emu). What I've found out so far is that there a basically two relatively stable emulators out there: iDeaS and DeSmuME and No$GBA. All three have issues with some games, even in the newest versions. Only No$GBA is able to play multiplayer […]

Of course, emptying the trash is usually a right-click on the desktop-trash and that's it. But sometime you've managed it to move something to the trash (i.e under sudo) where you've got insufficient rights to delete it once it is in trash. So here is the command to do this from the command line: Open […]

It 2009, and the questions is: what are hot trends that survived the turn of the year? One thing will surely be the fringe trend which surfaced at the end of summer 2008! Currently, its hip to wear fringed tops, boots or bags. One thing is important to note: fringes aren't so closely related with […]

Install mysql with apt-get install mysql . The mysql config file can be found at /etc/mysql/my.cnf. Note that additional conf files may be linked from this file. If you are running mysql on your server, this means a permanently running daemon (a persistent type of program) will be present. It serves database connections on standard […]

Among the search-engines who officially support XML sitemaps according to the sitemaps.xml standard currently are: Google (related help blog post with details)ping url: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap= Yahoo (related help)ping url: http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=SitemapWriter&amp;url= API subscriptionId required Ask/ IBM (related help)ping url: http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap= Live Search/ Microsoft's MSN related help)ping url: http://webmaster.live.com/ping.aspx?siteMap= Yandex (related help)subscription required at http://webmaster.yandex.ru/wmconsole/ More info can […]

The special appeal of Fax machines, the cause that makes them still linger around, is that they are "self-contained appliances" (see WIRED: Why Are Faxes Still Around?): it's easy to understand what the machine's purpose is, if you can place a call you can fax a document and nearly everyone has them so you can […]

Torrent downloads (technically correct downloads via the BitTorrent protocol, filextension .torrent) are a resources saving way of providing large downloads for a large userbase. Made popular by the BitTorrent client torrent downloads can be handled by a number of clients - which is why so many do not speak of BitTorrent downloads that often anymore, […]

They've been gone since the 80ties - more or less, but prepare for their comeback: leggings. What we have seen during the past few months was a strong trend of greyish cloths and dresses combined with black opaque pantyhose (more on the side of tights) and heeled boots. Now as the days are becoming colder, […]

Speaking for a debian based system, here is a short list of very essential and useful commands: To update your system: agt-get update, then apt-get upgrade. Also see: Installing/updating software on any Linux system. The whole domain of /etc/init.d/xxx scripts, most prominently /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload.Also compare these posts: How do I exit the X Server from […]

Although this was only a temporary problem, wikimedia was down - due to a database connection error, see...

The RTMP (Real Time Messaging Protocol) protocol is a proprietary and closed source protocol developed by Adobe which is used to stream (mainly FLV) video off a media server, like the the Adobe Flash Media Server. Most probably you've come across this protocol while watching video on one of the video sites out there. About […]

Email is as old as the internet, but it needed Google to make it fun? Come on! I can't believe this. There is no real Gmail rival, not even a Gmail clone! The thing people like the most about gmail seems to be the ability to dynamically sort and search emails in an advanced way, […]

Using SSL as means to secure data connections to specific servers on the net is a widely adopted standard. One of the limitations of domains secured with SSL certificates is that a certificate needs to be hardcoded to be only valid for a single subdomain + top-level-domain combination, like www.example.com. If your sitestructure requires you […]

On a recent magazine photo, an oversized LED alarm clock catched my eye. (you are looking at a photo.) A bit of research online brought me to various images of the clock, but as it seems, all sources originally shipping it had taken it out of their stock. While not getting a source for that […]

Time for some link love: "Eye candy for the style hungry", Yvan Rodic's page facehunter.blogspot.comScott Schuman's thesartorialist.blogspot.com lesmads.de - a German fashion and street-style blog, backed by Burda Further glamcanyon.blogspot.com and stilinberlin.blogspot.com or the portals ilikemystyle.net, styleclicker.net and thecoolhunter.net. Besides rebabbling the sources everyone else mentions, this Norwegian party/fashion blog gives some insight into northern […]

Today, launchpad.com went down for a scheduled maintenance.

Stonehenge One of the oldest structures built by humans is Stonehenge in England. A circle of monolithic stones of gigantic dimensions, probalby arranged to measure or observe astronomic phenomenons. Links: Britannia Official site Information 1 Information 2 Address: 2 Miles West of Amesbury Salisbury SP4 7DE UK

Fermilab  Fermilab (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory) is one of the most important Particle physics facilities worldwide. Unlike the CERN facility in Meyrin, the partly subterranian collider structure can be seen clearly from the top here. Another interesting thing about Fermilab is the architectural striking Robert Rathbun Wilson Hall, the main entrance to the site. Address: […]

CERN CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (formerly: "Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire", thus the name) is one of the top research facilites in the world. The Suisse campus located in Meyrin, Canton of Geneva, Switzerland, is the main and oldest site of what is today a network of sites, combining a number […]

Burj Al Arab Due to extensive Television coverage, the Dubai Burj Al Arab is one of the most prominent hotels in the world. As Wikipedia states it is "at 321 metres (1,053 ft), (..) the tallest building used exclusively as a hotel". Wikipedia page Address: Burj Al Arab PO Box 74147 Dubai United Arab Emirates

Burj Dubai Although the satellite image does not yet show very much, the Burj Dubai will soon be the tallest building in the world, at an estimated height over 800 m (2,625 ft) and - as of May 2008 - while it is under construction it already is. More information Address: Burj Dubai Dubai United […]

Golden Gate Bridge The Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, completed in 1937 was for a long time the longest suspension bridge in the world - spanning the Golden Gate, the opening of San Francisco's Bay with 4,200 feet (1,280 m) on its longest span. Address: The Golden Gate Bridge does not have a physical address, but its […]

Pixar's headquarter in Emeryville, California Everyone who knows Toy Story, The Incredibles, Monster Inc. or all the other instant classics knows Pixar, the California company that has produced landmark films in the 3D animated domain and a good share of the recent feel-good-laugh-out Entertainment output from Hollywood. Address: 1200 Park Ave Emeryville, CA 94608 USA

Tokyo Disneyland Park Nearly thirty years after the inital opening of a Disney Park in Anaheim USA, Tokyo Disneyland Park (DLT) in a suburb of Tokia, Japan opened its gates. As part of Disney's global expansion strategy, it is one of currently three Magic Kingdom parks around the world. An interesting fact is that in […]

Radio telescope Effelsberg For 29 years, the radio telescope Effelsberg in Germany was the world's largest fully steerable telescope in the world. Until 2000 when its 100m diameter antenna was superceded by the the Green Bank Telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia (USA) with a bit over 100 meters (roughly 110m). Address: a road descending […]

Arecibo radio telescope The site of the Arecibo Observatory is home to a 305 m diameter radio telescope, the largest single-aperture telescope in the world. May know the characteristic "bowl" from films, such as the James Bond movie GoldenEye and in the film Contact or the "X-Files" episode "Little Green Men". Address: Arecibo Observatory HC03 […]

hollywood sign The Hollywood Sign, which originally read "HOLLYWOODLAND", was meant as advertisment for a housing development program in 1923. Address: doesn't really apply, should be Mt. Lee Drive, next to the transmitter station but you can get a good view from 3000 Canyon Lake Dr, Los Angeles USA

Ennis Brown House Ennis-Brown House or Ennis House is the classic house made famous by its use in Ridley Scott's The Blade Runner (1982). Designed and built by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1924 for Charles and Mabel Ennis. Used in these films. Address: 2607 Glendower Ave Los Angeles, CA 90027 USA

Griffith Obsersatory The Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. Overlooking the city from the Hollywood Hills is one of the landmarks of the region, and was used in numerous film & TV shows as filming location. Address: 2800 E Observatory Ave, Los Angeles USA Tel +1 213-473-0800

Lovell House by Richard Neutra One of Los Angeles's classic architectural landmarks is Lovell House or Lovell Health House, built by architect Richard Neutra in 1927-1929. Today, the house is know to a wider audience through its usage as filming location in the 1997 film L.A. Confidential as the home of the character Pierce Patchett. […]

Beijing National Stadium After over two weeks of competition, finally the XXIX Olympic Summer Games are over. Time to have a look at where it all happened. The most prominent location was the "Birds Nest", the Beijing National Stadium, designed by Herzog & de Meuron. You can get a better look at it on the […]

Mel's Drive-In on Sunset Everyone who has seen George Lucas' American Graffiti knows the drive-in burger brand Mel's Drive-In. This landmark of US 60s memorabilia is actually a small chain of restaurants, with 2 shops in San Francisco and this one, located on a corner of Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, California. It features cool space-age […]

Paramount Studios Lot The Paramount Studios lot, home of the Paramount Pictures Corporation was the production site for many of Hollywood's classic films. With its beginning in 1910, the actual property has changed hands a few times, most notably Gulf+Western who owned the Paramount brand from 1960 to the 1990s, followed by Viacom. Address: 5555 […]

Eiffel Tower This is a satellite image of the Tour Eiffel, the Eiffel Tower in the center of Paris, France. Built for the world exhibition 1889 and named after its designer, engineer Gustave Eiffel, the Eiffel Tower is the tallest building in Paris. Address: Tour Eiffel Champ de Mars F-75007 Paris France

Bill Gate's house Overlooking overlooking Lake Washington in Medina, Washington, this extensive (and partly underground) mansionis one of the phenomenons of great richness and the computer age. Bill Gates bought the property in 1988 and after over seven years, the villa was completed in 1995. Due to the many advanced features and gadgets incorporated into […]

Madrid Barajas Int. Airport Today, a plane from Spanairs fleet, a McDonnell-Douglas MD-82 swerved off the runway during take-off from Madrid Barajas Int. Airport and crashed into a nearby wood, turning everything into a giant fire. Some 153 were believed dead and only 19 people survived the midafternoon crash, one of the worse crashes in […]

Skywalker Ranch Among film enthusiasts the famed Skywalker Ranch (sometimes Lucasfilm Ranch) is the origin of some of film's greatest moments. The property, bought and built by George Lucas, creator of the Star Wars franchise, was over years the primary home of all Lucasfilm operations (until recently, when Lucasfilm moved it's official epicenter to the […]

Camp David also known as Naval Support Facility, Thurmont, in Thurmont, MD 21788 is 125 acre mountain retreat of the President of the United States. It is just across the Pennsylvania border, not far from "Site R" (Raven Rock), the Alternate Joint Communications Center.As it seems there is no better zoom resolution available - understandable […]

Disneyland Paris If you are in France, en route A4, sortie 14, 77700 Marne-La-Vallé, that's where Uncle Walt's worldwide empire set it's foot on the European continent. The happiest place on earth, the European twin of Disneyland Anaheim was the second spin-off theme park and the third Disneyland worldwide. The park Disneyland is just one […]

Disneyland Anaheim The original Disney Park in Anaheim, Disneyland, is the happiest place on Earth. Even the address is special: 1313 S. Harbor Boulevard, Anaheim, CA. Rumours go the double 13's in the Disneyland address stand for M. M., Mickey Mouse's initials. Wikipedia page

hewlett packard's garage Generally regarded as the birthplace of Silicon Valley, Hewlett-Packard's (in)famous garage. It's still there: 367 Addison Ave. Palo Alto, CA USA N 37* 26' 34.9" W -122* 9' 17.5" you might want to check out this photo with a dedication plate: http://www.videoi.com/~pietro/NerdTour/images/HPGarage.jpeg

Googleplex Google's headquarter is in Silicon Valley California, on the former Silicon Graphics Lot at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Sunnyvale, CA 94043. Call them: Telephone: (650) 253-0000.

What an interesting idea (via)! Made me think... By the way: as it seems the original idea (including a how to guide) is from here, with the last.fm guys being just early adopters... 😉

Everyone who had the time during the busy days of CPD, the IGEDO Company's flagship fashion show in Düsseldorf, Germany, were invited to party with Burda and attend the BUNTE New Faces Award 2008 FASHION (announcement). This year, the red New Faces Trophy was awarded to fashion designer Philipp Plein. Some may remember this name […]

Although this is definetly off-stopic for a linux blog, this strange symptom appeared while reviving an XP box with the SystemRescueCd Linux LiveCD recovery suite. The story was that the main drive C: with Windows XP Pro on it had a few defects and required a fresh XP install. Like certainly many systems these days, […]

Compiling scripts with pp, PAR's helper script, to executable binaries (.exe files on Win32) should be a pretty straightforward process. Anyway, if you are developing GUI applications, probably with Wx, you will surely run into some problems. Upon execution, the generated execs will complain about missing libraries, DLLs or similar. This is because pp does […]

Getting a working version of Wx and wxperl running on a amd64 Ubuntu system (mine was 6.06 dapper) can be a bit tricky. Everytime I tried to install Wx via cpan the Alien::wxwidgets module complained and refused to install this required package for Wx. The problem seemed be that I had no version of Wx […]

There is a handy short version for a classic if-else-statement that is very useful, but everytime I'd like to use it, I just can't fully remember what its syntax was. And looking it up on google is hard, because "if" is a very common word... It is especially useful on initializing variables in a cgi […]

Recently, I had to wrangle a large dataset, with over 3 million key-value pairs. I needed to iterate over them in a sorted way and I needed the hash-structure to weed out "already-seen-keys". My first approach was to build a hash in memory, with the usual my %hash, then adding keys and values in a […]

Although white may be the colour for summer '08, actually grey and gradients (especially black-to-grey) are the way to go when it comes to classic or hip evening styles. Update: With the year 2008 completed, the grey trend is still going (although fading a bit), so it's the last chance now to grab a grey […]

For those of you you haven't been to S.F., Los Angeles or South Beach lately, Rocket Dog is a (still) upstart fashion label from California. Navigate to their about page to find our more or browse their online product catalog. It's "Pop culture meets subculture – with a twist." We especially like their "Otto" in […]

I am convinced that it is equally important to create believable environments as it is to model 3-dimensional characters. While watching a rerun of Crimson Tide (imdb), I noticed the piece's accuracy in terms of military hierarchy, speak, the submarine's equipment and especially the realistic use of the 1MC, a ship's intercom system. A bit […]

Installing wine, the windows emulator to execute dos/Win32 programm executables (.exe) under Xandros on the ASUS EeePC can be a bit challenging- but if you follow my guide you should have it up and running in a few minutes. Do this: 1. Open the console/a terminal by pressing CTRL + ALT + T 2. Paste […]

the nicely designed and very useful TV listings service couchville.com is from now on officially dead.

A quick reminder: How do I pad a string so that a number or string gets leading zeros? Answer: By using sprintf: my $number = 123; $number = sprintf("%07d", $number); print $number; Output: "0000123" after the %: "0" is the character to add, <number>d is the amount of digits (that's why it's "d") to add. […]

I think format is secondary - it's the content! But presenting things nicely is also a form of politeness, I think, and a form of respect when it means playing by the rules of a trade or group. In terms of screenwriting you can easily go insane when you try to track down the right […]

Running MySQL and doing join'ed queries you might run into problems when you try to get results from two tables into one results set, where both tables have a field that is identically named (common with id-fields). For example: SELECT table1.id, table1.fieldA, table1.fieldB, table2.id, table2.fieldC, table2.fieldD FROM `table1`,`table2` WHERE table1.fieldA = 'test' AND table1.id = […]

not even the open source community is safe from errors or downtimes. This time the almighty error 500 struck elephantsdream.org, home of blender.org's first open source movie...

As a personal reminder and sort of a motto, I bookmark Mur's blog/podcast "I Should Be Writing" (latest post) today. I should really be working... In order to further network with the online screenwriting community, I'd also like to hint at Paul's "Process Diary" podcast/blog, who's latest post on using the rules is a good […]

This year's trend coulour for summer '08 is white - used in accessoires, bags, shoes and all kinds of outfits.

Here is how to checkout a specific revision from a subversion (svn) controlled project (use the "-r" option): svn checkout -r <revision number> This can be handy in case you use subversion in a production environment, where having the latest version is less important than having a version you know and can rely on.

If you are trying to properly install a Netgear USB WLAN dongle model WG111v3 on an Ubuntu machine running the 64-bit variant - just give up! There are numerous tutorials telling you that it would work, in version v1, v2 or v3 of the hardware - but they are all referring to the 32-bit version! […]

Watermarking a video with ffmpeg is simple - at least once you have the correct command line. Here is what I've figured out: ffmpeg -y -i 'inputFile.mpg' -vhook '/usr/lib/vhook/watermark.so -f /home/user/VideoTag.gif' ... I am using the older "-vhook" (video hook) functionality of ffmpeg here. Please be carful with the location of the watermark.so library. Depending […]

The updated way: Here's how you use ffmpeg's built-in capabilities to convert 4:3 video to 16:9: ffmpeg -i input -vf "scale=1280:720:force_original_aspect_ratio=decrease,pad=1280:720:-1:-1:color=black" output Source Note how this scales a video of arbitrary size into a canvas of 1280x720 pixels. It forces to "keep the original aspect" and adds appropriate padding by supplying values via -1 (which […]

There are thousands of designers in the world, and nearly as many companies offering design services. But still, some of these "design shops" stand out. Some do so because of their charismatic founders or leaders, others impress with innovative or groundbraking designs. Time to have a look at the top design firms worldwide, who affect […]

Form follows function was the motto of sculptor Horatio Greenough and has since become the credo of modern design and architecture. Time to apply this rule to planter design. From dutch Home & Garden supplier Feelgood comes a fresh design for your patio and the final answer to most traditional balcony planters. The German designer […]

Forget about that lame door wedge. A funny new twist on the classic door-stopper idea comes from Fred & Friends, the Cumberland, Rhode Island based manufacturer of "stuff that works and puts a smile on your face". Foot in the door is a doorstopper modeled to look like a high heel stiletto pump. Made of […]

If you do letterboxing or cropping on your video with ffmpeg, you might get this error: "incorrect top pad size" In this case you managed to somehow screw up the values passed to ffmpeg for resizing/padding. Have a look at your command. If you are using a script to call ffmpeg, check the algorithm that […]

At least on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04, doing this: apt-get install openssl-dev will give you an error: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done E: Couldn't find package openssl-dev As a workaround, to use openssl and openssl-dev, use the openssl-dev components from another library: apt-get install libcurl3-openssl-dev Also note that libgsm-dev […]

On linux, and most other unixes, you can chain commands by simply putting a "&&" in between. This shorthand version is often used on make/install procedures without explicitely explaining it. So when you next compile something on linux, use sudo ./configure && sudo make && sudo make install to execute everything in batch without further […]

A little late though, I was told that German music magazine KEYS has an interview with Chris Hülsbeck (official site), as part of their feature about game scoring and game music in issue February/2008. If you have the chance to get hold of that issue, there is also an interview with composer Alex Pfeffer.

Every linux/unix based OS has a built-in scheduler, a tool to automate the execution of tasks/scripts/commands at a given time. This tool is the cron daemon. cron directories On debian 4.0 there are two procedures to add tasks to the cron table of events. The crontab and the cron directories: If you navigate the directory […]

As the rise project recently found out, the pre-installed SAMBA daemon on the ASUS EeePC is an outdated version that has a security problem, allowing a knowledgeable user to gain root access on the system. The original arcticle is over here. The little machine is running version 3.0.24 of smbd, which is vulnerable to the […]

Over time, even an ambitious project like the ASUS EeePC will run into first problems. Its growing userbase also means more focus from the black hat community. An important measure to keep a system healthy and secure is updating and other common linux security measures. Here is my growing/work-in-progress checklist for making the ASUS Eee […]

When compiling a software package that is dependent on OpenSSL, it might happen that your compiler will give you the following error: configure: error: Cannot find OpenSSL's <evp.h> or <hmac.h> in this case, the compiler wants to tell you that you haven't the openSSL developer library installed. Do so by: sudo apt-get install openssl-dev on […]

After browsing through Ronald B. Tobias' 20 Master Plots: And How to Build Them  I am tempted to finally give Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces a chance. As it seems, Tobias has written a helpful guide, complete with checklists (!), about the major themes of literature. An enlightening read. It's like putting […]

Many of you might already own a copy of MS Word, write in LaTeX or Emacs. For writers looking for a free alternative, here's a short list: celtx which also includes capabilities for storyboarding, scheduling and such The OpenOffice Suite in combination with the Script style template Lyx (Linux) with the "Hollywood" template SLang braintorming […]

A few days ago, I had the chance to watch Tony Gilroys's Michael Clayton (Steven Soderbergh being Executive Producer). Actually the plot is interesting, but nothing that makes you cling to your armrest. But, the impressive quality of the film is that you actually enjoy watching Michael Clayton go through all this ups and downs, […]

If you need to stay in touch with German media,  here is my top 3 of online magazines focusing on Television, Producers and TV stations: kress report, etablished in 1966 one of the oldest and most respected media magazines, publishes a print and online version. DWDL , this online-only service is number 2 in Germany […]

Just like The Nightcrawlers' "Push The Feeling On", Calvin Harris' "Acceptable in the 80s" is a hit slowly but steadily gaining momentum. With a first release on vinyl in December 2006, this remarkable piece of Electroclash has developed from being an underground hit to a mainstream phenomenon. How this came across is actually no secret. […]

H&M has established a tradition of selecting featured designers as partners for each major collection. After Karl Lagerfeld, Stella McCartney and Victor & Rolf, now japanese(!) fashion Label Comme des Garçons is next. According to this press release: Comme des Garçons’ founder and head designer Rei Kawakubo will create this autumn’s guest designer collection at […]

Just a quick note: if you need a fresh spark of inspiration, direct your browser to Random plot points. On every visit (or each time your refresh the page) it will spit out a new unexpected twist. Give it a try! This one goes without detour onto the Blogroll.

As simple as this: $ apt-get install mysql-common mysql-server mysql-server-5.0 a small wizard should as for a root password (for the mysql server), otherwise: $ mysqladmin -u root -p password 'NewMysqlRootPassword' You can create a database like this $ mysqladmin -p create TestDatabase and add users like this (allowing access to the just created db): […]

Offering https:// (SSL secured encrypted connections) is a feature most demanding webmasters who care about their customer's privacy will want to offer on any e-Commerce website. Here is a small how-to about configuring your apache to use SSL and how to install the required certificates. This is known as using a self-signed certificate. First, install […]

Are you into gardening? Have a patio, terrace or a garden with a small pavilion? If so, you surely know Kettler, the German manufacturer of outdoor furniture. If you are invited over to friends, to have a look at their garden, to admire the lawn or for Barbecue - I would place a bet that […]

Cubase: available in various Pro, Prosumer and Lite versions (Cubasis VST 3.0, Cubase SE 3). One of the first software suites available and still the standard in todays producing environments. Logic: initially developed by a small German company, the now Apple owned Cubase-rival was originally a more pattern based sequencer. Today Logic is available as […]

Let's start this blog as we would start writing a new song (at least in most cases today): by switching on the computer and firing up our music making software of choice. Besides numerous well-established commercial software suites to write, record and mix music, there is a whole slew of free tools available to produce […]

It's now seven years since the initial release of "Uplink: Hacker Elite", time to have another look. In 2001 British developer Introversion Software released Uplink. What started as a demo version has developed into a cult game with an active fan and developer/contributor community and numerous re-relases and versions. I've always been a fan of […]

there is a film of that name, and the game itself has five different titles (see below), depending on the market it was released in. So, it might be difficult to track down, but it's worth the effort... Let's flashback to 1989, when a dense game atmosphere could compensate for limited system capabilities. That was […]

While configuring, changing or testing stuff on a dedicated server, things might break or you lock yourself out. Things like that often happen while securing your server. Anyway, there is help! Most ISPs offer a rescue console or booting into a rescue system to undo unwanted changes or rescue data from a defunct system. The […]

Running your own server is challenging. One of the first steps you should take though, are measures to make your system more secure and keep unwanted guests or intruders outside. In this simple how-to on securing a linux server, I'd like to mention a few basic steps I would recommend in order to harden your […]

After a fresh install of WordPress and the first posts you did to find your way around the admin panel and basic functionality of WP, some users start to fiddle with the knobs and begin to customise the appearance of their blog. While this is OK for the human reader of your blog, it might […]

The latest issue of the German KulturSPIEGEL features and interview with publisher-at-large Angelika Taschen. The article is an entertaining piece about her quest for the most versatile and yet hip bag with a certain edge. She mentions a nylon Prada bag as her alltime favourite. A benchmark following "It-Bags" couldn't reach, like the Fendi Baguette […]

If you are the business type, you've surely read about Bag Borrow or Steal, a rental business for handbags, bags, purses, clutches. The idea is similar to Netflix': register, pay a monthly fee of $20 to $100 and order the handbag of your choice. Send it bag and get a new one or keep it […]

Have you been to Europe lately? When you've been to London, Cologne or Düsseldorf during the last year and had a look at what young fashionistas are sporting as bags, you have surely noticed the George Gina & Lucy bags that were everywhere. The bags with the three lion logo and the signature carabiner hook […]

After wrangling with an older Kyocera printer on the Eee PC, the next level is to connect a newer HP LaserJet 1018. The Xandros printer management actually recognizes the device by the correct id, but as printing does not work right after connecting, this seems to be just the id that is transferred via the […]

What is so remarkable about a replica Rolex? Yes, nothing. But wait, it's pink! Toywatch USA has managed the unmanageable. To actually sell replicas and look-alikes of major brand watches, and that with a hefty price tag of about US$ 200 each. Best of all: people love it! Another example of clever product placement among […]

An up and running operating system exposes a number of services to the user or the network by running so called deamons in the background. These are the services you may be familiar with from the Microsoft Windows envirnment, where the Task Manager (opened with <CTRL>+<ALT>+<DEL>) lists all sorts of little programms humming away. No, […]

Compiling an application or programm from source is actually not as complicated as it seems. In most cases and when everything is setup right, the procedure is as follows: Go to a directory where you have write permissions or become the superuser root Get the source of the application, for example from the web with […]

When on console, you can exit the X Server, which is running in the background, with: /etc/init.d/gdm stop or later restart it with: sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart The toggle shortcut to switch back to the X Server's GUI is <CTRL> + <Alt> + <Backspace>

The are numerous scenarios possible, where a RAID system can get out of sync. That means that the data on one disk is not exactly the same as on the other drive - although these two disks should be in perfect sync all the time. But don't panic, this is what RAID was actually made […]

This is a short how-to to create and mount a software RAID 1 partitition. Before you start, it may be helpful to read this Then begin to mechanically install your new disks. Check the /dev directory. Your new disks should show up. In my case they were automatically labeled "sdb" and "sdc", "s.." as these […]

A really simple command to transcode a video file from one format/ container to another can be achived with ffmpeg -i inspectorgadget.ogg inspectorgadget.avi This illustrates the basic command-scheme ffmpeg uses. In this case ffmpeg transcodes an .ogg file to an .avi file (actually it just changes the container format). No further processing is done.

Managing installed software (so called packets) is pretty straightforward on linux systems like Debian. Go to the console and edit the /etc/apt/sources.list Sometimes the location is a bit different, like /etc/sources.list You can install software automatically from repositories, accessible via the internet. Adding a line like deb ftp://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ unstable main to sources.list adds such a […]

If you would like to ban a subnet, an IP address or a single country, most of these tasks can be done by using mod_rewrite and your .htaccess file. Start by writing Rewrite conditions that match against the REMOTE ADDR variable. Depending on the length of your regexp you can ban a complete network, a […]

Let's start to build the system. For this Gaming PC here, I chose to use a Dell OptiPlex as base. While not a perfect choice, these systems bring most of what we need right out of the box: a black case, nice design, small form factor, Gigabit Ethernet, USB connectivity and sometimes even an S-Video […]

Over the years I've collected quite a few games. The problem is, they are literally scattered over multiple platforms and formats. Some are Commodore C64, PC games, lots of Commodore AMIGA disks while others are SNES/Super Famicom, Sega MegaDrive/Genesis, Sega Saturn, Nintendo64 cardridges and last but not least some real arcade ROMS. I own the […]

Looking at modern office environments today, the Aeron Chair by Herman Miller is the icon of contemporary business seating and the object of desire for many hipsters of the new media age. Writing this post sitting on an Aeron myself, it's time to have a closer look. The Aeron is the result of a collaboration […]

Have you played The Outfoxies lately? It's a true gem and worth another play. In fact, this clever arcade platform game from 1994 is on my list of all-time-favorite arcade titles. The story itself is quickly told: A group of hitmen, quite unique characters like a mad scientist in a wheelchair, a chimp in tuxedo, […]

Writing a large-scale web-crawling and web-indexing search engine from scratch is a large beast to tame and in many cases a project that is heading for desaster right from the start. As you can read in Alex's worklog for the ongoing effort to manage the Majestic-12 distributed search engine, writing a crawler alone can cost […]

When connecting a Kyocera FS-1010 to an ASUS Eee PC the default configuration should recognize the printer on USB and properly set it up for printing. But, as I said, it should... Actually getting the Kyocera to work on the EeePC was a little bit harder. First I fiddled around with the configuration of the […]

On ubuntu, for example, executing commands is normally under a user other than root. In fact, root is deactivated altogether to make the system more secure even for novice users. However, on certaincircumstances you need to do things as root. This is where su (switch user) comes into play, or sudo (switch user and do). […]

On Linux, searching for files is easy with the find command. In order to search for a specific text pattern inside a file you can use this command: find . -name '*.php' -exec grep 'my text pattern' {} ; the "-name" section limits the search to files matching the stated pattern, in this case only […]

If you happened to visit Ruairi Robinson's website in the past, then you know what an all around great guy Ruairi is (and know about his high quality work). So I am pleased to join in on the good news (via AW and AICN) that Ruairi is going to direct the live action version of […]

I have written a few complete scripts in the past and have even more incomplete ones on the shelf. Actually at the moment I plan to start a new project soon. Regarding this "next one", I'd like to publish little tidbits of what I've learned in the process of writing it here on the blog. […]

I you haven't figured it out from the name of this blog yet, this blog is going to by my notepad, scratchpad and comment bullhorn for all things related to the art of screenwriting. I hope I can establish it as a place of vivid and enlighting discussion, with insight for everyone reading. So stay […]

As I have no solution yet, this post must be considered work in progress (WIP). I am running Linux and plan on using an HomePNA (also called HPNA) phoneline network via an Allnet ALL0187 USB to HPNA adapter. My system recognized the device partly and is now using the "pegasus" driver - which as far […]

When you figured out how to go to console on an ASUS Eee PC (btw it's pressing CTRL+ALT+T), the next question will be "how do I become root on the system, or what's the root password?". At first, Xandros, the OS on the little machine, has root deactivated by default, so you can't become root […]

As you can see from reading this discussion, installing a cpan module, without root access, can be daunting. When you managed to install your own compiled Perl on a non-root account, this is in most cases earlier or later the next step/problem. Do this: login via ssh ssh remotehost.com -l myusername Mostly, follow this guide […]

In this blog, I'd like to publish trick, tips and hints related to the scripting/programming language Perl, which should not be confused with PEARL. Although the origin of the name Perl are a more adventurous story, today most agree that Perl stands for Practical Extraction and Report Language, which summarises quite well what it does […]

This procedure is useful when your shared hosting webserver is running an outdated version of perl but your applications need a newer version; for example when utf8 functionality is needed which only newer versions fully support. First read this small paragraph: http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/2.22/html/nonroot.html Then get the latest perl sources and extract/configure/compile it: $ wget http://perl.com/CPAN/src/stable.tar.gz $ […]

When using portable storage media like USB-Sticks, SD-Cards, Transflash cards or Memorysticks you do gamble a bit with your data. From multiple data losses on such devices I know that losing the piece itself is not the only way to surprisingly get rid of your files. Let's discuss these two aspects: The threat of losing […]

Although the EeePC's desktop seems to be pretty locked up as the system is running Xandros Linux, you can enter the console by pressing [CTRL] + [ALT] + [T] and go on tweaking the OS.

A short how-to for awstats. Lately, when I found out analog falls short in terms of geo IP functionality, I decided to switch to awstats. Running debian and a webserver, I downloaded the awstats archive and extracted it on a reachable path within the www root of my server. Next I customized the shipped awstats […]

One annoying thing on ubuntu and linux in general is the absence of the old and trusty true type fonts that are shipped with Mixrosoft Windows uses. But help is near: Microsoft has released these fonts for free and you can install them on any linux system with little effort. On ubuntu type sudo apt-get […]

Ever wanted to get a decent ubuntu on an older PC, a legacy machine that you found down the cellar? Then you might run into weird trouble when installing from a live CD or DVD - the installer needs more than the available RAM While booting the system, press Ctrl+Alt+F1 to go to console Select […]

There are multiple ways of moving folders from one machine to another. You could connect via FTP, download all stuff and then upload the folder to the other machine. But this approach would suffer from slow connections and a step in-between that is not really needed. So the best and easiest way ist to trasnfer […]

Coming from Windows, doing simple tasks on linux or ubuntu can sometimes appear to be hard. To make things easier, here's the routine to burn a video DVD on ubuntu: Use (!) tovid, a wrapper for all the underlying scripts and tools. If you haven't installed it yet sudo apt-get tovid use tovid to create […]

In the previous post you've learned how to share folders among pure linux machines. Now, in reality you'd like to access that securely hosted files on that linux server from a machine running Windows XP. Here's how to achive that: On the server sudo apt-get install samba sudo gedit /etc/samba/smb.conf and add: workgroup = GROUP […]

First post on the zen of linux. A good start would be a basic post about how to get multiple machines working on a shared folder. The way to go in the linux/unix world is to use the pretty stable and reliable NFS filesystem. At first, you have to select a machine you would like […]

A subsidiary of the German OTTO Versand had some troubles, imwalking.de down.

On January 13th, 2008 the flickr.com image hosting service server was down.

One of the best social video sharing platforms on the net closed it door in October 2007.

youtube was growing and got issues. Down splash with the legandary explanation diagram.

on August 15th, 2006 youtube.com was down... not the first time.

on July 25th, 2006 the popular film content site broke down...