I've just rebuild this site using my own static generator. It would be easy to just rely on github pages to automatically publish my site but I don't want to use too much cloud services. Therefore I want to use the same technology tricks github uses but then on my own system.

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Emulate a CRT on the steamdeck with RetroArch

Previously I added my Amiga games to my Steam library so I can play them from Steam on my SteamDeck. What I really miss from playing games like that is the look and feel of the games on modern displays.

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RetroArch on the steamdeck to emulate the Amiga

It's nearing the end of the year. Time to feel nostalgic. I always seem to boot my Amiga around this time. So I thought it would be handy to just run my Amiga games on my Steamdeck attached to the TV.

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restarting a site

So it's been a while since I did anything with my own website. Since I'm now into the Permacomputing philosophy I wanted to get rid of all javascript.

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Some trouble running Ubuntu raring on the Dell e6330 out of the box... here are my solutions.

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It's very handy to have a full featured python 3.3 available in Blender. So this is how how you do that. For linux that is... but it should be sort of similar for Windows and OSX.

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If you're a bit like me and forced into using Windows for certain applications you're probably using RDP in some way. I usually put my RDP client (rdesktop) on a specific desktop and switch desktops using CTRL-ALT-LEFT and CTRL-ALT-RIGHT. You've probably noticed that it doesn't work unless you use '-K keep window manager key bindings' option. But if you do that you can't use ALT-TAB in Windows. Being really bothered about that I have a very simple patch for that. I'd like to treat CTRL-ALT-LEFT and RIGHT as special keys in rdesktop just like CTRL-ALT-TAB.

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According to Debian docs you should be able to do

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Diving into GLSL shaders to create effects supporting visuals I stumbled upon Sean O'neil's work only to find out Martins Upitis already implemented it in Blender's Game Engine.

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unix pipes ng research

You probably know unix pipes right?

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IMHO the documentation on the Debian Wiki is a bit outdated. Here's my way to configuring LDAP client authentication on Debian (Wheezy)

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De future will be all about parallel computing and asynchronous design patterns. So how are we preparing for this? I'm doing some research into this and gathering thoughts and information in here about this subject.

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Debian's initial root filesystem (initrd) is a minimal environment basically responsible for finding your root filesystem on some device in your computer. In this article I'm unwinding what it's composed of and how it is generated so I can use the same mechanisms to place a complete Debian (Emdebian) environment in the initial filesystem removing the need to find the root filesystem device.

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Just a quick guide into installing Emdebian using multistrap. This currently based on Debian Squeeze. Wheezy is not supported yet.

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Ubuntu is getting a bit on my nerves. Time to test Debian testing!

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Like all Debian based distro's it's very easy to boot the installer through PXE. However with Linux Mint this is not the case? Why? I don't know yet but since the installer of Linux Mint is just a live CD using casper we can boot the whole live system with a little help from NFS through PXE

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I've alwasy been happy with the default settings of my webcams but now I got me a situation where the camera tries to refocus in low light conditions. Time for some controlling and since I don't have a gui I need a cli tool. Well just found me one: uvcdynctrl

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Today I needed a simple setup for streaming a camera locally on the network. I could do this with ffmpeg and ffserver and so but that's a whole lot more work than doing this with VLC which has a webserver built-in. Getting the right command line with this was a bit cumbersome however with some digging through the available docs I managed to get the right parameters.

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Just a simple reminder again. This script streams the webcam directly to Justin.tv. Plain simple

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Just a quick note to self. If you run into a certificate error like this with svn:

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We use the postfix MTA for our email needs. We also use our user groups for email. So if you are a member of a group you will receive mail for that group. However replies from a group mail are sent to the sender of the mail and not back to the group. This setup explains how to work around that and so create 'a poor mans' mailinglist setup.

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It's actually quite simple just paste the following code in your setup() method:

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Simple gcc intro reminder with 0mq

Just as a quick reminder and test for a very minimal setup with gcc and the 0mq library. This just compiles a static version of 0mq and runs one of the examples.

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I never work with OSX but my colleagues do. So sometimes I need to help them out. This time we wanted to create an Xcode template for OpenFrameworks with the application project outside of the openFrameworks root. As this templating thing in Xcode is quite undocumented this is kind of a reminder...

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This is a simple guide to setting up a honeypot. A honeypot is a device that captures all traffic. It's usuable for example when you need to quarantaine people on a network or if you have a network without internet and you need to redirect users to a specific website no matter which site they try to visit.

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Since I could hardly find any documentation on using the Redmine REST API with python here are some examples. I wanted to add them to the Redmine Wiki but didn't want to register an account there...

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So the new LTS from Ubuntu has been released. Time to upgrade my laptop as well. But I'm lazy bastard and I don't feel like downloading an iso nor do I have a CD player. So this is an easy hint to start the Ubuntu/Debian net installer from grub.

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Tonight I was just checking out some web source to see what was going wrong on some site. WTF... this is not my source..., I suddenly noticed... Is my server hacked? Is my workstation hacked? This can't be true... But after investigating it's Vodafone who is kind enough to inject material in the websites I visit 8-O...

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Just as an important reminder for myself. Apparently NFS has a limit of 16 groups you can be a member of. I was just investigating why I couldn't write to certain files no more only to discover this nasty limitation.

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Since my first article about an Introduction to python web programming I went exploring frameworks to make it even simpler. I wanted something simple and lightweight and preferably supplied by distributions. There are quite some choices and for this article I explored CherryPy. This led me to some reflection into why even use a framework.... and so the article became mostly an outro to CherryPy...

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It's time to say goodbye to PHP and replace it with Python? This article is a quick intro into two approaches of using python instead of PHP. Yes you can use python embedded in your HTML like with PHP however that approach is for kids and not covered here ;-).

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So I figured I should get myself a new challenge. I work for z25 and we are consolidating the software and tools we use. Blender is one of those beauties we completely embrace. However for realtime usuage Blender is not there yet. So why not help making it better?

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Since I'm experimenting with tools for creating a minimal OS it would be handy to create a harddrive image from a directory. This is possible with a few commands.

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Since about a year I'm investigating more appliance/embedded-like systems. Through all this research I stumbled upon debirf. This simple tool let's you create a full debian os in an initial ramdisk. This is especially handy for fully customised systems aimed at performance and not using harddrives or flash disks.

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Just been trying to get a Logitech Cordless MediaBoard Pro(TM) device working with a linux system (Ubuntu Lucid). I only have what seems a usb bluetooth adapter (made in China) but it isn't doing very stable. At first I just setup the device using the bluetooth-wizard and a few bluetooth restarts. It did say it got connected but I get no input from the device. Generating a lot of input even crashes the bluetooth stack :( and sometimes renders the usb bluetooth dongle unusable until replugged in the computer :S.

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This is a little recipe for configuring freeradius 2 with a ldap backend and some other tricks. Mostly usable for EAP setups. Since I'm trying this out on an old Debian Lenny server I'm using the backports version 2.1.10. So this is based on the fresh install of that version.

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Today I finally found some time to tighten security on an internal LDAP setup only to find my usual procedure doesn't work. Apparently OpenLDAP has GnuTLS support since 2.4 and ofcourse Debian uses this. So here's a quick guide for setting up LDAPS with GnuTLS.

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While I used to install php-syslog-ng (now called Logzilla) I now just use the most simple setup for a syslog server. It looks nice to have a gui but logging everything to mysql is a huge bottleneck for performance. So I rebuild a syslog server which simply logs everything to files. A gui is nice but not nearly as powerful as the command line.

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The ancient FAT filesystem is still used by many manufacturers but with increasing pixel resolutions the files tend to grow bigger and bigger. However FAT(32) is limited to 4GB files. So video recordings are split over multiple files. When you need to edit your recoded footage these seperate files are pain in the ... Best would be to undo the splitting. There is no hard sience involved in splitting the files, I figured, so to undo it would be even more simple. And so it is!

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Sometimes you just can't get your hands on a physical machine. So today I had to resize a live filesystem. No rescue CD's or whatever. It is possible :).

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I couldn't resist posting this. Although it's probably old news by now I do experience this myself when teaching. So it was inspirational to find Sir Ken Robinson putting it all out. Check it out.

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With increasing frequency I find myself reverting to ffmpeg to do video and audio conversion. So for my own reminder a few recipes I collected from my mind and the web:

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A simple setup to see how well streaming from ffmpeg to ustream.tv works.

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I've often been searching for a nice simple Jabber server. Today I was strolling the internet a bit and stumbled upon Prosody. Looking through the docs I noticed I should be able to get it to authenticate agains an LDAP server. So let's give it a shot!

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Today I was wandering the world of encrypted passwords in order to understand how to change a password through standard ldap modify functions. From the shell I was using this command to set the password to 'test':

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OMG, so much time spend on getting this Vodafone K3765 (Huawei) USB dongle to work! I just used the wrong APN. So a hint to everybody: Can't get your 3G/UMTS/HSDPA dongle to work? Make sure you use the right APN. For me the NetworkManager gave me the wrong APN. So here are some right settings at least in The Netherlands:

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Thought projection mapping was something new? Check this from 1984 by Michael Naimark

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I usually use cat in a bash script to create files. However sometimes the text for output through cat is interpreted and this causes script errors or wrong files. Especially with ASCII art output. The fix for this is to quote the 'EOF' string.

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In my searches for an easy way to create a self extracting zip file which would automatically start a command after extract I came across some extra 7zip magic. The following intsructions enables exactly this.

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Always forgetting certain not often used commands. So here's a reminder to set the sticky group bit on a directory so everything created is with same group ownership of the parent directory!

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