Jan 31: Redshift to reduce eyestrain at night
If your monitor, like mine, is a little bright and on the blue side, you might appreciate Redshift available on Linux and Windows (with caveats). It takes your location and the time of day and alters your monitor settings to make the colours match daylight during the day and tungsten during the night. You can tweak the settings quite a lot. I don't like the screen getting so red during the night - it's a cheap laptop screen so the colours are bad enough as it is without too much more messing around.
Here's the command I'm using on Linux, using Medmenham as my geographical location. You can easily get latitude and longitude for any place using Google maps: find the place, and the lat/lng is after &ll= in the URL when you click Link.
Here's the command I'm using on Linux, using Medmenham as my geographical location. You can easily get latitude and longitude for any place using Google maps: find the place, and the lat/lng is after &ll= in the URL when you click Link.
gtk-redshift -l 51.556459:-0.834851 -t 5700:4900 -g 0.8 -m vidmode
Jan 23: Setting up phpm for offline use - parsing the PHP docbook manual
If you want to create an up-to-date function list for use with phpm, you'll need to update the manualparser.php recommended in the original article to work on PHP5. I'll tell you for free that this is going to be difficult: for starters the original article is no longer properly online (there's a cached version on the Wayback Machine) and the code is broken as it relies on a deprecated method of the DirectoryIterator class.
You'll also need to get hold of the PHP manual docbook source. All the instructions for doing so refer to old CVS users: SVN is used these days. This is what you need to know:
So, to save you time, I've suffered all the pitfalls and mended the code myself - it runs cleanly. You'll find it on my GitHub along with more explanation in the README. Fetch the lot down, put it in the same directory as you download phpdoc-en and run parseit.php.
Here are some links to the resources I used: I'm mainly putting them here in the hopes that they will trackback to the various blogs and that people might actually find this...:
- Håvard Eide's phpm post. Did he write the original version of this parser? I'm not sure, but he certainly wrote phpm
- http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/11663
You'll also need to get hold of the PHP manual docbook source. All the instructions for doing so refer to old CVS users: SVN is used these days. This is what you need to know:
$ svn checkout http://svn.php.net/repository/phpdoc/modules/doc-en ./phpdoc-en
So, to save you time, I've suffered all the pitfalls and mended the code myself - it runs cleanly. You'll find it on my GitHub along with more explanation in the README. Fetch the lot down, put it in the same directory as you download phpdoc-en and run parseit.php.
Here are some links to the resources I used: I'm mainly putting them here in the hopes that they will trackback to the various blogs and that people might actually find this...:
- Håvard Eide's phpm post. Did he write the original version of this parser? I'm not sure, but he certainly wrote phpm
- http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/11663
Jan 14: Have you ever read a more scary prayer than this?
Paul my vicar has been blogging again, this time about Renewing our Vow and Covenant, and he mentioned a prayer that I hadn't heard of, but it might just be the scariest, most challenging prayer I've ever heard. It's called the Methodist Covenant prayer. I got shivers when I read it.
I am no longer my own but yours.
Put me to what you will,
rank me with whom you will;
put me to doing,
put me to suffering;
let me be employed for you,
or laid aside for you,
exalted for you,
or brought low for you;
let me be full,
let me be empty,
let me have all things,
let me have nothing:
I freely and wholeheartedly yield all things
to your pleasure and disposal.
And now, glorious and blessed God,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
you are mine and I am yours. Amen
There is no clever language here, nothing I can't understand, just the most pure expression of supplication, submission and admission to God that I've ever read. Even though the first line is simply a recognition that we didn't make ourselves and that God's creating Spirit is responsible for our existence, it puts it in a new light. It recognises that God is the God of the Old Testament as well as the new: isn't it tempting to think of God only as a benign, gentle, useful, protecting watcher when it is so much more than that. God is love, and love happens in pretty explosive, cruel-to-be-kind, hands-on, forthright way sometimes, and that's just with humans. Why don't we treat God as capable of that same kind of tough love?
Great stuff.
I am no longer my own but yours.
Put me to what you will,
rank me with whom you will;
put me to doing,
put me to suffering;
let me be employed for you,
or laid aside for you,
exalted for you,
or brought low for you;
let me be full,
let me be empty,
let me have all things,
let me have nothing:
I freely and wholeheartedly yield all things
to your pleasure and disposal.
And now, glorious and blessed God,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
you are mine and I am yours. Amen
There is no clever language here, nothing I can't understand, just the most pure expression of supplication, submission and admission to God that I've ever read. Even though the first line is simply a recognition that we didn't make ourselves and that God's creating Spirit is responsible for our existence, it puts it in a new light. It recognises that God is the God of the Old Testament as well as the new: isn't it tempting to think of God only as a benign, gentle, useful, protecting watcher when it is so much more than that. God is love, and love happens in pretty explosive, cruel-to-be-kind, hands-on, forthright way sometimes, and that's just with humans. Why don't we treat God as capable of that same kind of tough love?
Great stuff.
Jan 14: MXToolbox SuperTool - great for domain and DNS checking
I've written my first search plugin on MyCroft, for the excellent SuperTool. I can't believe that out of 22,000 plugins, mine is the first for such a brilliant tool. Take a look and try it out - you won't regret it. Better than a lot of pay-for ones, in my view, but there's a special place in my heart for the free, oddly named and somewhat spartan dnscolos. My web hosts often use intoDNS which I rather like as well, and gets new tests and features periodically.
(How do I manage to sound like I'm advertising, even when I've nothing to gain? Must be that boundless enthusiasm...)
(How do I manage to sound like I'm advertising, even when I've nothing to gain? Must be that boundless enthusiasm...)
Jan 11: Checking credit on a Vodafone dongle
More a less a note to self, if you're using a Vodafone TopUp and Go dongle on Linux, you'll quickly find there's no nice way to check your remaining credit. On Windows, you can use the button so labelled in the Vodafone connect software. On Linux, that's not really an option!
The answer is to pop open your trusty copy of minicom so proceed thusly:
In the resulting settings menu, change the serial port configuration so that your device is set up. The most likely choice is /dev/ttyUSB0 or /dev/ttyUSB0 rather than /dev/ttyS8 or whatever the default on your system is. Then go to 'exit' in the menu, which should take you into minicom.
What we do now is to simulate pressing that button, so, paste in (so that it happens quickly), and follow with Enter:
You may have to have a few goes. What you get back should look like this:
Which is your dongle's way of saying £14.66 remaining.
I don't know how up-to-date this figure is, and for the record, I think £15/GB is extortionate (I'm paying £15 for 5GB for my own 3 dongle with a rolling one-month contract by Direct Debit).
This will only work for Vodafone dongles (and TopUp and Go mobiles, I suppose if you've hooked yours up by USB). The approach might work for other setups, though.
The answer is to pop open your trusty copy of minicom so proceed thusly:
minicom -s
In the resulting settings menu, change the serial port configuration so that your device is set up. The most likely choice is /dev/ttyUSB0 or /dev/ttyUSB0 rather than /dev/ttyS8 or whatever the default on your system is. Then go to 'exit' in the menu, which should take you into minicom.
What we do now is to simulate pressing that button, so, paste in (so that it happens quickly), and follow with Enter:
AT+CUSD=1,"*&1345;",15
You may have to have a few goes. What you get back should look like this:
+CUSD: 0,"#14.66.",0
Which is your dongle's way of saying £14.66 remaining.
I don't know how up-to-date this figure is, and for the record, I think £15/GB is extortionate (I'm paying £15 for 5GB for my own 3 dongle with a rolling one-month contract by Direct Debit).
This will only work for Vodafone dongles (and TopUp and Go mobiles, I suppose if you've hooked yours up by USB). The approach might work for other setups, though.
Jan 11: ttytter extension for posting to Instapaper
I have forked reuteras' extension for posting twitter URLs to del.icio.us and make it post to Instapaper instead. You can find my efforts in my GitHub repo.
It isn't as clever as I would like it to be:
- only accounts without a password are working at the moment
- I'm not using HTTP basic auth as I just can't get it to work
To try it you need to do the following: Read More
It isn't as clever as I would like it to be:
- only accounts without a password are working at the moment
- I'm not using HTTP basic auth as I just can't get it to work
To try it you need to do the following: Read More
Jan 11: If you need a fresh proxy, here's the list I use
I remember when the days of finding a fresh, fast, geographically local anonymous proxy to surf behind were fraught with difficulties. Some Russians ran a list I used, but it was often out-of-date and the proxies on it didn't work for long.
I now go here for a fresh proxy when I need one:
http://www.ip-adress.com/proxy_list/
That site also allows you to test a proxy for Reverse DNS, actual location and so on, right from the list.
These are HTTP proxies mainly, rather than SOCKS5 ones which you might want if you need a full range of ports from Windows, but they suit my needs, getting me out of corporate networks and around restrictive ISPs, etc. I expect I will use them heavily whilst travelling when I come across certain states which are somewhat restrictive about where their citizens might surf. Like Western news websites.
I now go here for a fresh proxy when I need one:
http://www.ip-adress.com/proxy_list/
That site also allows you to test a proxy for Reverse DNS, actual location and so on, right from the list.
These are HTTP proxies mainly, rather than SOCKS5 ones which you might want if you need a full range of ports from Windows, but they suit my needs, getting me out of corporate networks and around restrictive ISPs, etc. I expect I will use them heavily whilst travelling when I come across certain states which are somewhat restrictive about where their citizens might surf. Like Western news websites.