Category: IT
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Mass upload to WordPress
I often make photo entries on my other non-technical blog, and it is such a pain having to upload photo after photo in two sizes. Yesterday I discovered the Upload Unzipper which implements uploads of zip-files which are then unpacked on the server and treated as individual uploads. Fantastic time saver.
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Comment spam
I just went through the comment moderation queue on this blog, and there were four (4) valid comments out of 385 comments. Spam is such a pain that I can’t even imagine how it would be without comment moderation activated.
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Vodafone Wi-Fi Hotspots
I have the dubious pleasure of using a Vodafone Wi-Fi hots at the Jolly Hotel at Cagliari. It must be the lousiest hotspot I have ever used. I am consistently thrown off every few minutes and association attempts fail three times out of four. It makes it bloody hard to do something with the time…
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Nokia N800 on kayak journey
I’m on a three month kayak journey around the Italian islands of Sardinia and Sicily. Our only computers on this trip are two N800 tablets which we use daily for email, checking weather forecasts and for blogging. They keep us connected and updated wherever we go. Our blog is at www.kayakislandquest.com. We’re bringing two N800…
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Aptitude
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…
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Blog moved to WordPress
I finally got my act together at moved this blog to WordPress. There’s still a few lose ends, some uploaded pictures are missing and will have to be added by hand, and the top graphic needs replacing. It’ll probably make a mess of those places using the feeds from here. Sorry about that.
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Useful guide to everything DNS and Bind
There’s a very useful guide to bind and DNS at http://www.zytrax.com/books/dns/.
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Emacs wiki
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.
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Converting AAC audio files to mp3
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 🙂
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Longest Common Prefix in perl
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), ” “;
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Xterm and the clipboard
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…
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With GNU Emacs you can always learn
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…