This week, I came across a really cool system for generating videos from website screenshots. I was looking to create a promo video, but don’t have any software to do it locally. I found quite a few after effects templates, but it seemed like a lot of work and money for a simple, short video.

Renderforest to the rescue! With their system, I was able to create a really cool video in no time at all. Highly recommended and well worth checking out. One of their demos below:

Until next time…

For reference, my cron line is */1 * * * * set_volume_mode Download which runs the command every minute. This may be a little un-necessary, but the script runs in a second or less and i’ve not seen any negative impact on the NAS.

As usual, if you follow these instructions, I take no responsibility for damage caused to persons, property, etc. You follow my instructions completely at your own risk. Bla bla bla :-p.

1. Login to AWS -> EC2
2. Shut down your EC2 instance
3. Click Snapshots on the left hand side and create a snapshot of your main root ebs volume
4. Once completed, click volumes on the left and create a new volume (with the new disk size and the snapshot you just created)
5. On the volumes page, make a note of the disk location (probably /dev/sda1)
6. Detach the smaller volume
7. Attach the larger volume (using the the ref noted above (probably /dev/sda1))
8. Boot the EC2 instance
9. Now login to the EC2 instance. If you run df -h, you will see the disk still thinks it is the same size as before. Make a note of the Filesystem (probably /dev/xvda1)
10. Run resize2fs -p /dev/xvda1 where /dev/xvda1 is the Filesystem noted above
11. run df -h. You should now see that the main partition is the size of the new volume you created.

As always, I accept no responsibility for damage caused, loss of data, loss of anything. You use these instructions at your own risk.

Elastix Logo

I’ve gone rather mad with VoIP configurations since I decided to move to using my own PBX for my personal and business telephony. My choice of installation was Elastix, mostly because it looks nice, but it works really well. These details will work with pretty much any other Asterisk PBX such as Trixbox though. Right, so let’s setup the SIP trunk. The details you need to set are as follows:

Maximum Channels: 2

PEER Details:
allow=alaw&ulaw&G.726&gsm&g729&g723&g777
canreinvite=no
context=from-trunk
disallow=all
dtmfmode=rfc2833
fromdomain=sip.voipcheap.com
fromuser=USERNAME
host=sip.voipcheap.com
insecure=very
nat=YES
port=5060
qualify=yes
secret=PASSWORD
srvlookup=yes
type=peer
username=USERNAME

User Context: leave blank

User Details: clear so it’s blank

Register String: USERNAME:PASSWORD@sip.voipcheap.com/USERNAME

So long as you have replaced all of the USERNAME’s and PASSWORDS with your VoipCheap ones, you should be laughing. Remember that to dial out, you will need to setup and outbound route!

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE (post_content, 'OLD_DOMAIN', 'NEW_DOMAIN');

If you are running on a WP Multi-site installation, you’ll need to replace “wp_posts” with something like “wp_SITEID_posts” (e.g. wp_19_posts).

I hope someone will find this useful. Remember to always backup your database before you run any updates or changes just in case it goes wrong

sh-3.2# service sshd start
Starting sshd: Could not load host key: /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key
Could not load host key: /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key
Disabling protocol version 2. Could not load host key
sshd: no hostkeys available — exiting.
[FAILED]

The fix is simple, just run the following commands, then try and start it again and it should work

ssh-keygen -t rsa1 -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_key -N “”
ssh-keygen -t dsa -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key -N “”
ssh-keygen -t rsa -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key -N “”