Tags: insanity

Joe and I have been eating broth every Monday for a while now. Unfortunately, the broth is becoming more boring every week as we fail to find new things to put in it.

Tags: random

I walked to the shops earlier. I took my mp3 player with me, which I haven’t used in a while. I keep all local copies of my (new) music in Ogg Vorbis or FLAC, which means that when I transfer to my mp3 player, I have to convert the tracks. Previously, I’ve bashed together a shell script that does the conversion, but today was different. Today I got graphical.

I had a quick search for audio converters for GNOME, and found AudioFormat and audio-convert-mod. audio-convert-mod is in the Fedora repos, so I used that. It was surprisingly enjoyable. It automatically detected the encoders and decoders that were available on my system:

The program takes the form of a wizard, which first asks for the files to convert, then the format to convert to, and the destination directory. Then it converts them. That’s it, no hassle.

R.

Tags: GNOME, linux, tools

I sent my “sendkey” script to Ivor. This script automates the injection of one’s ssh public key into a remote host’s authorized_keys file (to allow password-less login). It didn’t work very well when Ivor ran it. I’ve now updated the script:

#!/bin/bash                                                                     

KEY=`cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub`

ssh $1 bash <<EOF                                                                                                                               
mkdir -p ~/.ssh
chmod u=rwx,g=,o= ~/.ssh                      
echo $KEY >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
chmod u=rw,g=,o= ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
EOF

It can be run like this:

% ./sendkey remoteusername@remotehost

15/02/2007 Update: I fixed the script so that it made the .ssh directory first… kind of important.

29/02/2007 Update: Klaus pointed out that it might be useful to write how to generate one’s ssh keys:

/usr/bin/ssh-keygen -t rsa -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa -N ''

Tags: hacking, linux, tools

It’s only a few months late, but we released the Student Robotics hardware at about 4 AM last Friday:

From left to right: The slug (nslu2), power board, motor controller, jointio board (analogue in, digital i/o), Servo PWM board.

Now these robots can actually get built :-)

Tags: Robotics

There’s a category on wikipedia for “Star Trek articles that need to differentiate between fact and fiction”. One day there’ll be a category for Star Trek articles that have become fact…

Tags: random