Archive for the ‘tech’ Category

Want: a virtual USB DVD-ROM implemented in hardware

Dear Lazywebs,

I’d like a hardware device which has a USB connection and SD card reader.

I want to copy an ISO file to the SD card, put the card in this mystery USB device, and have the USB device appear like a USB CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive. And when I say “appear like”, I mean “indistinguishable from” – it would have the USB mass-storage device type of a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive. So the BIOS sees it as true optical removable media, and can boot from it. Whatever operating system I use would see it as true optical removable media.

Being more ambitious, I’d like to be able to put multiple ISOs onto the SD card. There would be a way of “ejecting” the fake drive and then selecting an alternative ISO to “close the fake drive tray”.

Yes, I know I could use something in Windows to mount the ISO as a virtual drive. I could use loopback devices in Linux to mount it too. But that’s not good enough – I can’t easily use it to install operating systems without doing bootloader stuff and other voodoo. And I can’t be arsed to do that.

I just want to copy the ISO to the SD card, and have it appear (to the USB host controller) like a real shiny physical CD.

Please, Lazywebs, make it possible.

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Filed under tech : Comments (0) : Jan 12th, 2010

Dual-screen monitor problems with Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic)

Problem: Could not get multiple monitors to work (one laptop screen, one external widescreen) with Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)

Symptoms: Blank screen when turning off “mirror screens” mode.

Resolution: Disable or remove compiz. (System -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Visual Effects -> None)

Other Karmic annoyances…

Read the rest of this entry »

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Filed under tech : Comments (4) : Oct 30th, 2009

Useful bookmarklets for iPhone

Over the past few weeks, I’ve come across a few useful bookmarklets which work great in Mobile Safari on the iPhone.

I can’t take any credit for writing these, but hope to be helpful by listing them in one place.

How to install

Open this page with mobile Safari and tap-and-hold on the bookmarklet hyperlinks below. Select “Copy” when the menu appears. Then bookmark a page (any page will do), giving it a name like “Scroll to bottom”. After storing the bookmark, edit it – the URL will now be editable where it wasn’t previously. Delete the original URL and paste in the bookmarklet code. Finally, remove the “http://” from the front. Save!

Scroll to bottom

How many times have you been reading a long webpage and accidentally hit the top bar in mobile Safari? Yes, it takes you to the top, but there’s no “go to bottom” shortcut. This will do just that. Copy me

Find in page

This provides a “find text in this webpage” feature. Copy me

View source

Yeah baby! Copy me

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Filed under tech : Comments (0) : Oct 28th, 2009

Opening Google Earth files (kml, kmz) on an iPhone

Yes you can! But the kml/kmz file needs to be hosted online somewhere.

  1. find the URL of a kml/kmz file hosted somewhere on the internets. (I used this one hosted at dropzone.com)
  2. open the iPhone “Maps” application
  3. type the URL into the search bar and press [Search]

… and you’ll get something like this:

iPhone viewing kmz file

iPhone viewing kmz file

The Search autocomplete feature should help the next time you open the file – because it’ll remember the URL. Just type “http” and the URL should pop up underneath.

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Filed under tech : Comments (0) : Oct 9th, 2009

Larger, greener, quieter: Kurobox changes

320Gb just isn’t enough nowadays, for a machine-under-the-stairs packed full music in flac format, video and digital photos… so an upgrade was needed. And while the hard disk is being upgraded, I thought I’d help it spin down by putting the root filesystem on a USB stick.

Ingredients

1x Buffalo 8Gb Thumbkey
1x KURO-SATA (because the Kurobox HG only has a PATA controller)
1x Western Digital Green 1Tb hard disk

WD 1Tb hard disk, KURO-SATA and Buffalo Thumbkey

WD 1Tb hard disk, KURO-SATA and Buffalo Thumbkey

Read the rest of this entry »

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Filed under Kuro Box, tech : Comments (0) : Jul 28th, 2009

Fedora 11: you might as well quit guys

I thought I’d give Fedora 11 a spin, cos they’ve made some changes to power management, and my battery has been screwy since Ubuntu Feisty.

But what a mistake!

I don’t expect any distro to recognise all my hardware, nor do I expect any to be exactly tailored to my tastes.

But I do expect every distro to at least:

  • have installation docs that were not out of date two releases ago
  • get the time right when pointed to an NTP server
  • recognise my PS/2 trackpad
  • not clobber the contents of /boot
  • warn me before installing a non-backwards-compatible upgrade to Grub

It’ll be a very long time before I try Fedora again. :-(

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Filed under tech : Comments (2) : Jun 20th, 2009

A simple UI for ‘vpnc’

I’ve been using the Nortel branch of vpnc for a while with great success, but it’s a command-line tool, and a drag to use now that Ubuntu 9.04 is so swish.

So here’s a 30-minute Python/Tkinter UI hack which wraps the vpnc and vpnc-disconnect tools.
Code follows…

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Filed under tech : Comments (0) : May 20th, 2009

Killing two iTunes birds with one stone

Two things have been niggling me lately with iTunes, perhaps because I’m the kind of person who can’t stop fiddling with software.

Problem 1: reinstalling and reconfiguring iTunes is a pain

Man, all that scanning of the music folder. Then the recreation of playlists, and the hand-cranking of album art for the 20% or so albums which the iTunes Store doesn’t recognise. And, for a chap who re-installs Windows often, and fiddles around even more, it’s starting to be a pain in the bum.

Yes, there are ways to back-up the iTunes metadata (aka the “iTunes Library”), but who does that often? Who does it often enough?

Problem 2: iTunes resets the music folder location

My iTunes music folder is stored on a NAS box (the Kurobox), shared using Samba and mounted in Windows as a mapped drive. This is primarily for space reasons (20Gb of MP3s would be a lot for an ageing laptop), but also to have it all in a permanent place.

But there’s a problem: if I start iTunes before my wireless connection is established, then the mapped drive ain’t there – and iTunes helpfully resets the music folder location back to its default. Sure it can be manually changed back, but everything needs scanning afresh.

Killing two birds

I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before: relocate the iTunes Library (the metadata) onto the mapped drive too. That would mean that I can re-install iTunes (or even Windows) at will and even access the same iTunes library from multiple Windows installations. (Virtual machines, etc).

This has the added benefit of curing problem 2 as well: if iTunes can’t find the library files at startup, then it pauses – meaning that it’ll never get as far as resetting the music folder location back to its default, giving me time to re-map the music drive.

But, while it’s easy to change the location of the music folder, relocating the library itself isn’t as obvious.

The trick

The trick is hold down <Shift> while iTunes starts. It’ll ask for the location of the iTunes library – set it to a location on the mapped drive (making sure you’ve moved it there first ;-).

Thanks to Lifehacker for this excellent iTunes tip! :-)

Postscript: my first attempt at solving this was to install Firefly Media Server onto the Kurobox, which acts like a shared iTunes library on the local network. This worked great until I tried to sync my iPhone against it: it can’t be done! iTunes insists that synching is only done with stuff in the local library.

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Filed under tech : Comments (0) : May 12th, 2009

“MyRail Lite” iPhone app – dead!

Although I didn’t think to mention the app in my recent Essential iPhone Apps post, the “MyRail Lite” app is (was) first-rate. But they today tweeted that the service is to close because their license to distribute real-time data from National Rail Enquiries isn’t to be renewed.

Several words spring to mind, the cleanest of which would be “boo”, “hiss” and “arse”.

There is another app , very recently released, called “National Rail Enquiries”… but at £4.99 it’s a bit feckin’ steep. It looks to be officially sanctioned by NRE and – while I obviously don’t know the details – I wonder if NRE licensed the data to MyRail, watched them prove the concept, saw it was popular, and then saw an opportunity to screw them over.

(Only guessing, like!)

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Filed under tech, transport : Comments (0) : Mar 23rd, 2009

Essential iPhone apps (if you happen to be me)

Well I was sorely tempted by the Blackberry Storm, but Vodafone are making a fundamental error in their sales tactics: they let people play with the thing before they buy it. Usually that’d be a good thing, but I very quickly concluded that it’s a bloody awful device. (Stephen Fry was right, and I so wanted to like it too!)

So out went the Storm, and in came a shiny new iPhone.

But even the iPhone itself as its problems, and I was all ready to jailbreak the thing in order to get the functionality I wanted… but found it wasn’t necessary. So here’s some essential iPhone applications, if you just happen to be identical to me… Read the rest of this entry »

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Filed under tech : Comments (2) : Jan 26th, 2009

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