Simkin.Org

Category: Uncategorized

  • Windows 7 MCE Eject from Remote

    I have a Mac Mini running Windows 7. There is no physical CD Eject button. So getting a CD out can be a challenge.

    Here is how to solve it:

    1.Download and install LM Keymapper

    2. Edit the default profile for the MCE remote to remap the TELETEXT key to instead perform the single keystroke ` (the button to the left of the number 1)

    3. Download and install CD Eject

    4. Make it run on Windows start and change the shortcut key to `

    5. Press TELETEXT on your remote to make the CD magically eject!

     

    Note: I found by doing this I broke the pause button on the remote, so I remapped it to ^p and that solved it.

  • Despair

    I love those demotivational posters. I like it even more that you can create your own ones.

  • Windows Live Mail to Mozilla Thunderbird

    Finally got sick of Windows Live Mail and the poor IMAP support, especially with talking to GoogleMail. Found some import tools to make the job of moving to Thunderbird a bit less painful.

  • Shifting to Googlemail

    I run my own mailserver and Store-and-Forward server. But getting an iphone means the pain of getting IMAP working or worse still, using POPand having a split-brain email with the iphone and desktop is just getting old.

    So I’ll dump everything into Googlemail. But…..

    I use a load of aliases for incoming mail on my trusty Mercury server. I’m going to need to redo all my alias entries in Mercury to point to my Googlemail account. The mail server will be running a bit longer.

    I may just retire Mercury if I can remember how postfix aliases or virtual alias domains work. Postfix runs on the S&F box. If I write my aliases out there, it can route my mail for me. It will basically be an MX placeholder and hold no actually mailboxes. Mmmm

    Mercury is GUI. It is stable but needs Windows. I’m tempted to see if there is a hosted alternative or a postfix aliases gui…..

    Uploading mail to Gmail via IMAP just keeps failing. There is a useful tool called GML which just might make this work for me. First though I need to run Thunderbird and add a plug-in to put my mail into an MBox file…..

    But in the end I have dropped all my mail into Thunderbird, created an IMAP account and am shifting messages in blocks of 20. That actually works….

  • iPhones & Google Calendars

    I just bought an iphone 3GS 16GB. I’ve lived with my Nokia N95 for a while now and it is very tired. It doesn’t slide open properly and I’ve been getting increasingly annoyed with the poor browser and other apps.

    The iphone on the other hand gives me a decent browser, VNC, Linkedin, Facebook, SSH, Telnet, Logmein etc etc. It also has decent mapping.

    The Calendar support is OK but I wanted to bring my work and home calendars together on one device. Google came to the rescue. Have a look at http://m.google.com and load up your calendar. Sync it using the settings page at http://m.google.com/sync and you can run multiple calendars.

    Google Sync allows me to rip appointments from my work Outlook account to Google. This ensure I don’t double-book myself. I’ve set it read-only for work appointments because I already have Blackberry and Outlook running that and I should not be editing work appointments on a weekend……

    Googlesync does on occasion decide to ignore outlook appointments. Instead I went for gSyncit which just works and gets everything over. It is also a lot more configurable.

    I am now considering if it still makes sense for me to run my own mail server. Googlemail is tempting. It would however mean me throwing all my historic mail at their servers and trusting them to not trawl my archive or lose it all. Decisions, decisions.

  • iPhones & Google Calendars

    I just bought an iphone 3GS 16GB. I’ve lived with my Nokia N95 for a while now and it is very tired. It doesn’t slide open properly and I’ve been getting increasingly annoyed with the poor browser and other apps.
    The iphone on the other hand gives me a decent browser, VNC, Linkedin, Facebook, SSH, Telnet, Logmein etc etc. It also has decent mapping.
    The Calendar support is OK but I wanted to bring my work and home calendars together on one device. Google came to the rescue. Have a look at http://m.google.com and load up your calendar. Sync it using the settings page at http://m.google.com/sync and you can run multiple calendars.
    Google Sync allows me to rip appointments from my work Outlook account to Google. This ensure I don’t double-book myself. I’ve set it read-only for work appointments because I already have Blackberry and Outlook running that and I should not be editing work appointments on a weekend……
    Googlesync does on occasion decide to ignore outlook appointments. Instead I went for gSyncit which just works and gets everything over. It is also a lot more configurable.
    I am now considering if it still makes sense for me to run my own mail server. Googlemail is tempting. It would however mean me throwing all my historic mail at their servers and trusting them to not trawl my archive or lose it all. Decisions, decisions.

  • Another Media plugin for MCE

    “MyMovies” works fine. Well sort of. “Media Browser” works better. When accompanied by the excellent “meta</browser>” finally my DVD collection can get tidied up and linked to imdb. Hooray. Thanks Skip!

  • You have to mention Twitter

    ..or else you are not “in” at the moment.

    I’m a bit sceptical. For famous faces it is a chance to appeal directly to their audience in arbitrarily concise format. Stephen Fry is a great amabassador simply because many people admire his intellect countered by the school-boy charm with which he views life’s idiosyncrasies.

    Following Lance Armstrong in his journey to reclaim past glories on his bike is also compelling for those keep to see how he is coping getting back into the swing of things. After all, how many weekend cyclists would love to get a free tip from the master on how they can improve their cycling and enjoy it more in the process?

    Finally, comedians offer the chance to get a more sanguine version of the cartoon strip we turn to in the morning paper. Why read imaginary when their twist on otherwise mundane events can hit a finer note. But are they not supposed to not be funny all the time? So what do the readers get out of it? The comedians get to try new material without stepping on a physical stage however so it works for them.  Though for the legendary John Cleese, it is simply a way of letting his sublime mind unfold the world before us.

    The dark underbelly of all this of course is the platform it gives the politician, TV presenter and pop culture personalities who spout drivel or obvious rhetoric as befits their role in society. I’m guessing that a lot of the material is written for them. Those that do write their own stuff would be profound by their fallibility and interesting due the insight it gives the “Hello!” reading public into their real lives. But how can you tell ?

    I feel that Stephen Fry is not the sort to con his viewers/readers for whom he seems to have a genuine affection. Lance is unlikely to have a publicist writing his copy because he has a genuine cause to talk about – his cancer charity, as well as enough people talking him down that breaking through the media and directly reaching real people works well for him. Twitter also allows his supporters to keenly cheer him on, drowning out the voices of dissent. Good job.

    So I’m a bit unsure. I’m going to dip into three pages now and again to see what the fuss is all about and maybe get a fix for what has annoyed Lance this week, the fantastic mind of Neil Gaiman and exactly what Stephen has got himself into now….

    Lance Armstrong

    Neil Gaiman

    Stephen Fry

  • Another DVD Ripping Tool

    As regulare readers will know, I rip my DVDs to my trusty Thecus NAS and watch them in the living room via Vista Media Centre and a plug-in called “MyMovies”. Well, I recently hit a snag.

    The Dark Knight defeated all attempts at being ripped.

    After a bit of research, I found a tool called “AnyDVD”. This tool sits between the DVD driver and other applications and fixes duff sectors and in this case, broken VOBs. Leaving a region-free, valid DVD image for the ripping tool of choice to work from. I use RipIt4Me and DVDecrypter.

    I do not in any way condone DVD piracy. Howver, being able to watch the film you own in a variety of formats at home is fine in my view. MY DVD is safely on the shelf. The Dark Knight is available with a few button presses of the remote. No trawling through the DVD menu – just play the movie with the best audio track pre-selected. No DVD noise when playing. No fumbling to get the disc out. No risk of scratches. Perfect.

    Get your own copy of AnyDVD here.

  • Cloning VirtualBox

    After reading that cloning VirtualBox VMs is difficult I thought I had better work out how to do it. Because if I’m going to use VM technology I need to be able to move them around the home network and back them up. The basic concepts are:

    We can copy a VDI as it is basically just a Windows file on the host machine. VDIs are VirtualBox Disk Images are image files that can hold a Virtual Machine.

    VirtualBox has a bunch of settings that explain how to launch the VM within a VDI. We need to recreate these and point it at the VDI to get a working VirtualBox.

    But…. You can’t start two machines with the same UUID. So there is a command to fix that.

    My method:

    c:
    cd "c:\program files\sun\xVM VirtualBox"
    copy "\VDI\Windows XP Server.vdi" "\VDI\Clone.vdi"
    VBoxManage internalcommands setvdiuuid \VDI\Clone.vdi

    So I basically copy the VDI (with the VirtualMachine turned off) and give it a new UUID. This works except I still have to fire-up the VirtualBox gui, create a new VM with the same settings as the master VM but rather than create a new VDI, I choose the new clone.vdi.

    What I want to do next is be able to pause the master VM, script the Copy, UUID, creation of the new VM. Luckily VirtualBox has the same command set available on Windows that the less gui-friendly OSes use. Hooray.

    I also need to script automatically starting and stopping VMs. In effect I can run an XP host which on startup can launch a bunch of VMs. Ideally it should all be able to gracefully shutdown.

    I know ESX does this better but I have some non-ESX firendly hardware in my stack and I would like to just build them as XP hosts and get all the benefits that virtualisation gives but on the cheap. So far it is looking good.

    I am also currently just running on a local disk. Running with a VDI over the LAN seems like inviting trouble but creating cloned backups on a remote disk does seem like a really easy way to do a fool-proof backup.

    I also need to get my head around allowing VMs access to the real LAN as I will want to run web servers for example on these VMs and default network settings disallow this due to the funky NAT that is in use. I guess I’m going to have to work through the command line Port forwarding…