Everything is Crap

It is possible to run CrashPlan (great backup software found here) on a Linux server that does not have a GUI.

• tar xzf CrashPlanPRO_2010-03-08_Linux.tgz (or latest file)
• cd CrashPlanPRO-install
• sudo ./install.sh
• finish install with all defaults
• /usr/local/crashplan/conf/my.service.xml and change "servicehost 127.0.0.1" to "servicehost 0.0.0.0" and reboot. (you need to change this back once you get it installed so the world can't make changes to your backups)
• make sure your firewall allows port TCP 4242 and 4243

Then you need to install CrashPlan Client on your local pc and make the following change:

• c:\Program Files\CrashPlan\conf\ui.properties change "#serviceHost=127.0.0.1" to "serviceHost=10.0.0.5" (10.0.0.5 is the Linux server ip)

Now you can connect using the client on your pc but making the changes on the Linux box.

(Thanks Schwer Log)

Quick intro: A friend recently had a duck take over his planter and use it as a nest for its eggs. So, he bought an IP camera.

The Foscam fi8905w outdoor wireless IP camera has some nice features, but it needs a lot of hand-holding to make it work. You can control it through a URL-based set of scripts. Here's the most useful examples:

Camera status: http://my.ip.or.url/get_status.cgi?user=username&pwd=password Camera settings: http://my.ip.or.url/get_camera_params.cgi?user=username&pwd=password Snapshot from camera: http://my.ip.or.url/snapshot.cgi?user=username&pwd=password Reboot: http://my.ip.or.url/reboot.cgi?user=username&pwd=password Param set example, changes camera mode to 'outdoors': http://username:password@my.ip.or.url/camera_control.cgi?param=3&value=2
You can set parameters and reboot the camera with commands detailed in this guide.

We ended up with a series of tools and scripts to make the camera more useful. First is a script that grabs a photo every minute and stores it in an archive.

#!/bin/sh wget -O /www/duckcam/downloading.tmp http://username:password@my.ip.or.url/snapshot.cgi >/dev/null 2>&1 mv /www/duckcam/latest.jpg /www/duckcam/archive/cam.`date +'%Y-%m-%d-%H%M%S'`.jpg mv /www/duckcam/downloading.tmp /www/duckcam/latest.jpg
Next, because the camera doesn't handle going from night to day very well, we had to write a script to handle that. But, the camera stops responding after the brightness has been set, so we wrote a script that reboots it once a day right before setting the brightness at daybreak. This seems to work, but it's far from ideal.

#!/bin/sh wget -O - "http://username:password@my.ip.or.url/reboot.cgi" >/dev/null 2>&1 sleep 60 wget -O - "http://username:password@my.ip.or.url/camera_control.cgi?param=3&value=2" >/dev/null 2>&1 sleep 20 wget -O - "http://username:password@my.ip.or.url/camera_control.cgi?param=1&value=48" >/dev/null 2>&1 sleep 20 wget -O - "http://username:password@my.ip.or.url/camera_control.cgi?param=1&value=32" >/dev/null 2>&1
We realized that we wouldn't be able to stream from the camera itself because the owner's internet connection wouldn't handle it, so we found a tool that takes the IP camera feed and rebroadcasts it. The tool is called webcamXP.

After all that we have a pretty good setup for watching the miracle of life. Even if the image is a little washed-out.

Webkit browsers (Chrome, Safari, etc.) all show an annoying bug: When you have a frameset page and one of those frames sets the hash location, the whole page reloads. This doesn't happen in IE or Firefox, and has been submitted (and not rejected) as a bug in Webkit. But, the bug was submitted years ago, and nobody seems to care.

I found a workaround and posted it to stackoverflow. In short, use a full page table instead of a frameset.

Getting this when trying to sign in to Messenger: "Sign in to Microsoft Messenger failed because the service is not responding."

Delete:  userLibraryPreferencesMicrosoftMicrosoft Messenger User Cache.plist

Okay, there are plenty of places online with instructions on randomizing posts in WordPress; even WordPress tells how. But here's my version along with the code I used.

Basically, I randomized the loop, and this required replacing the standard loop like this:

Replace…

while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ... endwhile;

with…
$pdh_args = array( 'numberposts' => 30, 'orderby' => 'rand' ); $rand_posts = get_posts( $pdh_args ); foreach ( $rand_posts as $post ) : setup_postdata($post); ... endforeach;

That worked for me. (note: setup_postdata() prepares the $post array as if it had been part of a standard loop, and the code did not work without it)

Sometimes curly quotes get copied and pasted into the title of our blog and WordPress just can't handle it. The problem lies in the permalinks and manually editing the permalink to get rid of curly quotes fixes it (but what a pain). In my search for an automated solution I discovered no hooks into this aspect of WordPress and, therefore, no plugins that handle it.

The solution involves editing WordPress code. I'm not a fan of this and I wish there were another way, but if there is, I haven't found it.

This solution I discovered in a conversation that ericr23 had with himself.

Add this to sanitize_title_with_dashes in wp-include/formatting.php:

$title = preg_replace('/[“”‘’]/', '', $title); //delete curly quotes $title = preg_replace('/[–—]/', '-', $title); //en- and em-dash to hyphen

Permalinks sanitized! And we could all do with a little more sanitation, right? We could do with some more sanity too!

Don't you hate it when you replace a hard drive, install a perfectly legal copy of Windows 7 Upgrade and then try to activate it and it says it can't be activated because it is a clean install?  Here's a fix that worked for me:

• Make sure there are no pending updates
• Change HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionSetupOOBE  MediaBootInstall from 1 to 0
• In an elevated administrator command prompt type slmgr -rearm
• Reboot
• Run Activate Windows and use your key!

Found it here. Thanks mydigitallife.info!

So, the old web server is acting slow and I don't know why. Solution? Move to a new webserver, and upgrade to the latest OS along the way. It needs to be upgraded anyway, right?!

That's what I just did and here are the most valuable command line arguments for doing so:

tar -pcvzf www.tar.gz www/ mysqldump -u root -pPassword --all-databases > alldata.sql tar -pxvzf www.tar.gz mysql -u root -pPassword < alldata.sql

Of course, those commands are not all that I needed to do, but they are the ones that I will want in the future when I move to another web server. So, I guess you could say they're more like a personal note on how to transfer a directory without losing permissions and how to move an entire MySQL install.

You have to specify which calendars to sync in Google; go here…

https://www.google.com/calendar/iphoneselect

I you want to know more, iPad Candy has a full walkthrough on using multiple Google calendars on i-devices.

My iPad froze today. It looked like it was just asleep, but it didn't respond when I hit the home button. Holding the hold/power button (which is how you do a normal reboot) didn't do anything either. It was stuck good. Here's the trick I used to fix it:

Hold both the home button and the hold/power button for a few seconds.

After doing that the silver apple appeared on the screen. When I hit the hold/power button again it booted up.

I'm not sure what caused it to freeze, but, the Apple device didn't display an error message. Just like their ads say, Macs don't get error messages. No, neither do iPads, apparently. They just go black. Not even a blue-screen-of-death or anything.

Thanks, Apple.