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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De-googling
I have tried for ages to de-google. Not just from Google itself, but all the big ones — Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon. However, de-googling is not easy.
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Koha Library Software
Setting up a library management system like Koha is not easy, but once it’s done, registering and cataloguing your books is very easy.
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Across the river, into the trees
I spent a good deal of January and February 2021 on a movie set, but it wasn’t a very positive experience
See all featured posts.
Most recent posts
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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…
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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 are options to specify irc server, channel, nick and some more. An example: irctail -c…
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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 and gnome-volume-manager automounting removable disks, the disks in my usb enclosures are mounted as /media/usbdisk,…