René's old blog
Whatever I feel like posting, whenever
This site goes back some twenty-five years, so it is bound to be full of stale links and irrelevant information. It is, at best, updated irregularly.
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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…
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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;…
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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…
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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…
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irctail – track a file on an irc channel
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…
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Labels on ext2 and ext3 filesystems
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…
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D-Link DI-704P router
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…
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Vmware and tmpfs
With the installation of udev a tmpfs file system is mounted on top of /dev at boot. Device nodes are created automatically by udev as the devices appear, but in the case of vmware it doesn’t work. Vmware needs some…
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Resampling audio data
I’ve never done much with audio data, so when I had to write some audio files to cd, and they weren’t sampled at the right rate, I had a problem. Fortunately, I found sox: sox input.wav -r 44100 output.wav resample…
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Mozilla Thunderbird and the order of accounts
It has long annoyed me that I couldn’t control the order my mail accounts are listed in the left pane in Mozilla Thunderbird. In the end I decided to just edit my ~/.mozilla-thunderbird/default.xxx/prefs.js file to get it right, and after…