Archive for

May, 2011

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2011-05-31 21:59

Parcellite: Replacement for Klipper/Glipper

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by havard    in Fedora

The great copy/paste clipboard tools Klipper and Glipper have both been abandoned and removed from the main repositories. The replacement is just as good, though: Parcellite. It supports the keys features you’d expect from a tool like this:

  • Keeps a clipboard history.
  • Various view options to display items the way you like it.
  • Daemon mode; guard your clipboard contents when you close applications.
  • Global hotkeys to display your items quickly.
  • Perform custom commands using clipboard contents.

It’s available for Fedora:

sudo yum install parcellite

And Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install parcellite

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2011-05-25 08:43

Fedora 15 Released

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by havard    in Fedora

Fedora 15 was released yesterday. The most noticeable change is the new Gnome 3 UI, which “brings the first major overhaul of the GNOME user experience in 10 years”. Some of the changes might take some time to get used to, and adjust, and the release notes covers some of the details for desktop users. Judging from an alpha release, and the screen shoots, it is disappointing that they have jumped on the fashion bandwagon and added a black status bar. I’m sure it can be customized though, so I will come back to that later.

Other major changes and updates include Firefox 4 with its improved HTML 5 support, systemd boot and init optimized for SSD drives, and also worth noticing Indic, a predictive input typing booster, for “the ibus platform. It suggests complete words based on partial input.”

Download your copy now, a special “spin“, or share over Bittorrent.

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2011-05-23 09:30

White tiger toy causes police alert

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by havard    in Idle

And now, for something completely different. A white tiger, or should that be a troll, caused a major police alert in Southampton, UK yesterday. The stuffed tiger toy was hiding in the “savannah” at Hedge End, and police were called in to “protect the public” from this dangerous predator. Several armed officers, a police helicopter, and tranquilliser darts were brought in. The tiger stood its ground. Luckily, an alert police officer noticed it was only a toy before they blew the whole field up.

Congratulations goes to whoever put the toy out in the field, trolled the police, and made them look like fools. It seems, cuts should not be a problem, when the police have time to run around in the field, playing with toys.

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2011-05-22 11:27

Useful CLI tools

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by havard    in linux

Kristof Kovacs has collected a neat summary of useful command line tools, some well known, others not that often seen but still great to have, including multitail, htop, iotop, iftop, iptraf, ranger. Most of them are available from the standard repositories under those names.

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10:49

Solar-Powered Charging Station

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by havard    in electronics

Here’s an older article from the Loudoun County Aeromodelers Association in Virginia, US, describing in detail how they planned and installed a solar-powered charging station for their electric RC planes. Their calculations and decisions made for interesting reading, and the result seems thorough.

They’re using a single solar panel, connected to four 6V / 220Ah golf cart batteries. On Saturdays and Sundays the club use the storage batteries as power source for charging their LiPo batteries for the plans. During the rest of the week, the storage battery is recharged by the solar panel.

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2011-05-20 22:38

Down memory lane: Second Reality by Future Crew

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by havard    in Idle

I was recently reminded of the epic 1993 assembly demo “Second Reality” by the Finish group Future Crew. With its recognizable and visionary “psy” tracker music, and innovative graphs and animation, it set the stage for the demo scene for many years. From the Wikipedia article: “It is considered to be one of the best demos created during the early 1990s on the PC, e.g. Slashdot voted it one of the ‘Top 10 Hacks of All Time’.”


It was therefore interesting to find “Making of Second Reality“, a YouTube clip the guys have put together from a home video of their youth. Here you can see them working on assembly code, while the music is playing and looping on their own brew Scream Tracker. You get to see some of their inspiration, including a carton book with a demonic skull which made it into the demo.

The trouble you have to go through to view the demo today is somewhat sad, but maybe fitting. It was certainly not easy to configure your CONFIG.SYS to get the right amount of memory, yet have the correct drivers loaded. The original demo was no more than 2 MB, but inconvenient at the time since it just didn’t fit onto one floppy. Today, you can download both the music and video from The Internet Archive. However, both uncompressed AVI (1.1 GB), and compressed MP4 (327 MB) comes with major glitches. In particular, the plasma sequence fares very poorly with the recorded formats. Sounds is good though.

It is also possible to view the demo using DOSBox. The original binary is available from The Internet Archive.  On my Fedora 14 with little manual configuration, it worked rather well. Sounds was good (however Gravis Ultrasound did not work), albeit with a few clicks and skipping. In the opening sequence, the scrolling text was not working, however the plasma looked very good.

Finally, a word of warning: The demo, along with other works from FC is also available on YouTube. I would discourage anybody from looking at those uploads. Both audio and video compression have destroyed so much of the original work, that you are left with a very depressing presentation. YouTube is not know for its quality, but in this case it is down right damaging to the art.

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20:45

MeeGo 1.2 Released

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by havard    in Mobile Phones, linux

The next version of MeeGo was released yesterday, moving to 1.2. This release seems to have focused on hand-held device features. Maybe we’ll see a port to some of the Android devices soon?

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2011-05-09 21:16

FSF announces publication of two new books by Richard Stallman

3 comments
by havard    in linux

Free Software Foundation just announced that two new books by Richard Stallman are available. They can be ordered from their web site, with both for a total of 36 USD. However, Mr. Stallman also signs your copy for 50 USD each. And soon, I will be the proud owner of two signed copies!

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2011-05-07 09:06

Commercial Quadricopters

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by havard    in Tech, robots

Coming a long way since the DIY Arudino based ArduCopter announced a year ago, commercial quadricopters seems to be taking off. Gizmodo and Slashdot are reporting on the Aeryon Scout Quadrotor by Canadian Aeryon Labs Inc. The marketing is towards police organizations, and the forum headlines compare it to a Predator UAV, which of course sets the discussion off on a totally useless track.

The interesting features of the Aeryon Scout includes its easy assembly and disassembly, high quality camera payload, and robust remote control system. The videos on their site shows off this. Otherwise, there’s few technical details, and the most crucial one for these kind of vehicles; how long can it stay up in the air, is not mentioned. They do talk about batteries though, using 11.1 V or 14.8 V lithium polymer cells. Price is not known either, however, since it’s target towards governments, you can expect a 10x markup.

Which brings us to the consumer quadricopter Parrot AR.Drone. It’s being sold as a kid’s toy, and you can get one for about 300 USD. There’s some pictures and videos on their site, but also a whole user community site. Their forum includes some more technical details about the product: The computer is based on ARM9 468 MHz, DDR 128 Mbyte at 200MHz, Wifi b/g, Linux OS. The guidance system uses a 3 axis accelerometer, 2 axis gyrometer, and a 1 axis yaw precision gyrometer. It has 4 brushless motors, (35,000 rpm, power: 15W), and uses a lithium polymer battery (3 cells, 11,1V, 1000 mAh). Finally, it weights between 380 and 420 g (based on which hull is attached), and they claim a 12 minutes flying time.

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09:03

Parsing /var/log/secure

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by havard    in linux

If found an old post from the Fedora Linux Legacy blog interesting: “ssh log parsing and monitoring”. It includes several grep strings and small awk scripts to extract specific pieces of information from the /var/log/secure authentication log.

Some of my favourites:

# List out successful ssh login attempts
cat secure | grep 'Accepted' | awk '{print $1 " " $2 " " $3 " User: " $9 " " }'
cat secure* | sort | grep 'Accepted' | awk '{print $1 " " $2 " " $3 " User: " $9 " IP:" $11 }'

# List out successful ssh login attempts from sudo users
cat /var/log/secure | grep 'session opened for user root' | awk '{print $1 " " $2 " " $3 " Sudo User: " $13 " " }'

# List out ssh login attempts from non-existing and unauthorized user accounts
cat /var/log/secure | grep 'Invalid user'

# List out ssh login attempts by authorized ssh accounts with failed password
cat /var/log/secure | grep -v invalid | grep 'Failed password'

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