Mythmovies in the UK
Mythmovies is a cool plugin to show film times in cinemas around you (geographically speaking that is!). However, up to now it’s been US only. However, this script found on the Ubuntu forums works perfectly in the UK.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1090793
Works great. Now for trailers …..!
Startup items on OS X
For an unrelated reason I just checked the console on my Mac and found that an executable was being called every few mins, that did not exist. WTF!
I used to have a 3G modem made by Huawei (T-Mobile). The software dialler was pretty rubbish, and it appears that the naffness continued after I removed it. It had placed a file in my Launchpad folder which supposedly checked whether there was an updated version of the software available (note: in 18 months of running this software there never was!).
Anyway the upshot of it that it’s not just the StartupItems Preference Pane that shows such items. Also check the following folders:
/Library/LaunchAgents
/Library/LaunchDaemons
/Library/StartupItems
~/Library/LaunchAgents
~/Library/LaunchDaemons
~/Library/StartupItems
Merry Crimbo and all that shenannigans……
It’s been a quiet year for blogging here. It’s been a busy year for many reasons and any blogging time has been spent on the house renovation blog and on the work blog.
On a brief tech related note, I got my entire new-old house wired with cat6, including buried wires, I used OS X far more than Linux for the first time, I switched to a Android phone (HTC Hero), which I am very pleased with.
Anyway here’s a apt picture of my new workplace for 2010. Which incidentally is heated mainly by my dual old school Xeon Linux box. I’ll try blogging more next year!
Rebuilding Spotlight indices fixes mail.app search issues
Over the last few months searching in Mail.app has been problematic to say the least. I’ve been hoping that Snow Leopard would fix this, but it did not. In fact since upgrading to SL it has got worse, although this was likely just coincidence rather than being caused by the upgrade. So I tried rebuilding the Spotlight indices from scratch. Previously I would have used Onyx to do this. However, the Snow Leopard compatible Onyx has only just come out in beta, and was not available when I did this. Other methods I was aware of include dragging that partition (root) to the Privacy part, then back again. However, this being UNIX you can of course do it quickly from the command line. MDUTIL is a command line tool to interact with MDS, which is the Spotlight indexing tool.
Note all the following commands were run using sudo (or you could su to root). If you do not know what sudo is, perhaps the command line is not a place you should dwell!.
mdutil -i off /
Now some posts seems to indicate that you also need to delete the indices
e.g.
rm -R /.Spotlight-v100
I did not do this.
To add them back I simply turned on indexing again. Note this does take quite a while and leaves a few processes at 100% CPU.
mdutil -i on /
I have since been told that you can just force a rebuild using
mdutil -E /
However, despite the ease of this once the Snow Leopard version Onyx has come out I would recommend using that instead. It’s a cracking app, and I run this once a month at least.
The Chop House
I’ve been quite a few times recently to The Chop House. I’ve always been pleased with the service and the food. It’s nowhere near a top notch restaurant, but the food is always enjoyable, and served with pleasure.
However, recently they surpassed themselves. I was there in a fairly large group (25+). Much (much) wine was drank as well as the full three courses (groan!). Due to ineptitude (and perhaps that excess of wine) both of us paid separately for each other. It was not until a few days later that we realised we’d paid double.
We guessed that by this point we’d had it, however, we rang them up, and sure enough they refunded one card, more or less at our word! Cracking service.
Spider haunt at the Chesterton cycle bridge
The new(ish) cycle bridge at Chesterton is well lit at night with many spotlights along its breadth. After a relatively pleasant evening spent at the Fort St George (all too rare since Greene King took over the place last year and converted it into a cheap rate All Bar One) I was cycling back and had a little trip across the bridge.
Looking at one of the beams in the middle of the bridge, there must have been close to a thousand spiders hanging there. The spotlights illuminate the webs in a very pleasant way.
(Unfortunately my new HTC Hero does not have a flash).
Although I’m sure that the main function of these lights is to make the bridge safe they have a side affect in that they have created an ideal site for webs. These lights draw in flies, moths and other flying insects, and many, many spiders have set up their fly catching homes here.
If you are ever passing after dark then go have a look. Perhaps not alone if it’s too late
Bash shell extension
I came across this cool tip whilst browsing the blog of a fellow storage geek’s who’d posted on the Linux RAID list.
Basically you can insert a variety of characters inside braces to expand them. I guess like a smart shell expansion using the tab. The most obvious usage is a major timesaver for creating a backup of a file (which of course we all should do everytime we edit a config file!).
cp foobar.conf{,.bak}
will work as:
cp foobar.conf foobar.conf.bak
Many more examples are given here.
Draytek 2820n and a T-Mobile 3G dongle
I’ve just got a Draytek 2820n. This will be the new router for the new house. What I like about this is that you have three WAN interfaces, ADSL, IP and 3G. What’s even cooler is that you can set this up so if ADSL fails it falls back to one of the others.
Until I have phone lines installed I’ll be using the 3G dongle exclusively. I hope I get better reliability than using the dongle with my Macbook Pro.
Running Jive on Mythtv
Just got Squeezeplay (the new replacement for SoftSqueeze) working from
Mythtv! .. and it was dead easy.
- Check out the source code from Subversion:
svn co http://svn.slimdevices.com/repos/jive/7.4/trunk/squeezeplay
- compiled it (if you are doing this on a 64bit box you need to specify just the app)
% cd src % make -f Makefile.linux app
- copy it all into /opt (there’s a tarball in ../build)
- Edit the Mythtv Media Library by adding an entry to the Library.xml file
/usr/share/mythtv/Library.xml
Here’s the entry
< button>
< type>SqueezeBox
< text> launch Jive
< action>EXEC /opt/squeezeplay/bin/squeezeplay.sh
< /button>
(Spaces added as I cannot work out the HTML to now parse those metatags, Doh!)
It works great on my Myth box (also running Squeezecentre) and syncs with my Squeezebox AND the other linux box running Squeezeplay.
Reasons for not posting for a while
I’ve not been posting on my main site for a while. I guess the main reason is the house renovation. Follow this on my house blog. Secondly I’ve also been blogging for work. Nothing earth shattering, but it was about time.
In the meantime here’s a newt I found in the new garden:
I never noticed, but somebody rightly pointed out it is missing a leg. Poor thing.
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