Skip Avira’s Free Antivirus reboot request on updates

If you’re using Avira’s Free antivirus and are a mad computer user like me that never reboots his computer (unless something blows up), you might have noticed that Avira periodically updates its program (beside the virus definitions) and asks for a system restart to complete this.

Using rsync to syncronize files between two systems

Rsync is a very handy tool at synchronizing the contents of two folders/directories.

And while being great for local folders, it also works remotely, via SSH, thanks to the -e ssh parameter: # rsync -ave ssh sourceserver:/home/user/ /home/user will sync /home/user from the sourceserver with /home/user on the local machine.

Dismount mounted drives that do not have letters in Computer Manager

Upon entering Computer Manager to remove the drive letters, the partitions do not have any letters assigned. In fact, no actions beside “Delete partitions” are present on the context menu. But the partitions show up in Windows Explorer as drives H: and K.

Luckily MOUNTVOL, a Windows utility (present in all Windowses since Xp) “creates, deletes, or lists a volume mount point”.

Making Enter type newline and Ctrl+Enter send in Pidgin

By default, Pidgin uses Shift+Enter to jump to the new line (unlike the Ctrl+Enter in Yahoo Messenger), and this may be cumbersome when you’re used to YM or when you’re a fast typer.

Now, to change the actual behaviour of the Enter and Ctrl+Enter keystrokes, we’ll need to paste the following piece of text in the ensuing (pdigin specific) gtkrc-2.0 file …

Modding TUGm to use custom MAC on a VPS

Tugs Uptime Project is a great service for monitoring and recording the uptime of your various hosts.

They have various clients for (almost) all operating systems. Unfortunately all of their clients base the machine id by MD5-ing the machine MAC address. This works perfectly unless you are using a VPS… which will have no MAC address for its network interfaces, generating the same machine ID on every host.

So in an attempt to make their latest Linux client – TUPm – usable on my VPSs, I made some changes to the client and conf file to add support for defining my own custom MAC (when a MAC is not found).

Automatically moving and sorting recovered files based on file extension

Let’s consider a very complex folder/files structure with a lot of (read infinity) subfolders and a large amount (read infinity again) of files in each subfolder.

This folder structure is generated by PhotoRec, used to recover lost files from damaged/formatted/erased drives.

I needed to move all the files found in those (very numerous) subfolders into different folders based on the file extensions (so in each folder I would only have one filetype, making it a lot easer to browse through and extract important files out of the piles and piles of bulk information).

Raspberry PI as NAS

A friend of mine was wondering about using a Raspberry PI as a NAS, the question being: how fast is the PI at file transfers from/to an external hard disk connected via a USB rack.

So I booted up my PI, mounted some random 3.5 inch Samsung 160GB SATA hard drive inside another random Spire USB-SATA external (powered) rack and gave it a go at some testing.

Upgrading the SD card used on WRT54GL v1.1 running dd-wrt

If you’ve done the SD card mod on WRT54GL, you might at some point change it with a bigger / faster card. You could just replace the SD card with a bigger one, but then you’d have to install/re-configure everything set up on it (like Optware stuff). […]