Archive

Bargain Hunting in the UK

Published
by
David
on December 20, 2008
in Shops
.

The pound sterling has taken a deep dive the last few months and continues to fall. Today it reached an amazing £1 = €1.07. For us euro-handlers this means we can pick up bargains on the other side of the pond. Since the UK is part of the European economic union, no import taxes need to be paid either.

Here’s a list of my favorite UK online stores:

The cheapest books can be found on The Book Depository, including worldwide free delivery. I’ve consistently had great experiences with them. Books ordered monday get delivered by friday.

Great gifts and gadgets can be had at Firebox.com. Shipping is a tad expensive though, at £13 to Belgium.

Play.com has always been my first stop to buy movies, music and games with good prices and free worldwide delivery. Unfortunately they use their own currency exchange rate which is still stuck at last decade’s £1 = €1.5. A great alternative is Amazon.co.uk, with excellent prices and cheap shipping. A CD or DVD is sent to Belgium for about £2, software for £5.

If anyone else knows of good UK shops, please post it in the comments. The more shops the better. Happy over-the-channel shopping!

Samsung Loses, Ultimate Boot CD Wins

Published
by
David
on December 19, 2008
in Sysadmin
.

To cut a long story short: I had 2 disks to test, one a Seagate and the other a Samsung.

Using Seagate’s diagnostics utility SeaTools was a very smooth experience. After booting from the CD, a GUI application automatically started, including mouse support. Even basic users would feel right at home.

Trying to get Samsung’s HUtil to work was a nightmare. Apparantly Samsung are as of yet unaware of the existence of SATA CD/DVD-drives. Using the CD my PC booted into FreeDOS just fine, but their script couldn’t detect the CD-drive so it couldn’t start the diagnostics utility. Trying it manually failed too because the included drivers simply don’t support SATA drives.

I spent half an hour going back and forth changing settings in the BIOS and rebooting to no avail. This worked for some people though, so ymmv. Check out any settings on SATA compatibility modes.

One post on the internet revealed a method of booting using the Ultimate Boot CD, then switching to Samsung’s CD, and running the diagnostics from there. After reading up on UBCD, turns out those last two steps aren’t even necessary. UBCD includes the latest diagnostics utility for any hard-drive out there! Just boot it, select the utility from the menu, and it automatically starts.

So if you ever need to do a diagnostics on a disk, don’t bother downloading and trying to boot the manufacturer’s utility. Just pop in the UBCD and you’re off. It also includes other stuff to do just about anything with your computer. Neat!

How-To: Wrap a romantic present using Schamper

Published
by
David
on December 17, 2008
in How To, Madness and Personal
.

So you need to wrap a romantic present, but you’re all out of wrapping paper. Or you never had any. As a student, I face this situation constantly, and have become quite adapt at surviving it.

The Victims
Here are the victims. I’m going to scavenge an old issue of Schamper, our university’s awesome student magazine, for wrapping paper.

My Favorite Article
Rip out your favorite or most romantic articles to use as wrapping material.

Two articles fused together
Use tape to paste every page together to make a long enough string of mind-blowing literature.

Wrap around
Wrap the string around the present. Use tape to paste the two ends together.

Cornered
There’s supposed to be a certain technique to do the corners neatly, but let’s face it: you’re wrapping her present using an old magazine. She’s not going to care about the corners. Also, I forgot.

Use tape vigoriously to make sure the enlightening wrapping doesn’t fall apart.

Missing side
If you missed a side, a common error, just paste a page on top.

FixedThat’s the beauty of this method: you can screw up and she’s never going to notice.

Nice Wrappings
Nothing says I love you like a big bald face on top of her present.

A job well done, another potentially problematic situation solved. You can tell her you custom-made the wrapping paper yourself, because that’s how much you love her!

Make Athena Go Local

Published
by
David
on December 15, 2008
in How To, Linux, Sysadmin and UGent
.

If you’re a student at UGent and living in a dorm, you need to access the Internet through a VPN, but Minerva and Athena, a Citrix system, can be accessed locally. Using a clever line of commands, one can route all Athena traffic over the local network even though you’re connected through a VPN.

Obviously this will result in less lag when using Athena, but more importantly, it’ll also save precious megabytes of bandwidth from your VPN limit. All this while your regular internet connection remains untouched.

Type this in your shell:

for ip in `dig @ugdns1.ugent.be ugent.be axfr | grep citrix\
 | awk '{print $5}'`; do echo $ip;
sudo route add -net $ip netmask 255.255.255.255 eth0;
done;

It’ll find all Citrix-related addresses at UGent, and route them through your local network interface.

On the other hand, you need to connect through a VPN if you want to access Athena from outside of UGent. In this case, we can use our script to limit the VPN for Athena traffic only, and make all other Internet connections go locally. This will again save you precious megabytes from your VPN limit, while ensuring all other Internet traffic doesn’t get laggy.

sudo route add -net default eth0
for ip in `dig @ugdns1.ugent.be ugent.be axfr | grep citrix\
 | awk '{print $5}'`; do echo $ip;
sudo route add -net $ip netmask 255.255.255.255 tun0;
done;

Shell-fu

Published
by
David
on December 11, 2008
in Linux and Sysadmin
. 
alias webshare='python -c "import SimpleHTTPServer;\
SimpleHTTPServer.test()"'

Want to show something on your machine to someone over the web? Don’t copy it or upload it somewhere. Just run “webshare” and the current directory and everything beneath it will be served from a new web server listening on port 8000. When your pal is finished, hit control-c.

Awesome.

Gems like this can be found on the aptly named Shell-Fu.

Good Luck Phoenix!

Published
by
David
on May 25, 2008
in Madness
.

2 hours and 30 minutes before humanity’s newest mars lander will touchdown - hopefully unharmed. One of the highlights of the mission is the search for past lifeforms in the polar ice. Some nice links if you’re interested:

Let’s hope Phoenix will fare better than his predecessor. Sleep tight tonight, because we just might awake to a whole new world.

1.30192108E+94K

Published
by
David
on May 25, 2008
in Madness
.

A year ago, while drunk, a friend and I were discussing temperature scales. Turns out Fahrenheit used his body temperature to define 100°F, which is totally ridiculous from a scientific point of view. Fahrenheit was actually having a little fever when he developed his scale, which is why 100°F is slightly higher than the normal human body temperature of 98.2°F.

One could say Celsius was more sane, using the boiling-point of water to define 100°C. If you think about it, though, this isn’t optimal either. Water boils at differint temperatures depending on the atmospheric pressure. Seen through the alien eye it really doesn’t make any sense at all: why H²O? Why bound by the conditions of one planet (Earth)?

Mind you, we were drunk.

So off we went and created a new temperature-scale. We figured Kelvin was spot on with defining 0K as the absolute zero, so we used that in our scale. Furthermore, using probably bogus science, we calculated the highest temperature possible in our universe, which turned out to be 1.30192108E+94K, and used that to define 100°.

Out came Astix, including basic HTML-page explaining the calculations done and Kelvin-To-Astix converter. Enjoy our crazy brainfart.

Make your PC wake you up

Published
by
David
on May 23, 2008
in Linux
.

It’s a little known feature of a BIOS: You can set it to start the PC at a specified time and date, practically like an alarm clock. Even lesser known is the fact that you can set this same setting in Linux by writing a date and time to this special file (as root):

$ echo "+00-00-00 00:05:00" > /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm

Now shutdown your PC. It should boot up again 5 minutes after you executed that line.

Let’s harness this awesome power and turn it into a poor man’s complex alarm clock:

  • sudo sh -c ‘echo “2008-05-24 06:59:00″ > /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm’
  • Start a media-player and make it play a song
  • Quickly put your PC in hibernate

Now when your PC is booting in the morrow, it’ll return from hibernate and continue playing the song, waking you up in the process. Yay.

Update: Since kernel 2.6.22 (and Ubuntu Intrepid) the location of the alarm file has changed. I’ve updated the path, but if you’re using a kernel version lower, or an Ubuntu version older than these, you should echo to the file “/proc/acpi/alarm” instead of “/sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm“.

Talk on Broadband and Distributed Software

Published
by
David
on April 8, 2008
in Uncategorized
.

Zeus organises another talk, this time by Piet Demeester. He’ll give us some details on the how’s and why’s of broadband and distributed software. We’ll also be able to visit the IBBT, which is chock full of gadgets and consoles, for “testing purposes”.

For more info, and an abstract, visit the Zeus site.

Although I don’t like this poster as much as I like my previous ones, I love the photo used as the backdrop. Link to original. Truly amazing the quality of some of the free photos you can find on sxc.hu.

Wanted: Earphone buds

Published
by
David
on April 7, 2008
in Personal
.

My earphones with the large buds.I lost one of the rubber buds used on my in-ear earphones, and now I need to use a size that’s a bit too big for my ear-canal. It’s annoying because they keep popping out, unless I sit perfectly still. As luck would have it, you can’t get the buds seperately, and at a cost of €30 I’m in no mood to buy new earphones.

If anyone of you have the Creative EP-630 or Sennheiser CX300 (they’re basically the same), and doesn’t use the medium buds, I propose a swap. I still have both small and large buds. This way I don’t need to buy new earphones, and you have some spare in case you lose your buds.