Posts

Note: Yes, WebOS Technically still exists. However, this article isn’t talking about the TV OS version made by LG. While this article was actually written to discuss getting Palm devices usable, I felt some preamble was necessary. My Palm History I’ve got a soft spot for Palm. My first PDA was the Palm Vx, possibly the greatest PDA ever made. Easily get days of battery from a device that can store all your calendar and contacts information, synchronizing periodically with your master copy on your computer. ...

Snapper is an excellent utility that provides hourly snapshots of btrfs subvolumes. Fedora ships with selinux enabled by default. This is excellent, and shouldn’t be disabled. To allow this, most software in Fedora has appropriate rules defined, including snapper. However, snappers rules only allow it to work on / and /home. If you wish to use it to snapshot /mnt/data, or /srv, or any other particular path, you’re going to have a very bad time. ...

I just attended the Watkins Glen opening day for the second year. It was, again, a blast. I made some slight adjustments to my ffmpeg assembly procedure from last year. Dashcam saves video in 5-minute chunks Instead of creating .list files, I simply used a pipe as input: for fo in AMBA091*; do echo file "$fo"; done \ | ffmpeg -f concat -i - -c copy Front-Track1.mov Front and Rear videos need to be combined Much like last year, I made short samples to confirm if any offsets needed to be done. However, I decided to move the video to the bottom-right corner to cover the timestamps, since they were incorrect on some videos (well, correct. Just not for this time zone) ...

I was attempting to run my laptop at a lower resolution than the laptop panel. However, by default the video is scaled to fill the panel. This causes the image to be distorted (fonts look bad, etc). On Linux (with Xorg, anyway), this behaviour can be tweaked with xrandr: $ xrandr --output LVDS1 --set "scaling mode" "Center" This is not a persistent setting, which is fine for my purposes. ...

In an ongoing quest to attempt to lessen my Google dependancy, I decided to self-host my Calendar and Contacts using Baïkal. Installing and configuring Baïkal is sufficiently documented elsewhere. This post is a 9somewhat short) account of why I’m giving up on self-hosted contacts and calendars. Google The problems can be summed up into these bullet points: It is assumed (and practically required) to use Google Play Store Google Play Store requires a Google Account Google Account means you have Mail, Calendar, and Contacts Simply adding your google account into your phone causes Mail, Calendar and Contacts to sync. Mail you can disable, and use an alternate client, as that data is housed internally to the gmail app, and not exposed system wide for other apps to use. ...

I decided I wanted some stats. There are a few options: Use a service (Google Analytics, etc) or parse your logs. Both have pros and cons. This article isn’t supposed to help you decide. I just wanted simple stats based on logs: It’s non-intrusive to visitors, doesn’t send their browsing habits to third parties (other than what they send themselves), and uses the apache log data I’ve already got for the entire year. ...

Update - March 09 2020 Since writing this article, I’ve made a few observations: More people read this than expected QEMU has since added discard support to the standard virtio disk, avoiding the need to use virtio-scsi It kinda sorta works out of the box. I’ve written a brief followup: Discard (TRIM) with KVM Virtual Machines… in 2020! Original Article I’ve got a bunch of KVM virtual machines running at home. They all use sparse qcow2 files as storage, which is nice and space efficient – at least at the beginning. ...

Gnome 3 introduced a very handy feature, grouping multiple application windows (whether they be separate instances or not) into a single desktop icon. This means when <alt+Tab>ing through your windows, you can skip over the dozen firefox windows, then dive into just your terminal windows. Generally, this works great, and I think most users don’t have any issues. However, some people (myself included) use a lot of terminals. Some are temporary short-lived generic terminals. Others are long-lived running mail (mutt), or a main development session. Unfortunately, trying to switch to my email terminal can be cumbersome as I squint at thumbnails of 10+ other terminals. ...

I recently took my car to a racetrack, covered with cameras. I wanted to post these on youtube, but encountered a few issues: Dashcam saves video in 5-minute chunks Front and Rear videos need to be combined I don’t know anything about video editing I didn’t have a working video editor Fedora doesn’t seem to ship ffmpeg, and rpmfusion doesn’t support Fedora 22 yet The last point was somewhat resolved by a binary build of ffmpeg. ...

This is the contents of a presentation I gave to KWLug in April 2015, roughly converted to blog format. The slides are available. I’ll update this post with a link to the kwlug.org podcast when it goes online. Audio and Video available via kwlug.org. I didn’t get through all of the points, I barely touched on snapshots (and didn’t cover any utilities). I’ll post a follow-up with my filesystem corruption demonstration instructions. Note that I am not a filesystem developer, just a user who isn’t afraid to experiment and share the lessons learned. If there are any comments/corrections, email me at chris -at- chrisirwin.ca ...