The One with the Thoughts of Frans

I Joined the Dark Side

2012-04-27T19:45:03Z

Back in 2010 I was really looking forward to the upcoming MeeGo phones by Nokia, but alas, it was not to be. My five-year-old phone started dropping its connection now and then for no apparent reason, so it was time to upgrade. Unfortunately all the phones out there seemed to be either mini-tablets or otherwise not living up to my requirements, but a few weeks after I’d stopped looking I almost accidentally came across the Sony Ericsson xPeria ray. It combined two features very important to me: it is not a small tablet and it has a nice resolution, resulting in nigh 300 PPI. Can I get the latter on desktop monitors please, instead of that paltry 1080p HD that seems to be popular right now?

I intend to document some of the apps I’ve installed and why, and perhaps also why I quickly uninstalled some others. To that extent it’s more of a public note to self, but who knows — it might just help to someone else.

Sense Analog Clock Widget: Because none of the other clock widgets were big enough. Call me old-fashioned, but I like a big clock to be the first thing I see. The weather, system info and configurable click actions are a nice touch.
K-9 Mail: The default e-mail client was alright, but not really any better than what my old SE s500i gave me over half a decade ago. Besides, it’s mostly just the default client with some bells and whistles.
K9 Mail Unread Count Icon: Unlike the default e-mail client, K-9 Mail doesn’t display the number of unread messages in its icon. This widget takes care of that.
Keyboard from Android 2.3: I like the default Android 2.3 keyboard better than the one Sony Ericsson included. You can choose your preferred keyboard by long-pressing on a text-input field. Among the advantages are that it’s easier to type symbols and you can change languages by a simple swipe on the space bar. Besides, it has a speech recognition button built-in so you don’t necessarily have to type on the screen.
AndFTP: I tried a few FTP programs. Most were lacking in the SFTP department. However, I think it may not ask before it overwrites files.
Dropbox: Heck, it’s useful. Besides, they give you 500MB of extra free storage.
ArchiDroid: I need to extract files sometimes. Duh.
OI File Manager and Open Manager: I haven’t decided which one I like better, but it’s preposterous that something like this wasn’t included by default. Did I mention my feature phone came with a basic file manager?
Barcode Scanner: Very straightforward. It scans those funky QR code blocks without any fluff.
QR Bookmarklet: This one actually isn’t for my phone, but for my regular browse. I saved it among my bookmarklets and gave it the nickname “qr”. Now if I want to open any page on my phone, I can just type “qr” and use Barcode Scanner.
Opera Mobile and Opera Mini: Are any other browsers even in the same league? Mobile for Wi-Fi, Turbo for when a real browser might be required on the go, and Mini for true data saving. Also consider Firefox. The default Webkit browser is bearable, but basically awful. Note that while Opera Mobile supports options like site preferences, adding them is a bit of a pain due to the lack of a simple interface.
Battery Widget: I like a big battery indicator — and the little one it adds to the notification bar has an actual number so you know what’s going on.
Screebl Beta: The best argument for those motion sensors yet. It disables or holds back the screen timeout while the phone is in your hand and can speed it up when you lay it down.
Timeriffic: Again, it seems like this should be included by default. Set your phone up to stfu at night and whenever else you don’t want it to ring. You can also change some other settings if you want, but for me it makes more sense to turn e.g. Wi-Fi on manually.
OpenOffice Document Reader: LibreOffice is my preferred office application after HTML + CSS rendered to PDF with Prince. I may want to look up something in one of my documents on the go.
wifi AutoSyncAutoToggle widget: I don’t really want my phone wasting CPU or data on syncing unless I’m on WLAN. This takes care of that. Don’t forget to tell your applications to obey this setting. Other applications, most notably Google Play Store, don’t necessarily live by this setting, but sport options like “update or sync over Wi-Fi only.”
SD Tools: I don’t know if I’d recommend installing it per se, but benchmarking the speed might interesting for comparison.
Maps With Me: It’s a lot like Google Maps, except it’s based on OpenStreetMaps and offline. There are more OSM apps out there, but most I’ve tried seem to be less fluid, uglier, or default to turning the GPS on. I’m just looking at having a decent 2D map just in case — I’ve got an actual GPS with a bigger screen (albeit sadly with a much lower PPI value) for driving. Surprisingly, although I also gave a few commercial applications a try, their 2D maps didn’t seem nearly as usable as the Google Maps or Maps With Me varieties. The commercial apps have loads of POIs though, which might sometimes be useful.
Aard Dictionary: In a similar vein, I’ve now got The Collaborative International Dictionary of English and the entirety of Wikipedia on my phone. It’s not only useful for when you don’t want to use data: it’s actually really, really fast. There are more dictionaries available, or you can make your own. The only downside I can think of is that SVGs (which presumably shouldn’t take too much extra space) are missing from the files.

Android is certainly usable, but ultimately it’s too Apple-ish for my tastes. It’s also a bit annoying that by default everything’s set up to use data all the time. I understand that connectivity is a big factor of the device, but it’s no wonder people complain about low battery life if their phones are synchronizing all kinds of things every few minutes. If I’m on the go I can live with checking for new e-mail manually to conserve both data usage and battery life. Ultimately, while I’m happy with my new phone, I hope real GNU/Linux will be available before I have to buy a new one again.

Using WordPress Excerpts in Meta Description

2012-04-09T08:58:27Z

For a long time I’ve been aware of the fact that few, if any, WordPress themes seemed to do anything with the META element’s description feature. I never bothered to look into a solution, especially since I never used to add excerpts to my posts half a decade ago. However, I’ve bothered to do so ever since I started notifying people about updates on Twitter. It already makes the search results much more readable if you’re looking for something in the archives of this site, and I figured I should do the same for search engines.

Some uneventful searching later I found what I was looking for, but it definitely wasn’t right for me: I’ve got a huge volume of posts without any excerpts, so printing empty descriptions no matter what would be silly at best, and besides there are more descriptions out there than merely those of posts. After all, categories and even my site itself have a description as well. The comment by Matthew Slyman was much more to my liking, which I then customized as follows:

<?php
$desc;
if ( is_single() ) {
	$desc = get_the_excerpt();
}
elseif ( is_page() ) {
	$desc = get_the_excerpt();
}
elseif ( is_category() ) {
	$desc = category_description();
}
elseif ( is_home() ) {
	$desc = get_bloginfo('description');
}
$desc = trim(strip_tags($desc));
if (!empty($desc)) {
	echo '<meta name="description" content="';
	echo $desc;
	echo '"/>';
}
?>

Add the whole thing anywhere in your HEAD element in header.php. If excerpts seem to be missing from pages, there’s a simple solution. If you want to reuse the code above for some reason, wrap some sort of function around it and stick it in functions.php. Enjoy.

OCR Text in PDF with Tesseract

2012-04-02T10:27:59Z

Since I had some scanned PDFs which I wanted to change into plain text, I looked into OCR solutions for Linux: as it turns out there are some pretty good options. I decided to go with Tesseract; you’ll need to install one or more language packs along with it. Unfortunately it only handles TIF files as input, so I needed a simple shell script to automatically convert PDFs to TIFs. This is what you’ll need to install:

aptitude install tesseract-ocr tesseract-ocr-eng tesseract-ocr-nld imagemagick

You might notice ImageMagick in there, which is just useful to have. Heck, even if you’re not interested in OCR you should install it right now and read the manual. In any case, it’s used in the shell script I wrote to assist my OCR-ing. I picked up a script from the Ubuntu Forums, but for some reason it was wasting CPU cycles and disk space with useless conversions to an intermediary format: ImageMagick can convert PDF straight to TIF.

#!/bin/bash
#ocrpdftotext
# Simplified implementation of http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=880471

# Might consider doing something with getopts here, see http://wiki.bash-hackers.org/howto/getopts_tutorial
DPI=300
TESS_LANG=nld

FILENAME=${@%.pdf}
SCRIPT_NAME=`basename "$0" .sh`
TMP_DIR=${SCRIPT_NAME}-tmp
OUTPUT_FILENAME=${FILENAME}-output@DPI${DPI}

mkdir ${TMP_DIR}
cp ${@} ${TMP_DIR}
cd ${TMP_DIR}

convert -density ${DPI} -depth 8 ${@} "${FILENAME}.tif"
tesseract "${FILENAME}.tif" "${OUTPUT_FILENAME}" -l ${TESS_LANG}

mv ${OUTPUT_FILENAME}.txt ..
rm *
cd ..
rmdir ${TMP_DIR}

This may not suit your needs, but I think as a starting point it’s a step up from what the Ubuntu forums gave me.

Word Count

2012-04-02T13:26:37Z

Since I wanted to know the actual number of words in a paper in near-MLA format and couldn’t find my previous (simple) PHP script, I reimplemented an equally simplistic word counter in Javascript. It strips out citations between parentheses. Suggestions welcome and use at your own risk.

Multiple Monitors: Enabling And Disabling With the Aid of nvidia-glx

2012-03-09T15:36:26Z

As I wrote last year, I wish to “automatically output whatever video I’m playing in fullscreen on another monitor.” Because the other monitor isn’t next to my main monitor, most of the time the output doesn’t have any practical purposes. That isn’t the biggest problem, although you might want to consider Mouse Jail. However, I recently changed from Nouveau, the open-source nVidia drivers, to nvidia-glx, the proprietary nVidia drivers that offer all the latest and greatest OpenGL acceleration: I wanted to play Achron.

After extracting the Achron archive, it turned out that the game wanted to spread across the entire virtual space available, i.e., across both of my monitors. Disabling one monitor is easy enough, but it would have to be automated. Besides, figuring out how to automate this would be a fun exercise in itself.

First of all, there were some issues with xorg.conf. nvidia-settings can generate one, but it’s not the greatest and requires some manual modification, if only to make sure your own mouse remaps and what not aren’t left behind. What we’re interested in is the section where it talks about metamodes. I thought I’d need two of them to enable easy switching: one with the second monitor enabled and one where it was disabled. Since I only actually use the second monitor for VLC video output, it should be disabled by default and enabled only for VLC: Option "metamodes" "DFP: nvidia-auto-select +0+0, CRT: NULL; DFP: nvidia-auto-select +0+0, CRT: nvidia-auto-select +1280+0". Alas, if only it were this simple. As it turns out, now the graphics driver creates a gigantic virtual display space in order to accommodate the largest resolution metamode, allowing you to pan around in it. New plan: we disable the second monitor on boot and dynamically add a metamode when starting VLC. The line in xorg.conf now looks only like this: Option "metamodes" "DFP: nvidia-auto-select +0+0, CRT: NULL".

So, how to add metamodes on the fly? Well, the nvidia-glx driver comes with this nice little utility called nv-control-dpy. Based on that I wrote the following shell script to start VLC:

#!/bin/bash

# Check if the desired resolution is available and if not, add it. The check isn't really necessary for proper operation but it keeps down error output.
[[ "`nv-control-dpy --print-metamodes`" !=  *@1920x1200* ]] && nv-control-dpy --add-metamode "DFP-0: nvidia-auto-select @1280x1024 +0+0, CRT-1: nvidia-auto-select @1920x1200 +1280+0"
xrandr -r 51.0 -s 3200x1200

# See http://www.andymillar.co.uk/blog/2010/03/17/limiting-vlc-memory-usage/
source /etc/profile
ulimit -v 1048576

/usr/bin/vlc $@

# Check if there's still an instance of VLC running.
# $$ is the process's own PID; testing the exit code of pgrep vlc for success wouldn't work 'cause this script itself would still cause that to test positive. Incidentally, see how to check for exit codes at http://linuxcommando.blogspot.com/2008/03/how-to-check-exit-status-code.html (Yes, this comment is all based on me testing something and wondering for a minute or so why my script wasn't working correctly.)
# To check that you can try
#somecommand  argument1 argument2
#RETVAL=$?
#[ $RETVAL -eq 0 ] && echo Success
#[ $RETVAL -ne 0 ] && echo Failure
[ "`pgrep vlc`" == $$ ] && xrandr -r 50.0 -s 1280x1024

The nVidia driver plays a little trick on X11 by pretending the different metamodes have different refresh rates. In some future update this should no longer be necessary, but for now that’s how you can easily switch between them with xrandr. The script is named vlc and added to my PATH in such a manner that it overrides the default link to the VLC binary. I think that should be enough information to adjust this to your own personal needs.

Behind the Scenes

2012-03-08T18:17:25Z

Half a year ago’s post, about why we decided to buy a washing machine two years ago, was actually written back in September or October of 2009. I didn’t post it at the time because it made me aware I had no table styling. I then proceeded to make a testcase for table styling, which I presumably finished before October 2009 was over.

Sadly for the post, however, I then forgot about it till last year, when I found my table styles testcase during my switch from NTFS to ext4. This had the side-effect that I started incorporating various stylesheet upgrades I’d written over the past two or three years, giving you a different default width and fancy schmancy transition effects today — or actually already back in May 2011 because that’s how long it took me to actually publish this. I really do need to stop putting things in drafts for potential revision without ever picking them up again.

Uw Kinderen — Your Children

2012-02-06T19:37:43Z

I thought this poem by Annie M.G. Schmidt was quite amusing; it also nicely characterizes the prose texts in the bundle from which I took it. The poem’s short, so you’ve got no excuse not to read it — assuming you speak Dutch, of course.

Een sprookje voor het slapen gaan
over de bijtjes en de maan,
over de elfjes teer en fijn,
die Artistiek Verantwoord zijn,
en over ’t zoete bloemenfeetje…
uw kind vindt het wel mooi, een beetje…
maar gooit de elfjes grif terzijde
voor strips met nare blote meiden.
Een kind is al zo gauw tevree:
een overval — een moord of twee.

Kind, huil maar niet, wees maar bedaard:
ik gooi Rie Cramer in de haard.
Hier is de strip, met stromen bloed.
Beng, weer een lijk. Dus wees maar zoet.

From Voeden, verschonen en in de wieg mikken. 2009, Querido.

For the speakers of English among us, I hereby offer you an impromptu translation:

A fairy tale for sleeping soon
about little bees and the moon,
about little elves frail and fine,
of artistically sound design,
and about the sweet flower fairy…
your child thinks it's nice, not very…
but promptly the elves aside it whirls
for comics with nasty naked girls.
A child is easy to entertain:
a robbery — a murder or twain.

Child, don’t cry, just be as if in a daze:
I'll throw Rie Cramer¹ in the fireplace.
Here's the comic, with streams of blood.
Bang, again a corpse. So be good.

1. Rie Cramer is a Dutch author and illustrator of books aimed at little children.

Debian: International Fonts

2012-02-02T20:52:47Z

Ubuntu comes with a large swath of international fonts installed by default, but Debian requires a little more attention. Although I can’t read the languages, I can recognize which script is which. Besides, boxes are just ugly.

East Asian: apt-get install ttf-arphic-uming ttf-wqy-zenhei ttf-sazanami-mincho ttf-sazanami-gothic ttf-unfonts-core (source)
Indic: apt-get install ttf-indic-fonts (source)
All together: apt-get install ttf-arphic-uming ttf-wqy-zenhei ttf-sazanami-mincho ttf-sazanami-gothic ttf-unfonts-core ttf-indic-fonts

These are merely the ones that I missed the most. I may update this post in the future.

Mounting filesystems with fstab

2011-12-23T21:56:24Z

If you’re just switching from Windows and you don’t like to enter passwords every time you want to access your disks, fstab is what you need. Of course it also applies to e.g. ext4 partitions that you didn’t assign a mount point during the installation of your OS, but when you’ve come that far along you probably already know this.

By far the best explanation of fstab I’ve found was on ArchWiki, so I won’t waste my time reiterating what is stated there. I’ll merely try to further clarify a few things that were less immediately obvious to myself and needed a little experimentation.

In many ways fstab is what I always wanted in Windows. For a long, long time I’ve maintained a C partition (dedicated Windows, so I could wipe it without really affecting anything), a D partition (my primary data container), and later, as I added more HDDs, I think I got up to G. There are some hacks available, like NTFS junction points, but they don’t really protect against the fundamental flaw of drive letter assignment compared to the much more sensible mechanism of mount points.

When you mount a partition manually through your GUI, by clicking on it and entering your password, it creates a temporary entry in /etc/mtab; this entry can be used to as a starting point for fstab entries. However, for more reliable partition mounting you need to use UUIDs. You can obtain this using blkid /mnt/sda1, where /mnt/sda1 should be replaced with whatever partition you want to print a UUID for. This command needs to be run as root, i.e. with su or sudo.

# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).

If you prefer to use a GUI, there are some options, but I haven’t tried any of them.

Disk Manager: http://flomertens.free.fr/disk-manager/
PySDM: http://pysdm.sourceforge.net/
fwfstab: http://www.diffingo.com/oss/fwfstab

Why Opera’s XHTML Error Handling Is Superior

2011-12-08T10:58:54Z

I found this old, unfinished post in my drafts. I’m not quite sure when I originally wrote it, but it was over a year ago. Rather than updating the content I decided to publish it as is, as I’m not sure why I didn’t, with a small addendum at the end.

I made a little compilation of the various error messages displayed by browsers upon encountering an XML syntax error. Firefox (Gecko) has the unfriendly looking error on top, Chromium (Webkit) renders the page up to the error, but shows a large error message (albeit not at all useful like in Opera & Fx), and for Opera I included 10.10 and the latest 10.50 pre-alpha build. Note that it’s just the styles behind the error message that changed a bit: the content and helpfulness of the error message is still the same. I’ll run it down a bit more:

Firefox displays an error message that’s only useful if you already know sufficiently much about X(HT)ML, whereas Opera’s error message not only highlights more clearly where parsing failed — although ultimately this difference might just be one of preference. More important, its error message might just helpfully link you precisely where you need to go to learn how to avoid it. When I first started messing about with XHTML back in ’03 or so, I probably would’ve appreciated it if Opera had done that. At the time Opera behaved the same as Fx does now.
Chromium displays an error message that doesn’t even manage to clearly indicate what’s the problem. This compares negatively to Fx and Opera highlighting the &.
Chromium renders the page up to the problem, which may result in a get out of jail free card. The error message doesn’t seem very annoying, but if the error is in the middle of the page it’ll still be in the way. In my sample page it’s at the end, however. (My example page is basically a standard installation of phpGraphy on which I decided to switch to application/xml+xhtml because it claims to be more or less XHTML compliant now — I had to fix all the unclosed meta and link tags first.)
Despite rendering the page, you won’t be able to see the page fully in Chromium. You will with Opera’s reparse as HTML function.

I hope that clarifies why I think Opera’s handling is best, both as a user and as an author.

This blog post is now outdated. You can return to the behavior I hailed by disabling the opera:config#UserPrefs|AutomaticallyreparseXHTMLwithparsingerrorsasHTML option.

Multiple Nationalities

2011-11-21T19:36:36Z

I seem to have missed Donner’s latest brilliant idea for a new law. It seems that the Dutch government is looking to limit the number of people with multiple nationalities to a minimum. In today’s NRC Handelsblad Ulli d’Oliveira wrote a great opinion piece about the matter on page 14. Some highlights:

De rabiate weerzin in delen van het politieke spectrum tegen het verschijnsel van de meervoudige nationaliteit heeft een gevolg dat pas laat aan het licht kwam – dezelfde beperkingen aan het behouden van de oorspronkelijke nationaliteit die aan buitenlandse aspirant-Nederlanders worden opgelegd, gelden voor Nederlanders die een buitenlandse nationaliteit willen aannemen. Een petitie met meer dan vijftienduizend handtekeningen van mensen in het buitenland keert zich tegen deze collateral damage.

…

In het nationaliteitsrecht is het nuttig om politics of identity te onderscheiden van politics of interests. De laatste jaren wordt het Nederlandse nationaliteitsrecht gedomineerd door de vurige wens om aan buitenlanders die Nederlander willen worden eerst de eis te stellen dat ze ideaaltypische Nederlanders zijn geworden. Ze zijn ingeburgerd, spreken de taal, participeren in de samenleving, verdienen behoorlijk, hebben hun startkwalificatie op zak, hebben geen strafblad en zo meer – alsof Nederlandse losers niet bestaan. Deze Nederlandse identiteit mag niet worden bezoedeld door vreemde smetten, zoals een buitenlandse nationaliteit. De identiteit van de would-be-Nederlander moet exclusief Nederlands zijn.

…

Het wetsontwerp houdt geen rekening met burgers. De argumenten van expats zijn verstandig en invoelbaar. Mensen willen settelen in den vreemde zonder hun Nederlanderschap te verloochenen. Om praktische, zakelijke overwegingen nemen ze een vreemde nationaliteit aan, zonder dat ze erover piekeren hun Nederlandse identiteit weg te snijden. Het zijn dezelfde overwegingen die buitenlanders ertoe brengen om Nederlander te willen worden.

Quick, messy, summarizing translation: the dislike in some parts of the political spectrum against multiple nationalities has an unexpected result: the same limitations that apply to aspiring Dutch apply to Dutch people who wish to assume another nationality.

In recent years Dutch politics has been dominated by demanding that foreigners become idealized Dutch people, part of which is being exclusively Dutch.

The law design doesn’t take citizens into account. The arguments made by expatriates are reasonable and can be empathized with. People want to settle in a foreign country without renouncing their Dutch nationality. For practical reasons they assume a foreign nationality without considering cutting off their Dutch identify. These are the same considerations that make foreigners want to assume the Dutch nationality.

I have little to add to that. The whole shebang about multiple nationalities is ludicrous. Perhaps the Dutch municipalities should stop automatically submitting babies born of Moroccan-Dutch parents for Moroccan nationality if it’s truly a problem of such massive scale — although they might’ve stopped it by now, since I think a some Moroccan-Dutch parents sued Amsterdam over this gross misconduct. Nobody will apply for multiple nationalities just for the heck of it.

Mental Conversations

2011-11-13T19:08:21Z

She remembered the day a furniture van from Portland had shown up with a two-thousand-dollar sectional sofa. Scott had been in his study, writing with the music cranked to its usual deafening levels — she could faintly hear Steve Earle singing “Guitar Town” in the house even with the soundproofing — and interrupting him was apt to do another two thousand dollars’ worth of damage to her ears, in Lisey’s opinion. The furniture guys said “the mister” told them she’d let them know where to put the new piece of furniture. Lisey had briskly directed them to carry the current sofa — the perfectly good current sofa — out to the barn, and place the new sectional where it had been. The color was at least a fair match for the room, and that was a relief. She knew she and Scott had never discussed a new sofa, sectional or otherwise, just as she knew Scott would declare — oh yes, most vehemently — that they had. She was sure he’d discussed it with her in his head; he just sometimes forgot to vocalize those discussions. Forgetting was a skill he had honed (emphasis mine).

From Lisey’s Story by Stephen King (p.148 of the 2006 Scribner hardcover).

My wife alleges I do just that.

Skype Call Recorder

2011-11-11T15:02:13Z

Skype Call Recorder delivers on the promise of its name. It records calls, with the participants split into two separate channels if you want — which you do if you want the option of raising or lowering the volume of one participant.

On Critical Thinking

2011-09-19T10:19:31Z

Written in response to someone talking about thinking critically “against the powers that be.”

Given your phrasing, it’s highly improbable that you’re actually talking about critical thinking. One does not think critically against anything. You think critically, period, about everything. Perhaps most important, this includes yourself and your own notions. If you only think critically about (let alone against) others, you’re not thinking critically at all. If you think critically against someone or something, rather than about, you’re just out to find flaws so you can justify your own preconceived notions.

Some Practical, (Extremely) Simple Algebra

2011-08-30T21:01:27Z

Early in secondary school, many of my classmates used to be exasperated by the perceived lack of practical application of the mathematics we had to learn at the time. I never really understood why, because it had clear practical applications, though I admit I also simply thought it was fun. Later on, things like statistics were really boring, but I figured I’d share how the simplest of elementary algebra can help you make financial choices.

Having just moved, we had to decide whether or not to buy a washing machine. Washing machines start at about €400 — they can be obtained used for much less, but last time I picked up a used washing machine for €40 it broke within about a year and it’s just so much trouble trying to fix it or getting yet another used replacement — while laundromats cost about €3-4 per load (+20 cents for detergent). Admittedly the load sizes are slightly larger at the laundromat, but I don’t see that as a good thing: it just makes it harder to carry and dry the laundry.

Washing costs per load for various temperatures in € according to Nibud
temperature/ type of costs	90°C	60°C	40°C
electricity	0.48	0.25	0.15
water	0.10	0.08	0.08
washing powder	0.19	0.19	0.19
depreciation / maintenance	0.48	0.48	0.48
total	1.25	1.00	0.90
total without depreciation	0.77	0.52	0.42

We usually wash on 30 degrees and have an otherwise energy and water efficient washing machine, but I’ll just run with the price for a single wash without depreciation value. I’m not interested in depreciation of the value of the washing machine, since the point is how many times you have to wash to break even compared to the laundromat. Of course a depreciation value could be used for this so that ax = bx should yield a useful conclusion, but that’d be a bit of a roundabout way.

I devised the following simple formula: ax = bx + c, where a is the cost of one load at the laundromat, b is the cost of one load in a self-owned washing machine, and c is the price of a washing machine. x is the break even point of the number of washes required to make it worth your while to buy a washing machine as opposed to utilizing a laundromat.

3.20x = .42x+480 (-.42x)
2.78x = 480
x=480/2.78=173

I haven’t counted the number of times we’ve washed, but if we haven’t surpassed it yet, I bet we’re quite close. We’ve had it for nearly two years and we wash slightly more than once a week on average.

Liberty

2011-07-09T10:23:53Z

Lost now to family, buddies, girlfriend, rabbit hound, society, and himself, this poor young sailor had fallen—not very many miles from Jerusalem—understanding virtually nothing of the situation in the Middle East. He probably believed it involved a struggle between right and wrong, good and evil, freedom and oppression. That was his second mistake. His third mistake was in trusting that even if he didn’t understand the situation, his leaders did. His first—and worst—mistake was blindly doing what he was told to do. Without questioning their methods or their motives, he allowed politicians to make the decisions that led to his early demise.

What is politics, after all, but the compulsion to preside over property and make other people’s decisions for them? Liberty, the very opposite of ownership and control, cannot, then, result from political action, either at the polls or the barricades, but rather evolves out of attitude. If it results from anything, it may be levity.

From Skinny Legs And All by Tom Robbins (p.118 of the May 2003 Bantam trade paperback reissue).

Switching µTorrent from Windows to Linux

2011-06-30T13:16:38Z

A while ago, I wrote about using Wine in order to switch completely to Linux a lot quicker than would be possible if you had to figure out replacements for various pieces of peripheral software. In the case of µTorrent this meant that I could keep on seeding all the torrents I’ve downloaded over the years and not having to set up my RSS feeds and other preferences once more, but it’s not all sunshine. Aside from minor bugs in Wine, it simply uses a lot more memory and sometimes CPU. As an unscientific guestimate, it seems about 5 times as memory hungry as on Windows.

In the not too distant past, fixing this would’ve required a switch to e.g. qBittorrent, but an alpha version of µTorrent Server is now available for Linux. It can do everything normal µTorrent can, but not everything is necessarily available through its default WebUI. Luckily an alternative WebUI is available and I’d highly recommend it over what comes with the µTorrent Server by default. It enables RSS feeds and filters, among other things. I think it’s probably no more than a newer version, so perhaps you can ignore this part of this post if you’re reading this in a few months time.

One thing that doesn’t seem to be mentioned in the documentation anywhere is that you can access the WebUI through http://localhost:8080/gui/.

Now for switching over the data and configuration files. Luckily µTorrent for Linux uses the same data files, so you can easily copy over rss.dat (feeds configuration) and resume.dat (locations of torrents). Of course that won’t fix the problem that directory structures are slightly different on the respective platforms, and I don’t think you can make symbolic links to drive letters except in Wine. That’s where BEncode Editor comes in, as described in an article about moving your µTorrent files. I couldn’t find a similar utility for Linux, but no matter, it works quite well in — drum roll — Wine. I downloaded version 0.7.1.0, the latest at the time of writing.

You should read through the guide I linked, but of course some slight adjustments will have to be made. In my case I did some reorganizing of my HDDs after I hadn’t booted into Windows for a month, but the differences for my torrents weren’t that big. I replaced D:\downloads\torrents\ globally with /media/downloads/torrents/ as outlined in the text. I repeated similar commands for my E:\ and I:\, but of course the specifics will be different for everyone. To finish it off you can replace all instances of \ with /.

Something similar can be done for rss.dat, but I had already adjusted all my filters manually in the µTorrent WebUI.

Assuming you run this command in the directory where you put the µTorrent Server executable, you can run cp /somewhere/uTorrent-for-Windows-folder/*.torrent to copy over all the relevant *.torrent files.

There are some slight inconveniences. For example, you can’t open in folder directly, but you have to navigate there manually or copy the location from the WebUI. However, if you were using Wine you’d already given up on proper integration regardless. I think it’s easier to copy the proper Linux path from the WebUI than to mentally line up Wine drives and directories with real ones.

As one final caveat this method didn’t seem to remember proper times when downloads finished and instead “downloaded” all my torrents at that point in time. I’m sure that could be avoided somehow (perhaps by copying over settings.dat?) but for my purposes it didn’t matter.

More Fun with Screen and SSH with Byobu: Automatic Reattaching

2011-05-31T15:36:57Z

A while ago I wrote about screen, which makes your SSH experience more satisfying. There are some enhancements you can make to screen with .screenrc, but Byobu does more by default than I ever could be bothered to figure out. It seems to come pre-installed on Ubuntu, while aptitude install byubo suffices for Debian.

I thought it’d be even better if screen automatically attached itself when logging in through SSH, and clearly I wasn’t alone in that thought. I made a slight adjustment to the code I found so that Byobu is utilized when available and otherwise regular screen will load. Screen is often installed by default, unlike Byobu, so that way I won’t have to install or compile Byobu to reap the benefits of my custom .bashrc.

# From http://tlug.dnho.net/node/239
# "The following code when added to your .bashrc file will, after logging in via ssh, look for any unattached screen sessions and automatically attach to the first one found. If only attached sessions are found then a list of these will be outputted to std out. Finally, If there are no screen sessions running at all then a new screen session will be created."
if [ $SSH_TTY ] && [ ! $WINDOW ]; then
	SCREENLIST=`screen -ls | grep 'Attached'`
	if [ $? -eq "0" ]; then
		echo -e "Screen is already running and attached:\n ${SCREENLIST}"
	else
		type -P byobu &>/dev/null && byobu -U -R || screen -U -R
	fi
fi
# Optionally adding the following will alter your prompt to let you easily know which window within a screen session you are currently in.
if [ $TERM = "screen" ]; then
	PS1='window ${WINDOW} '$PS1
fi

Time Synchronization: NTP

2011-05-28T07:46:16Z

Today I noticed that my computer clock was running fast, meaning that Debian doesn’t come with some kind of time synchronization enabled by default. Ubuntu doesn’t exactly either, but setting your location seems to take care of it in Ubuntu.

There’s really nothing much to tell here. Debian Wiki has all the instructions lined up already.

Type date to see current date and time
date
Install NTP
aptitude install ntp
Done.
Type ntpq -p to see servers you are syncing with.

Type date again to see if the time changed. You time should be synced in a next minute.

Done.

There’s nothing more to do, though I often like to take a peek at the configuration files and the man pages — the latter is typically a bit too dense unless you already know what you’re looking for. In this case, that would mean man ntpd, man ntp.conf, and, most important, nano /etc/ntp.conf (or whatever your favorite text editor is). It doesn’t look like there’s anything of particular interest, but you might want to replace some of those default Debian server pools with ones geographically closer to you. The easiest way is to check on www.pool.ntp.org, but if e.g. your ISP offers such a service it might be a good idea to use it.

In my case, Belgium didn’t have too many servers, so I made up my own mix of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Europe.

#server 0.debian.pool.ntp.org iburst
#server 1.debian.pool.ntp.org iburst
#server 2.debian.pool.ntp.org iburst
#server 3.debian.pool.ntp.org iburst

server 0.be.pool.ntp.org
server 1.nl.pool.ntp.org
server 2.nl.pool.ntp.org
server 3.europe.pool.ntp.org

Also see how to disable the daemon on battery power. I don’t know how much of a difference that would actually make, but as the Dutch idiom goes, all small bits help.

Unmount Flash Drives & Memory Cards

2011-05-21T11:27:44Z

It seems that Gnome’s safely remove drive feature works just like the equivalent in Windows: not at all. It even displays the exact same useless error message, almost word for word: this device cannot be stopped. Not the slightest hint about why this might be the case.

Following this scenario, on Windows you’d pretty much be stuck shutting down your computer to be sure that no data loss will occur (although workarounds like Unlocker exist, or you can use Process Explorer to figure out the culprit manually). Luckily, on Linux the workaround is a lot easier. Use mount to display information about all currently mounted file systems and umount to, you guessed it, unmount the file system of your choice.

$ mount
[…]
/dev/sde1 on /media/888E-E0E0 type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=udisks,uid=1000,gid=1000,shortname=mixed,dmask=0077,utf8=1,showexec,flush)
$ umount /dev/sde1

PS I just found out that I’m mistaken, but I already wrote the post and besides, the point that you’re able to do things like this if you want, whereas you’d be stuck in Windows, still stands. It seems that the way Gnome devs envisioned unmounting is not while you’re viewing it in Nautilus by right-clicking, but by right-clicking on the icon on the desktop.