René's old blog

Category: Computers

  • Aptitude

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    René Seindal
    in

    I’ve been using dpkg, apt-get and apt-cache for a long time, but since I got a new laptop with a fresh install of Debian testing I have been playing with new toys. One is aptitude. I found the curses-based interface obnoxious, but after some time I came to like the command line interface. It has…

  • Useful guide to everything DNS and Bind

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    René Seindal
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    There’s a very useful guide to bind and DNS at http://www.zytrax.com/books/dns/.

  • Emacs wiki

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    René Seindal
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    I just stumbled upon http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/SiteMap, which looks like a very nice place. I found a newer version of longlines.el, for example.

  • Converting AAC audio files to mp3

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    René Seindal
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    This command will convert an AAC audio file to an mp3 audio file: ffmpeg -i input.m4a -acodec mp3 -ac 2 -ab 128 output.mp3 Batch conversion can be done with for i in *.m4a; do ffmpeg -i “$i” -acodec mp3 -ac 2 -ab 128 “${i%m4a}mp3”; done Sometimes it really is simple 🙂

  • Longest Common Prefix in perl

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    René Seindal
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    I can’t help finding this slightly elegant. Unfortunately I no longer remember where the idea came from. #!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; sub longest_common_prefix { my $prefix = shift; for (@_) { chop $prefix while (! /^$prefix/); } return $prefix; } print longest_common_prefix(@ARGV), ” “;

  • Xterm and the clipboard

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    René Seindal
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    It has long been an annoyance that xterm doesn’t follow the same rules with regard to the clipboard as most GTK/Gnome applications. Xterm by default only uses the PRIMARY selection for copy and paste, and follows the implicit selection model where the selection is set immediately when text is selected with the mouse, without any…

  • With GNU Emacs you can always learn

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    René Seindal
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    It is close to twenty years that I have been using GNU Emacs almost daily, and you still figure out new stuff. I’ve been somewhat annoyed that copying and pasting between Emacs and Gnome applications were so inconsistent, and then its all in the manual: Using the Clipboard As well as the primary and secondary…

  • irctail – track a file on an irc channel

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    René Seindal
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    Irctail is a small program I wrote to keep track of log files on various servers through an IRC channel. It will track stdin or a given file (like tail -f), and send the lines to an IRC channel. There are options to specify irc server, channel, nick and some more. An example: irctail -c…

  • Labels on ext2 and ext3 filesystems

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    René Seindal
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    I just recently discovered that you can put a label on an ext2 or an ext3 filesystem, just like you can with a msdos/fat filesystem. The reason I didn’t know was probably that it didn’t matter, but now with hal and gnome-volume-manager automounting removable disks, the disks in my usb enclosures are mounted as /media/usbdisk,…

  • D-Link DI-704P router

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    René Seindal
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    I recently bought a D-Link DI-704P router with the intent of using it as a first line of defense in front of a Linux server I have on a public IP. The basic stuff is working as expected, mostly “virtual servers” or “port forwarding” which is used to allow access to the select services I…