René's old blog

René’s old blog

This site is some twenty-five years old, and it contains lots of ancient stuff, much of it utterly dated and useless.

Sorry about that.

If anything, I post very unevenly, and about whatever occupies me.

Some featured posts

See all featured posts.

Most recent posts

  • Suction Cup Camera Mounts

    Suction Cup Camera Mounts

    —

    by

    René Seindal
    in

    It can be a bit difficult shooting pictures when you’re sitting in your kayak, especially if there’s a bit of action around you, and it can be impractical having the camera dangling around your wrist when paddling or manoeuvring. Fortunately, there are other ways to attach a camera on a kayak. I have found some…

  • Waterproff cameras

    Waterproff cameras

    —

    by

    René Seindal
    in ,

    If you want to take photos from your kayak, you’ll want a waterproof camera that’s easy to operate. I certainly wouldn’t recommend taking you expensive SLR 🙂 I have search a bit on the net, and apparently there are only two producers of simple waterproof digital cameras: Pentax and Olympus. Pentax Optio W10 A 6…

  • Merry Christmas

    —

    by

    René Seindal
    in

    I hope you’ll find a lot of Nokia 770s under the trees 🙂

  • Useful guide to everything DNS and Bind

    —

    by

    René Seindal
    in

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

  • Emacs wiki

    —

    by

    René Seindal
    in

    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

    —

    by

    René Seindal
    in

    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

    —

    by

    René Seindal
    in

    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

    —

    by

    René Seindal
    in

    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

    —

    by

    René Seindal
    in

    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…