Computer & Software
Computer & Software
Mainly to create a personal collection of computer-related solutions, I collect a few helpful tips, tricks & and scripts which proved to be useful for system administration and other computer-related everyday tasks.
Although most of the time I just write tiny maintenance scripts for my own purposes, I have also written one script or the other which may also be of interest to you.
Bilderspur allows you to construct input files for Google Earth from your digital images, given that a few conditions are met. This way, you can use Google Earth to display your fotos by clicking a thumbnail image at the location where the foto was taken, optionally linking this foto to your existing online foto album.
The Trekstor Vibez is a rather cool and compact portable music player which uses a micro drive disk with up to 12 GB in size to store the music files. Unfortunately, just as virtually all other portable media players available in the market, it does not feature out-of-the-box-support for the music recommendation community last.fm which uses the AudioScrobbler-system to calculate similarities between artists and songs and to provide personalized music recommendations to its users. As an addicted last.fm user I spent parts of the christmas holidays 2006 to reverse engineer the Vibez' binary data base format so that I'm now able to feed my last.fm music profile with music I listened to using the Vibez. :-)
With only very little preparation, ExifTimeAdjust can accurately correct the timestamps of your digital photos after a holiday, improving the results of time based georeferencing or simply allowing correct sorting of images taken by different digital cameras.
The Aachen based local Internet Service Provider Uni-DSL Aachen GmbH & Co. KG operates one of Europe's largest wireless metro networks, Öcher WLAN, with about 2000 active WLAN hotspots. All hot spots are powered by an OpenWRT based firmware which we adapted to our needs, so the network becomes self-organizing and allows remote maintenance of all nodes.
Uni-DSL Firmware in its version control repository
I wrote bindiff.py in one or two hours while being on the train, as I wanted to learn the usage of Python's difflib and were just in the process of reverse engeneering the Trekstor Vibez' binary database format so I could write It'sGotTheVibez.
By default, the version control system Subversion (Debian-Package: subversion) classifies new files as text
and binary data
only, a rather coarse granularity. If you'd like to annotate your files with more a specific mime type, you can use the tiny Python-Script (Debian-Package: python) svn_conv_mimes.py to generate a comprehensive list file type patterns (download) which can be added to the [auto-props]-section of your personal ~/.subversion/config file. This way, subversion will be able to automagically distinguish and tag dozends of different file types using several hundred file name patterns. This list is derived from the system wide mime type database /etc/mime.types and thus can easily be regenerated after this master data base has been updated.
