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

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Most recent posts

  • Emacs wiki

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    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

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    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

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    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

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    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

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    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…

  • irctail – track a file on an irc channel

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    René Seindal
    in

    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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    by

    René Seindal
    in

    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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    by

    René Seindal
    in

    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…

  • Vmware and tmpfs

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    by

    René Seindal
    in

    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 device nodes that are created when vmware is configured, so they aren’t there when /dev…