Just a short notice, so that I know it if I need it again…and others could find it. Recently, upgrading a VM to Debian 10 resulted in a broken bootloader. The error message was: symbol ‘grub_calloc’ not found And the grub resuce shell did prompt. Manual boot with an LVM file system The VM was patitioned using a LVM (Locigal Volume Manager) setup. Hence, the default root partition is not just /dev/sda or so.
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Therefore, go home to your villages and repair the IT of your families! (Jesus, never) Despite all circumstances, I managed to visit my family this Christmas. And to some extend, it is tradition that I use some of the time at home to repair/update/replace some IT devices of my family. This year however, I had a special challenge: Copy the recordings of the family camcorder, that were transferred to the external HDD of a Panasonic DVR to a usual PC.
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New laptop, new dock, latest software…great, isn’t it? I always like those “fresh starts” with new hardware and a new setup. Not only because you have cool new hardware, but also, because it’s a possibility to cut off old pigtails. And, you then have best performance and security with latest software… Well, if there wouldn’t be commercial software for hardware drivers. Preamble / The source of the Problem: DisplayLink With my new ThinkPad, I’m using a USB-C dock and therefore planned to connect my external monitors to this dock.
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From time to time, thanks to geoblocking or IP address based authorization, you need to access websites through a proxy. If you have access to a machine that would have the right address range or region, an easy and straightforward way is to use ssh: $ ssh -N -D 8180 <desired_machine> & i3 integration If you need this proxy more frequently and you want to have the status of the proxy connection displayed in your i3-status line (from the window manager i3wm), then you can integrate the proxy with the following scripts:
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In a programmers live, you need a recursive file search nearly every day. Of course, this is possible without a heavy IDE and with a simple but useful bash one liner: $ grep "pattern" -HniR ./path/to/dir The options in detail: H printing the filename of the match n print also the line number i for a case *in*sensitive search R for recursive Of course, this can also be combined with grep regular expressions.
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I use, among others, the Signal App as messenger. Of course, I also want to use the advantages of running a client also on my OpenSuse-based Laptop. Sadly, Open Whisper Systems does only provide packages for Ubuntu-based systems…so I need to build it by myself. Following the build instructions for developers, the build will fail due to some incompatibilities in the dependencies (see e.g. here). Due to permanent updates of the app, I’ve to rebuild it once in a while…and here is how:
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I’m a happy user of the Vivaldi Browser. But every time after an upgrade, H.264 videos stop working and every time I search and try quite a while to get it working again…maybe because the solution is always to obvious. So, now I write it down in the hope of remembering it next time ;). 1) The easy (to obvious) option Execute vivaldi in a comand line! The output is something like:
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In various situations during the work on a project, it could happen that one is required to add a header to a lot of source code files. Since programmers are usually lazy — eh, interested to work efficiently — they won’t open every file and copy it manually. Once again, the Bash can help us. For example, a copyright notice in all C/C++ files: find . -name \*.{c,cpp,h,hpp} | xargs sed -i "1i/*Copyright .
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And again something to ffmpeg: this very sophisticated tool can not only convert video or audio files. It also can handle the associated metadata. So, when you have a big music-library in the lossless format .flac (or .wav) and want to have it also on mobile devices you probably convert the files to mp3 or similar. Also, I do so, because when I’m travelling around I’ve mostly not the silence and equipment to hear music in best quality, so a little loss of quality through the use of mp3 would not be noticed.
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I’ve often the “problem”, that I want to show a movie while traveling, but the mpg-file on my PC is a few GB big and the disk-space on my mobile Devices are limited. So, I want to convert my mpg-files to mp4 files, with less or no loss of quality, but a huge reduce of bytes. And every time I’m searching around the web to find the correct ffmpeg-options. In order not to search the next time I need it, I write it down:
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