Jun 04 17:09

Where hav I been


visited 25 states (11.1%)
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May 12 16:10

Switch

At work I have switched back to Windows. It's a boring story involving a corrupted file system and the necessary re-install. What made me revisit the evil os was that I cannot do my computer supporting at work all alone. There is a couple of very nice guys paid for repairing my windows pc, and so it shall be.

Some comfort lies in the fact that the software I use on top of windows (XP) is open source (unison, svn, openoffice, winscp, putty, gimp, etc), which works quite well. On the other hand - it doesn't make a huge difference, the tools should stay out of the way, and if they do I am happy. For now.

Apr 27 21:16

Kulturzeit!

I guess the tricks in my previous post are not working any longer. No problem, news is mostly boring anyway. But here is something new: Kulturzeit, a German somewhat snobbish show about all kinds of culture. The problem: it is only offered as live stream. So we have to record it when it is streamed.

Add this to your crontab:

20 19 * * 1-5 /usr/local/bin/get_kulturzeit.sh &
00 20 * * 1-5 killall mmsrip

The get_kulturzeit.sh script called here is attached to this post.

We use mmsrip again and the linux command line version of asf-bin. The latter is necessary to fix the index of the streamed video file to keep audio in sync and to make it seekable.

Mar 31 22:02

Download German and Norwegian news

German and Norwegian state television still have the best news shows (compared to their private contenders of course). And they offer them on the net. Unfortunately, their download is made difficult. This may have legal reasons or not, I don't know exactly. If it has, it is not my problem. Therefore, I have built a workaround using OpenKapow robots.

This url:
http://service.openkapow.com/MaxSnauth/nrkdagsrevy21.csv?header=no
returns (among other) the url of the newest Dagsrevy 21.

In a script together with the handy little mmsrip this line

mmsrip $(echo `wget -qO- http://service.openkapow.com/MaxSnauth/nrkdagsrevy21.csv?header=no` | sed 's/^"[^"]*","\([^"]*\)"/\1/')

downloads the latest show.

The same for German news:

mmsrip $(echo `wget -qO- http://service.openkapow.com/MaxSnauth/ard.csv?header=no` | sed s/\"//g)

Here the latest show produced by ARD is downloaded.

Feb 17 13:11

Updates to the beamer backend

I've included the attribute :tocdepth: Set it to 1 to include only ---- level headings.

And while I were at it I also included 2 more attributes:

:imgpath: /some/path/with/trailing/slash/
If set images are searched in this directory (I keep all the images I use for talks in one directory).

:titlegraphic: some_logo.jpg
If set this file is included in the title slide. It uses :imgpath:

Feb 14 14:33

Beamer backend for asciidoc

This is my first attempt to simplify the production of beamer presentations. I chose asciidoc because of its ability to produce a host of output formats (natively and via its mature docbook output). The state of the backend is highly experimental. Please see the example files (ascii source and pdf output) first, it contains all you need to know for installation and use.

Jan 23 00:44

Awesome frugality

Now it has almost been a year that I started to experiment with frugal browsers. I started with ion which worked very well (even thouh the lua bit takes some time to get used to). Ion's immature developer's open Anti-Open Source stance then drove me away to wmii. Again tweaking (this time a shell script which houses the configuration) until it did what I wanted. I followed the mailing list but had soon to learn that wmii's man developers neither are the kind of people I (as luser) would trust to drive the development into my direction. So I moved on to Awesome. Very active project with developers who do not think that using firefox is your own fault. So far I really like it: Snappy performance and a very decent kind of eye candy.

Test

This is a test, what else could this be?

May 09 23:55

Headless episode downloader hack

I've hacked together a simple tv episode downloader script. As always it has a lot of perl module dependencies (all of them available from debian unstable repositories). It uses the feeds from tvrss.net. It downloads the torrent to a designated dir, where it may trigger the client (if your client supports this, most do). As a bonus it drops an email when a new episode has arrived.

Feb 03 20:38

AsciiDoc Cheatsheet

I have written a cheat sheet for AsciiDoc. You get it here as pdf and as odt.

What is AsciiDoc? Here's the description copied from its homepage (as most of the examples i use in the cheat sheet):

AsciiDoc is a text document format for writing short documents, articles, books and UNIX man pages. AsciiDoc files can be translated to HTML and DocBook markups using the asciidoc(1) command.

AsciiDoc is highly configurable: both the AsciiDoc source file syntax and the backend output markups (which can be almost any type of SGML/XML markup) can be customized and extended by the user.

And once you've got your text in DocBook format a whole world of different output formats is awaiting you.

Feb 01 02:21

Can I Get An Amen? (2004)

item image

Found this little movie over at archive.org:

Jan 20 02:08

So this is Drupal 5.0

I've just updated this site to drupal 5.0. It comes with some nifty templates, one is called antique_modern, I wonder what's antique and what's modern about it. But it is nice. Internally some improvements, but nothing I would write home about.

Jan 14 03:09

Late Night Qadrupel Feature

An einem Wochenende wie diesem schau ich eine Reihe Filme, aber nur selten sind sie alle so gut, dass ich der Welt davon erzaehlen moechte. Diesmal war es aber so und daher platz frei fuer snauth's quadrupel-feature of January.

Oct 11 08:28

Seems I don't like cc after all

Just what the title says. Here is why:

Sep 24 17:44

jamtagplay.pl - Playing free tracks from jamendo

Jamendo features a lot of fine music published under various cc licenses. And since I like cc and music, and since jamendo has a capable API, I wrote a little perl script which takes one or more tags as argument, grabs and displays coverart fullscreen, while playing randomly music for these tags.

Sep 16 02:07

scrobblerd updated

What was once an extensible daemon written in Perl submitting metadata to Audioscrobbler is now a complete personal streaming system, including a shout/icecast compatible streamer and a cgi web frontend to your music collection.
For more info refer to the project's home page.

Sep 09 07:37

gshowtv

Once more I reinstalled my whole system, just because this is so much fun. Because there is nothing better than a clean new install. And all went smoothly, the new debian installer really does what it is supposed to do: install. After some three hours everything was just dandy - except that I hadn't saved my mythtv configuration - which is a pain in the ass because you have to figure out the channels yourself here in Norway.

So I was looking for a more lightweight alternative, which does not force a complete webserver and a database (mysql) upon me. I stumled upon gshowtv, which also supports xmltv and has a nifty interface to use every possible recording application.

Sep 01 19:56

Beowulf and Grendel

Adapted from the Anglo-Saxon epic poem, Beowulf, BEOWULF & GRENDEL is a medieval adventure that tells the blood-soaked tale of a Norse warrior's battle against the great and murderous troll, Grendel. Heads will roll in this provocative take on the first major work of English literature. Out of allegiance to the King Hrothgar, the much respected Lord of the Danes, Beowulf leads a troop of warriors across the sea to rid a village of the marauding monster. The monster, Grendel, is not a creature of mythic powers, but one of flesh and blood - immense flesh and raging blood, driven by a vengeance from being wronged, while Beowulf, a victorious soldier in his own right, has become increasingly troubled by the hero-myth rising up around his exploits.

Jun 17 00:39

helper script to create an animated background in e17

Five more or less easy steps assuming you use elive and you have perl installed (which you have when u use elive):

  • Put all the png's of your animation (aka logo) ordered numerically (xyz00001.png xyz00002.png xzz00003.png ...) in a directory created for this purpose. Put the background image there too.
  • Rename your background image to bgimage.png or save the attached one there.
  • Copy the attached template (template.edc) to this directory.
  • Change to this directory (if you haven't yet)
  • Execute the attached perl script (perl mk17bg.pl.txt).

Then you should get a file called mk17bg.edj which - if moved to .e/e/backgrounds - should show up in Configuration->Configuration Panel->Background Settings. The location of the animated logo (formerly knnown as xyz00001.png etc) can be tweaked by changing the values in the template, more specifically here:

part {
name: "elogo";
description {
state: "default" 0.0;
rel1 {
relative: 0.255 0.41;
offset: 0 0
;
}
rel2 {
relative: 0.305 0.48;
offset: 0 0;

}

Have fun!
I'll probably develop the whole thing further scratching my own itch, stay tuned.
BTW: The template is of course based on the beautiful e17_bg_layered_sky created by the Rasterman himself - including the bgimage (correct me if I'm wrong).

May 13 00:38

scrobblerd

All right! Now I am an officially approved open source maintainer. It is called scrobblerd and what this tiny collection of perl scripts does is explained on the project's homepage. I should mention that I, a sociologist, cannot hide my pride to be allowed to take part in this fine human effort, which is all about sharing knowledge, puny as it may be in my case. My humble thanks go to RMS, Linus,and all the fine engineers who lay the fundament of this great democratic cathedral (I know what I'm saying, ESR is intentionally not included, though) of free hackerdom.