Run

sudo touch /forcefsck

Next time you boot, the file system will be checked.

So I upgraded to Thunderbird 3 some time ago. It has nice new features, like the grouped folders. Anyway, there are a few things that annoyed me too; one of them being the fact that whenever someone sends a mail to me and some other people, only the first recipient was displayed, with a “more…” button next to it. The settings unfortunately do not allow to turn this behaviour off, but there’s a hack to do this (maybe in the future, they’ll include a setting…)  Read the rest of this entry »

So I decided it’s time to build a HTPC so I can record TV and also use time shifting when watching live TV.

I’ve tried several products, be it software packages or whole linux distributions, including Windows Media Center, Apple Front Row, vdr, c’t-vdr, yavdr, freevo and mythTV. That last one I liked most by what it offered, so I gave it a try. I stumbled upon many things on my way though. I’ll write down the ones I remember here, perhaps it’ll help someone some day. Read the rest of this entry »

The problem

Did you ever want to install a font on your Mac that’s on a SMB share, for example on a Windows/Unix server? Did you experience the font was broken somehow, being displayed in the finder as “unix executable file” with 0kb size?

We had this issue here often, finally I figured out why this happens.
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The most common solution is pressing the eject key on the keyboard.

If that fails for some reason (in my case the key was not working properly) you could always drag the DVD icon to the trash or right-click (ctrl-click) it and click “eject” – as long as there is a CD or DVD in the drive. But what if it’s empty and you want to insert a disc?

Open a terminal window (Terminal.app) and type drutil tray eject. To close type drutil tray close accordingly.

My boss is working with tons of mails every day. Part of his workflow is to use the “followup” -> “add reminder..:” function in the right-click menu of messages. When I upgraded his Outlook from 2003 to 2007, he asked why that function was gone. I did some investigation, including a phone call at Microsoft tech support, and found out the following:

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I use a little tool to manage my MP3s called “MP3 tag tools“. It’s quite powerful, it allows you to mass edit some or all ID3 tag fields, fill them from a file name scheme and vice versa (create folder structures and/or file names from the ID3 tag fields). Now when I recently cleaned up my collection using that tool, I noticed that I had about 400 double entries. I just didn’t notice before because the file names were different. Now as this tool tried to rename the files and put them in the appropiate subfolders, it threw error messages that existing files can’t be overwritten.

So I had 400 files that I could safely delete, which I did. Now I had 400 dead entries in the iTunes library (marked with a !) which I wanted to get rid of easily. Apparently, iTunes does not have a function to remove dead/broken entries, I’d have to try to play every song from my playlist so iTunes would mark all missing entries and then… then what? iTunes doesn’t even let me sort by the ! column. That’s really stupid.

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Recently, I had a support query where a colleague had three “Flash Player” items in the open with menu when he right clicked onto a .swf file and I was asked to remove them. I learnt that it’s not as easy as it often is with Windows, where every file extension has an entry in the registry which you could edit. Mac OS X uses the so called LaunchServices database to assign applications to file types.
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These are my post-installation steps in Fedora 10.

After I read that Fedora 10 is out on heise.de, I thought, let’s give it a try. Here I’ll describe what I did to set up the fresh install for my needs.
Note: I installed Fedora 10 from the full i386 DVD (not live CD!) on my HP 2510p notebook, just in case you’re interested about hardware.

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Today I experienced one of these problems: My colleague in Berlin had that external hard disk drive. It was connected to a Buffalo TeraStation (that’s a NAS, sort of, with a super small linux). It was used as a backup drive there.

Now the TeraStation was horribly, almost hilariously damaged. It couldn’t be accessed from Windows machines anymore because the smb.conf was completely empty. I could edit it with vi (you don’t have vim on that minilinux) and save, nothing would happen. I could also echo stuff > smb.conf – it would always stay 0 bytes in size. Yes, I was root, I was owner, smb.conf had 777, everything. Whatever, that’s not my point here. Just as advice: NEVER EVER BUY SUCH CRAP!

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