Blog

  • Sometimes you want to preserve file permissions under subdirectories in linux with ACLs but that’s not the whole story. If you want multiple users to be able to read and write to these files, and the group permissions to stay correct, you need to set ACLs and also group +s on the subdirectories. This is…

    Set group permissions for whole subdirectory with ACLs
  • For a long time I have wanted a bedside clock that would keep accurate time via some external mechanism, and would take care of daylight savings automatically. I eventually decided that the best approach would be to use a wifi enabled device and use the NTP protocol for keeping the time accurate. After wasting several…

    LED Clock Project
  • My new uranium mug isn’t radioactive

    My uranium mug is not radioactive
  • Sometimes you might need to copy a whole directory from a remote host, but the remote host does not have enough space to tar the whole thing up and then sftp it off. The solution is to tar/bzip the directory and stream it directly to your local host: ssh root@remotehost ‘tar cjf – /path/to/somedirectory’ |…

  • I’ve been on a quest to find a good remote for MythTV. My first try was with a Logitech Harmony. Those things are nasty horrible pieces of crap. I’d never touch one again. Programming it is a nightmare. It does not have a generic PVR option so you have to fake it to make it…

    HP MediaSmart IR Remote for MythTV
  • I’ve been testing out FreeSWITCH and FusionPBX. I found it non trivial to install in debian. Here are my tips for installing. Don’t bother with the install script. I found it to be broken. And when it breaks during install, it leaves you in a state that’s very hard to understand and fix. In the…

  • I needed to allow access to my Dashing dashboard over ssl from the Internet.  I decided to proxy it behind Apache and get Apache to do all the SSL heavy lifting, mainly because I couldn’t work out if and how you could enable SSL within Dashing itself. It turned out to be quite simple to…

  • Our heated towel rail’s brackets broke from old ages recently. After investigating getting a new towel rail and finding out they were quite expensive, I decided to try and design and 3D print new brackets for it. The first cut of the design turned out to have too little space for the nuts. A second…

    3D Printed Heated Towelrail Brackets
  • Have you ever wanted to give several users permission to work on files within a directory, but then struggled with what permissions and user:group ownership to set them to so users can always edit the files? You might think the solution is to make the parent directory owned by a common group, lets say dev,…

  • Hack A Day has a great article introducing FreeCAD. FreeCAD is a parametric 3D modeler. Parametric modeling allows you to easily modify your design by going back into your model history and changing its parameters. FreeCAD is open source (LGPL license) and completely modular, allowing for very advanced extension and customization. There are several great things about…