calum.org Accept, or change

Well, life has a funny way of working. I had planned to take more time, and be more choosy when buying a laptop, but something came up, which meant I had to get one fast.

So I plumped for the Acer TravelMate 5720, with 4GB RAM, ordered from eBuyer, who a: I've used before, and b:, seemed to be the cheapest.

And it's a good-'un.

So. The time has come for me to buy a laptop. I want it for coding, development, and various other bits and bobs. And of course, I have no intention of running anything other than Linux on it.

I'm sure we've all suffered from this at some time.
You've got access to a machine on the internet, and a friend of yours has offered to sort out some of your CSS, but a firewall protecting the server blocks his IP?

This example uses SSH, but it will work with anything, TCP, UDP, ICMP, etc.

Answer - use IPTables to let him bounce off your machine.

iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -s your.friend -p tcp --dport 1 -j DNAT --to de.st.ip.address:22
iptables -I FORWARD -s your.friend -d de.st.ip.address -j ACCEPT

As the browser is one of the most common points of entry into a system, it makes sense to do everything that is possible to secure it.

Any sane user will never browse the web as root (or an account with Administrator access in Windows*), as any malware would then be able to do anything on the whole machine.

* This is insane. If you do it, you deserve everything you get.

So, in Linux, of course I use my normal user account, and trust in the fact that Linux, on an AMD64 processor is fairly safe.

Well, my Hauppauge HVR1110 card (that was sold as an HVR1100) is working in Linux.

To cut to the quick, here are the steps you need to follow:

Build and install a normal kernel (with DVB and v4l stuff selected as modules).

hg clone http://linuxtv.org/hg/v4l-dvb #(you might need to install mercurial - a cvs replacement)
cd v4l-dvb && make && make install

Grab some firmware:

DVB_CARDS="tda1004x" emerge -v media-tv/linuxtv-dvb-firmware

Reboot (optional, but suggested).

Then, when it comes back:

modprobe -v saa7134 card=104 && modprobe -v saa7134_dvb
  

Note: For the answer, see HVR1110 working in Linux

I decided to get with the 21st century, and buy a Digital TV card, to use with MythTV.

Bitten before, I researched what cards were supported in the Linux kernel natively, and found out that the HVR 1100 by Hauppauge was in the kernel.

cd /usr/src/linux ; grep -ir hvr1100 *

So I nipped off to PC World, and bought one. £49.99. Couldn't go wrong, I thought.

So I took it home, and plugged it in. lspci didn't show it, apart from

The post that started it all:

From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?
Summary: small poll for my new operating system
Message-ID: <1991Aug25.205708.9541@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki

Hello everybody out there using minix -
  

Like everyone, spam (or UCE - unsolicited commercial email) is the bane of my life.

If you run your own Postfix SMTP server however, there are lots of things you can do to stop it. This is a little crib sheet of what I do on most of my servers (as much for my ease-of-access as for other people).

Why do I use Postfix?
It's securely designed, has human-readable config, and is kept up to date.

People still, in 2006, seem to think that Linux has a problem with audio, video, ripping, compressing, converting, etc. No, people, no. For videos/dvd playing/dvd encoding, I use MPlayer. It's a command line player (don't freak out just yet), and it plays everything I can throw at it.

To play the first track on a DVD:

mplayer dvd://1

. Tricky eh.

Ever wished you could get a Radio 4 comedy program in OGG or MP3 format, but all they have is streamable Real Audio? Follow these simple instructions, and your wish will be granted.

Dump the stream to a file. (Note - you won't see any output while it is doing this, so you'll need to check the size of the output file to make sure it's working. It will exit when it has finished though.)