Jeremy Sands

Res publica non dominetur

The Lost Art of the Friday Work Whistle

Call it the 5 o’clock whistle. The 5 o’clock send off. The weekend blastoff. The weekend work whistle. The Friday work whistle. Whatever. The point is, hardly anybody does this anymore, and it’s a shame. Below are the ONLY specimens I can find that aren’t some lame DJ blowing a referee’s whistle… but REAL Friday work whistles. Enjoy!

[EDIT: Update:  Fixed download link and switched bitlocker so it shouldn’t be deleted again!]

It contains all the following:
1) WMXT 102.1 The Fox — Florence, SC — Better start, more music.

2) WROQ Rock 101.1 — Greenville, SC — Longer, more mixed in clips.

3) WKLS 96Rock — Atlanta, GA — The predecessor to 102.1’s version.

4) WHTZ Z-100 — New York City, NY — The version they did in 1984!

5) NEW!! Adam Curry – The Daily Source Code – Fubar Friday (short)

6) NEW!! WNKS KISS 95.1 — Charlotte, NC – Weekend Blast (short)

7) NEW!! WKLS Project 961 — Atlanta, GA — The ALL NEW version airing currently!

Mega Link — Click Here To Download Them ALL!

How to change your shell in Linux and using RSYNC to clone and migrate drives

I frequently use SysRescueCD to perform a variety of tasks.   In this case I was wanting to clone a hard drive onto a new SSD.   However, the default shell in SysRescueCD is zsh, and it doesn’t interpret commands how I’m use to.   To change shell:

chsh -s $(which bash)

You will need to logout or open a new shell for that change to take effect.   Now, the magic rsync one liner to clone drive 1 to drive 2 …

cd /mnt/YourOldDrive ; rsync -aAXv ./* /mnt/YourNewDrive –exclude={/dev/*,/proc/*,/sys/*,/tmp/*,/run/*,/mnt/*,/media/*,/lost+found,/home/*/.gvfs}

How to type special characters easily in KDE

One of the niftier but lesser known features it Windows is the ability to use Alt Code Sequences to type special characters, such as accented letters.   Anybody who has done work in a foreign language on a computer knows the value of having this functionality.   Good news … KDE allows you to do this but even easier and more intuitive than the cumbersome Windows “Alt + 130” style.   Here’s how:

Go into KDE System Settings.   Go to Input Devices.  With Keyboard selected on the left, choose the advanced tab on the right.   Under “Compose key position”, select which key you want to use as the equivalent of the Windows alt key.   I recommend using the Left Win key.   After selecting your desired key, Apply the changes.

Now you can type special characters by holding your Compose Key, then typing the relevant sequence.   Some examples:

?? = ¿
!! = ¡
‘e = é
‘a = á
‘i = í
‘o = ó
‘u = ú
~n = ñ
(c = ©
(r = ®

A full list of these sequences can be found here.

A ham radio operator’s guide to the 2011 SouthEast LinuxFest

Simplex Talk In:  146.520

 

Major Local Repeaters:

147.315+ (Net every Monday/Friday at 8:30 PM)
Operated by SPARC – Moderate signal, but very close to hotel.

442.075+ (Net every Thursday, 8:30 PM)
Operated by SPARC

147.165+ (Net every Thursday at 9:00 PM)
Operated by GARS – Moderate signal, but far enough away to require an good antenna on HTs

146.610- (Net every night at 9:00 PM)
Operated by BRARS – Superb signal, long distance reach, linked to EchoLink.

Echolink Node 551672 (W4NYK-R)
Operated by BRARS and linked to 146.610- repeater.

145.190- (Net every Saturday at 9 PM)
Operated by WCARS – Superb signal and incredible reach across several states – Located on Mount Mitchell, Highest 2 meter repeater in Eastern America. The net is called the 6600 net, referring to the elevation of Mt. Mitchell.

Club Links, with additional lesser used repeaters:
BRARS – http://www.brars.org
SPARC – http://www.spartanburgamateurradioclub.org/
GARS – http://www.w4gwd.org/
WCARS – http://www.wcars.org/

Dual booting Windows 7 and Linux

Traditionally, if I have the time, I nuke all those little insignificant partitions that come on a HP/Dell/Acer/etc with Windows pre-installed when I partition up the hard drive for installation.

Pro-Tip: Don’t delete the first tiny partition if it’s a Windows 7 machine. It’s important, and stuff.

Luckily, I didn’t delete it … but when I tried to launch Windows 7 by selecting the huge ntfs partition in Grub, I got a Windows boot error about a required partition that was missing. You instead have to boot off the small partition.

LIRC ignores delay, repeat, config file

So, LIRC started acting up on you? You have a problem with buttons being hypersensitive and repeating many times? LIRC ignores you telling it to disable repeat? When you run the command “irw” … nothing happens?

Well, here’s the bizarre and almost undocumented fix. Apparently the kernel has decided it can handle RC-6 (infrared protocol) directly without lirc processing. Woopsie! Run this command as root:

echo none +lirc > /sys/class/rc/rc0/protocols

If that works, have it run on startup via /etc/rc.d/local.start or similar (check your distribution’s documentation).

A ham radio operator’s guide to the 2010 Ohio Linuxfest

Linux In The Ham Shack – Ohio Linuxfest Booth – Talk-In
Simplex: 146.520 MHz

Ohio State University Amateur Radio Club
Repeater: 442.6 MHz (shift: +5 Mhz, PL/CTCSS: 114.8 Hz)

West Central Ohio Amateur Radio Association
Repeater: 145.110 MHz (Dayton and Columbus), Cross-band link: 224.160

University of Cincinnati Amateur Radio Club
Repeater: 147.060+ MHz – 100Hz PL

Southwest Columbus Amateur Radio Club
Repeater: 145.230, (Cross-band link? 444.100)
Net every Friday, 8PM

OH-KY-IN Amateur Radio Society
146.670- (CTCSS 123 Hz), 146.925- (CTCSS 123 Hz), 146.625- (CTCSS 123 Hz)

Dayton FM Group
Repeater: 224.680 MHz, 443.600 MHz, Echolink Node 298502

Capital City Repeater Association
Repeater: 147.24+ (CTCSS 179.9)
NOTE: Do not use break unless it’s for emergency, give call sign to interject conversation.

How to redirect to and from SSL in Apache

So … you have an e-commerce checkout page or a secure login thusly giving you the need to have an SSL page. But you don’t want people then staying in SSL the whole time, and adding an additional burden to your servers, do you? Here’s the simple solution, using mod_rewrite. The following two code snippets go into your apache virtualhost config files. This varies quite a bit by distro, but in Gentoo they’re in /etc/apache2/vhosts.d/

For the SSL virtualhost, add the following (between its tags obviously…)

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} on
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} !^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /(.*)TheEndOfTheURLOfPageToRedirect\.html\ HTTP/ [NC]
RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [R]

This will redirect down from SSL all pages except those precious SSL needed pages. Just add additional lines like the 3rd if you have multiple pages that need SSL.

Now add the following to the regular non-SSL Virtualhost entry for the same site:


RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !on
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /(.*)TheEndOfTheURLOfPageToRedirect\.html\ HTTP/ [NC]
RewriteRule ^/(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [R]