When I plan a cycling trip I search for tracks in the target area and try to maximize the “fun factor”. Thus I often end up with a bunch of tracks from which I want to use parts. The difficult task is to cut, sometime reverse and combine the source tracks into a planned track. Most of the times this seems a too much waste of time since it involves a number of operations in qlandkarte (cutting and combining) and gpsbabel (reversing)....
Do you still have your first computer? Your first laptop? As years go by we tend to accumulate a lot of old hardware which, at least in our mind, hold some value, at least a sentimental one. Yes, I still have my first laptop but I also have many generations of hardware of all types in between. How can I throw away that server which I used for 3 years, it must be still usable somehow!...
This weekend was cloudy and it rained so I decided to give some more time to play with my android phone. Even since I got the phone some time ago I tried on several occasions to do some fun development on it but it never seemed quite fun as expected so beside some play with the sensors, gps and camera I did not do much. However this time I was decided to do a different kind of test....
This weekend, being stranded inside by the rain I tried to help a friend with a small flex (flash) application. The code looked very simple and I could not understand the problem. On a non-US keyboard flash seemed to ignore all special chars (like @, #) in a basic text field. After some research I found this very, very ugly and old bug laying around since FF 2. It seems it had been corrected sometime and then lost again and there is no solution for it other than setting the wmode parameter to window....
This is a simple script which automatically backups files modified in the last n days on a usb stick. It can be run from cron and will require the usb stick to be present only at backup times: <pre lang="bash">#!/bin/bash USB_DEV=/dev/sdb1 MOUNT_POINT=/media/backupusb DAYS=60 SYNC_DIR=/home/tomcat/backup/ find $SYNC_DIR -mtime +$DAYS | sed "s|$SYNC_DIR||" > $SYNC_DIR/exclude mount $USB_DEV $MOUNT_POINT if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then mkdir -p $MOUNT_POINT/backup rsync -rtDxL --safe-links --delete --exclude-from=$SYNC_DIR/exclude --delete-excluded --modify-window=1 -vP $SYNC_DIR $MOUNT_POINT/backup/ umount $MOUNT_POINT else echo Could not mount $USB_DEV on $MOUNT_POINT fi Some explanation on the rsync params:...
Since I started paying some attention to the photos I make the display calibration issue recurrently came into question. I tinkered as much as I could with xgamma mostly with bad results. This weekend however I could borrow a Spider 3 device and I played with dispcalGUI and argyll. There is not much I could say because the doc on the respective sites is great so after some wait I managed to get and ....
This is a simple script which reverses the direction of a gps track stored in a gpx file: <pre lang="bash">#!/bin/bash gpsbabel -t -i gpx -f $1 -x transform,rte=trk,del -o gpx -F 1.$1 gpsbabel -t -i gpx -f 1.$1 -x reverse -o gpx -F 2.$1 gpsbabel -t -i gpx -f 2.$1 -x transform,trk=rte,del -o gpx -F rev.$1 rm 1.$1 2.$1 will generate a rev.file.gpx from file.gpx Comments: Gon - Apr 5, 2015 However the timestamps will be now in a wrong time order… It would be cool to be able to maintain the time gaps between trackpoints together with the start/end times....
Going on trip, one of the questions I asked myself is: should I pack a laptop, a gps, a camera? Now a new question: can a smartphone replace all these gadgets on a trip? The answer, based on my experience with my HTC Desire, Android based phone, is: yes, it can replace a laptop and a gps device on a city trip, but… Let me explain what I mean while I wait for my plane....
Sometimes people ask me technical questions: can this be done? I always try to answer to everyone as best as possible. But sometimes this leads to lot and lot of work. Why? Because some questions cannot be answered without actually doing them and for software development, building on a mountain of bricks built by other people the results can be uncertain. Then there are 2 choices: either consider the analysis a project in itself, as it is natural or consider it presales or work for free....
All you hear about the next big improvement in Linux distributions seems to be screen oriented: “It will have a new button which will be more Mac like”. I don’t say that having a button to click isn’t nice but don’t forget the power of the command line. Take the following example: “you need to print 50 pdf files in a folder”. You can either open them one by one in evince and print them (1 click to open, one for the print icon print, one to click ok * 50) or you can issue a single command which does this job while you read the next review on linux usability:...