Brian's Blog

I'm Voting Republican (NOT!)

Brian — 2008-06-20T18:04:45-04:00

Backing up with Faubackup

Brian — 2008-05-03T11:02:10-04:00

Recently on HPR Episode 85, deepgeek spoke about a pretty cool backup utility called faubackup. Up until I heard of this little utility I had been running a script with a string of tar commands which worked sufficiently but seemed somewhat limited. I wanted to keep several copies of the backup to keep a history in case I needed to go back farther than just the last couple of backup. This meant I needed gobs more space than I had, and that I had to write a script to rotate around the actual tar files. I had this working sort of but never felt like I could just stick it in cron and let it do it's thing. Thus my backups were being run only every so often which is just asking for trouble. Months old backups are just a tad better than no backups at all. Faubackup so far seems to be picking up the slack in my horrible scripting skills quite nicely.

Faubackup is just an apt-get away in (k)ubuntu but in Slackware I had to build a slackbuild script. For some reason the standard ./configure && make && make install didn't put all the files in where they needed to be. The default /etc/faubackup.conf file is pretty good. The only change I made was to change the default location of where backups should be put. The default number of backups it keeps are 2 yearly backups, 12 monthly backups, 4 weekly backups, and 7 daily backups. Initially this seems like it would take a huge amount of space but the cool thing about faubackup (and other similar file backup solutions I'm sure) is that it will hardlink to the original file rather than making a new copy if it hasn't changed. This saves tons of hard drive space.

Since it's a command line utility it's easy to automate via cron. I just put a script with the faubackup commands in it that I want and call that from roots crontab. To make this all a better backup solution I should really periodically tar up one of the backups made by faubackup and store it on tape or DVD somewhere off site.

One last thing faubackup can do is remote backups via rsh or ssh. To do this you have to install faubackup on both the system being backed up and the system doing the backup. To do the backup via ssh just changed the rsh in the conf file to ssh. The only thing with this is you have to provide a password every time you run the remote backup unless you setup ssh keys with out a pass phrase which is a potential security risk.

So far I like faubackup. You should check it out.

iAudio M5 New Battery

Brian — 2008-04-09T20:18:09-04:00

The new battery came in today for my iAudio M5. Replacing original should be super easy for anyone who feels comfortable with a soldering iron. I was thinking of putting together a series of pictures of the replacement steps to post but being that my digital camera is dead that won't be possible. Besides, someone already did it for the X5 which is physically identical to the M5 anyway.

In short these are the steps.

Take the 4 screws out of the back and take the back plate off. The screws are really tiny so be careful not to loose them.
Carefully remove the bit of tape at the top holding the wires down.
Gently move the wires out of the way and pull out the data cable to the hard drive at the top of the player near the circuit board just under where you took the tape off. You have to lift the top of the drive out a bit to be able to pull the cable. One the data cable it out the drive will just slide out.
The out the black rubber gasket thingy under the drive. This just sits there and isn't attached to anything or at least it wasn't in my player. The battery is under the gasket. In my case it was a green flat block with two wires, one red and one black.
Use your soldering iron to carefully desolder the wires battery wires from the board. It's small in there so watch you don't touch anything else with the iron and damage it. Make a note of what color wire is where so you can put them in the right place with the new battery.
Solder the new battery in place.
Put it all back together in reverse and test it.

And that was that. This is was worked for me so YMMV. Oh...If you kill your player doing what I did then it's not my fault.

More Bookmark Syncing in Firefox

Brian — 2008-04-01T12:52:15-04:00

Yes, I've changed my mind in the course of a day. Foxmarks is nice and it worked well the little bit I used it. However, being the stupidly paranoid sort of geek just don't like putting my data on someone else's server unless I have to. I know there are arguments for and against and I know I'm a hypocrite in certain situations. Still, it's one of my little quirks. Therefore, I have changed over to the Bookmark Sync and Sort add-on for Firefox. It does pretty much the exact same thing except it uses the webdav server of your choice. It's not as convenient in that you have to setup a webdav server for it, but since I already had one setup it was a piece of cake.

Syncing Firefox Bookmarks with Foxmarks

Brian — 2008-03-31T20:16:53-04:00

I was looking for a way to sync my Firefox bookmarks between multiple systems and a quick search gave me Foxmarks. It's simple enough. You just make an account with them and install the add-on. After your first sync it keeps things updated when you close out Firefox.

Pretty cool.

Replacing the Battery in my iAudio M5

Brian — 2008-03-27T09:21:14-04:00

The battery in my iAudio M5 is starting to die. Since it is no longer under warranty it would cost me about $60 USD plus shipping to have it sent to Cowon. That's not a crap load of money but I figured I could do this myself. I mean, how hard is it to replace a battery right?

I ordered a replacement today and it should be here in a couple of days. Even so, I wanted to know what I was getting into so I did a bit of exploratory surgery on my player. Of course, the battery is in the hardest place to get to. I mean, why make it easy for people to replace the most likely to fail component? Make it hard to do and people are more likely to just buy a new player. Also, it requires a bit of soldering. Not a biggie for me as I'm reasonably handy with the soldering iron, but the Average Joe would scoff at the idea.

In any case, the battery should be here in a couple of days and I'm going to give it a shot. I did some searching for a Do-It-Yourself guide but didn't find one. Maybe I'll post a few pictures if my attempt is successful.

Food for Thought

Brian — 2008-03-26T11:03:19-04:00

When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary. -- Thomas Paine

TC4200 Ambient Light Sensor w/ Linux

Brian — 2008-03-25T21:05:11-04:00

OK, I have to be the dumbest geek ever to walk the planet. I've been going crazy trying to figure out what I need to do on this laptop to get the ambient light sensor to actually work. I even posted on LQ Forums. My answer was:

"Did you try Fn + F11? It works on mine."

And, sure enough, it works on mine too. Perhaps this is all I need to do on my work PC with Vista on it. When I had XP on it I actually needed a driver to make it work. HP never released a Vista driver so I assumed it just wouldn't work.

...

Well, look at that. It works on Vista too. I wonder why XP needed a driver at all? It sure seems to be a hardware level feature rather than something that requires software to make it work. Perhaps the XP bits were just to control the on/off status of the sensor via a GUI interface rather than having to use the physical keyboard?

Whatever. At least it is working now.

Cleaning Up after Vista SP1 Install

Brian — 2008-03-24T10:27:07-04:00

James (one of our devs) at work IMed me this like about cleaning up junk files after installing Vista SP1 to free up disk space. As I'm always on the hairy edge of running out of space due to running a handful of virtual machines I ran it and freed up about 2GB of disk space. Not a ton but every bit of space helps.

The command to run is vsp1cln.exe and makes Vista SP1 permanent so you can't uninstall it afterwords.

Finally! Decent Handwriting Recognition in Linux for a Tablet PC.

Brian — 2008-03-23T20:59:18-04:00

I've had this TC4200 running Kubuntu Linux for a fair bit of time. I've used it off and on for various things but never took the time to get all the tablet functions working close to as they would in Windows. Unfortunately it seems that much of the tablet specific technology that handles handwriting is proprietary, thus leaving Linux out. After some searching with little results I accidentally stumbled upon Cellwriter when I was just about to give up. I checked the apt repositories to find it isn't there. However, there is a deb package for Debian downloadable from their website along with the source. This deb installed just fine in Kubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy).

Previously I was using xkbd, which was sufficient but was only an on screen keyboard. Cellwriter is both an on screen keyboard and handwriting recognition utility. It did take some training to get it to work half decent. Basically it was about 10 minutes of writing each letter and common symbol 4 or 5 times to give it an idea of what your writing is like. After this it was fairly accurate. By default it tunes itself when you correct it's mistakes. Pretty slick.

If this interests you I'd just go to their site and see what they have to say about it. No sense in me repeated it over again here. But so far I'm pleased with its performance.