MythNetTV-Status Page

I wrote a little script the other day so I could sporadically check on the progress and last downloaded shows of mythnettv on my mythtv-box.  The package “mythnettv-gui” sets up a nice cronjob that creates a log file, which my script uses to deliver the information. You can download the script here.

All you have to do is put the script in place and tell your system with crontab -e to execute it every now and then:

# m h  dom mon dow   command

* * * * * /usr/local/bin/mythnetstatus.py

For the lazy reader here is a complete set of commands, just copy-paste in a terminal to download and set everything up:

wget http://content.wuala.com/contents/Eubolist_/www/mythnetstatus.zip?dl=1 && mv mythnetstatus.zip?dl=1 mythnetstatus.zip && unzip mythnetstatus.zip && sudo mv mythnetstatus.py /usr/local/bin && sudo cp var/www/mythnettv-status /var/www && rm -Rf var && crontab -l > cron.tmp && echo “* * * * * /usr/local/bin/mythnetstatus.py” >> cron.tmp && crontab cron.tmp && rm cron.tmp

Python Script: Merge and sort multiple RSS Feed items in one Feed

In my first blog post a while back I wrote about showrss and how to concatenate multiple tv-shows into one personalized rss feed.

I’ve been using their service for about a year now and am quite happy with it. Sadly though, despite multiple requests, they haven’t included National Geographic and Discovery Channel documentaries yet. So today I took the time and wrote customfeed, a little python script that is able to fetch multiple feeds, sort the items and concatenate them in the right order to a new feed. Although I wrote the script for use with ezRSS feeds, it should work just as well with any other feeds (might need some little modifications or tweaks though).

The script depends on python-feedparser, so make sure you have that one installed:

sudo aptitude install python-feedparser

or:

sudo easy_install feedparser

The most convenient way is to set up a cronjob that executes customfeed.py every few hours or so. Mine looks like this:

24 */6 * * * /usr/local/bin/customfeed.py

A simple way to enable .py Python CGI scripts on Lighttpd (“Lighty”) webserver on Ubuntu

After multiple, failed, attempts with mod_fastcgi I found a simple three step solution to enable python scripts on my webserver:

1. sudo ln -s /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/10-cgi.conf /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled/
2. Add the following section to your /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf file:
   ### Python Config ###
   cgi.assign = (
   “.py” => “/usr/bin/python”
   )
3. Restart lighty: sudo /etc/init.d/lighttpd restart
   
   
   
   

That should do the trick. As it says in the title, this is a simple and painless way to enable Python CGI scripts on lighty.

AnkiMiniSync Version 0.1, an ‘offline’ sync script for AnkiMini (on the iPad)

Since I didn’t want to use the Anki Online service to sync AnkiMini on my jailbroken iPad and Anki on my Laptop I always had to copy the recent version from/to my iPad over ssh (sshfs). To automate that task a bit and save me some time I wrote this little sync script. It basically compares the two .anki decks in the local and the remote folder and replaces the older with the newer version. It does however -NOT- read the .anki file and merge the files properly. That means you can only work on one machine and then have to sync before you start working on the other one. It also means working on more than one mobile device is not possible (well, it’s possible but you’ll lose data through the sync process).

There are still some restrictions in this first version:

-Your username and directory where the Anki deck is stored must not contain any whitespaces (will be hopefully be solved in v.0.2)

-You can only sync one deck at a time (functionality to sync whole folders is planned for v.0.2)

-The .anki folder must be directly in the mounted directory of the sshfs volume

-You should have public key authentification turned on

-As far as I know this script only works on *nix systems, I have only tested it on OSX so far

If you encounter any bugs or problems besides the above don’t hesitate and write a comment! Don’t write any bug reports in the Anki support forums or to the developers of Anki (or AnkiMini), they have nothing to do with this.

Contributions to the code are always welcome of course. You are also allowed to use the code or parts of the code anywhere else, though it’d be nice to notify me somewhere along the way.

Link to ankiminisync-0.1.py

Howto: Create a bootable Linux USB flash drive (USB-stick) in Mac OSX

For Windows and Linux there’s UNetbootin, in OSX you have to rely on the terminal to create your USB flash drive.

Step 1: Download the image of the distro you want to use. In my case XUbuntu 10.04.

Step2: If there is data that you still need on your flash drive, save it on your desktop or somewhere else on your harddrive. I created a folder ‘Data’ on my desktop.

Step3: Open a terminal and type in mount . This should give you a list of mounted drives on your Mac, like this:

eubolists-macbook-pro:~ eubolist$ mount

/dev/disk0s2 on / (hfs, local, journaled)

devfs on /dev (devfs, local, nobrowse)

map -hosts on /net (autofs, nosuid, automounted, nobrowse)

map auto_home on /home (autofs, automounted, nobrowse)

/dev/disk0s3 on /Volumes/BOOTCAMP (fusefs, local, synchronous)

/dev/disk1s2 on /Volumes/Time Machine-Backups (hfs, local, nodev, nosuid, journaled)

/dev/disk3 on /Volumes/8GB DRIVE (msdos, local, nodev, nosuid, noowners) <– This is the one we want

Step 4: Unmount the drive: diskutil umountDisk /dev/disk3 Of course you may have to change disk3 to whatever disk your flash drive is.

Step 5: Write the image: dd if=/Users/eubolist/Downloads/xubuntu-10.04-desktop-i386.iso of=/dev/disk3 bs=1m

Again, change the command as needed. The path to your image is in all probability different as well as the path to your flash drive.

Now you should see the light of your flash drive flashing and after a while an output that looks similar like the following:

681+1 records in
681+1 records out
714168320 bytes transferred in 225.925632 secs (3161077 bytes/sec)

If that’s the case, congrats! You should have a bootable flash drive now. If you want to, you can create another partition if you have enough space and put the data saved earlier in Step 2 back on your usb drive now.

NOTE: If you have an older PC it might still not boot from your flash drive, even if you did everything well. Some older BIOSes just don’t support booting from USB flash drives.

Spirit – the jailbreak for the iPad

Today the Dev-Team has released their latest stroke of genius: Spirit is the name of the latest untethered jailbreak for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. Before you jailbreak your device you should take two steps:

1. Save the SHSH blob of your device. To do so you either have to download the necessary tool for Windows or Mac or edit your hosts file (/etc/hosts) to point “gs.apple.com” to “74.208.10.249″ (Saurik’s server)
2. Perform a full backup with iTunes! Especially if you’re trying to jailbreak your iPad – the whole procedure as well as Cydia on iPad is still considered beta.

Then go to http://spiritjb.com/ and download the jailbreak application for Mac or Windows. The jailbreak itself is as easy as one single click.

Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04 LTS is out!!

Download the newest Ubuntu long term support (LTS) release on http://releases.ubuntu.com/releases/10.04/. If possible choose a torrent download to save Canonical some server bandwidth and you some time.

Tests about the new Ubuntu will be on my blog soon!

How to download / buy iPad Apps that are unavailable outside the U.S.

That was a big buzzkill yesterday at first: After I unwrapped the iPad and did the first few touches on its beautiful glistening screen, I had to realize that in my country the App Store for the iPad is unavailable until the official launch (whenever that will be…).

A solution was quickly found, with a $ gift card or certificate you can open an account in the US-Apple Store. I just opened another account on an address of a relative in the US. For everyone who isn’t lucky enough to have a relative or friend in the states you can open it  to an imaginary address. Although I have no idea how legal or illegal that is, so you might want to check that first before doing something illicit. I won’t write any stupid disclaimer here, you’re a big boy/girl.

These gift cards can be acquired on eBay, just do a search on your local eBay site. Searching for “US apple gift certificate” on ebay.co.uk should give you similar results like this:

Search results

If you don’t want to wait for your code take a vendor who scans the codes and mails it to you – worked pretty well for me, I had the code in less than 15 minutes.

Next step is, after changing the country by accepting the terms and condition of the US, to enter your coupon code next to “REDEEM COUPON CODE” or similar and select “none” under the payment methods.

That’s it, you should be able to have access to all the sweet iPad apps available now! Have fun and keep this trick in mind for future Apple products.

Google adds site speed as a factor in PageRank

Google announced on their official webmaster central blog that they have added the speed (=how fast a website loads for the end user) as a factor in their calculations for a site’s page rank.

Google state in their blog that this change will only affect “fewer than 1% of the search queries”. Given that Google has about 91’000’000 search queries a day, “fewer than 1%” is still “fewer than 910’000″ search queries – which is quite a lot.

If you own a webserver on your own, like me, you may be worried that websites of you / y0ur customers might be negatively affected by the change. But don’t panic: Testing and improving the speed of your websites is actually very simple.

• Step 1: Install FireBug, a FireFox extension.
• Step 2: Install Page Speed, an extension for FireBug.
• Step 3: Test the websites you wish to improve and follow the instructions of FireBug/Page Speed (=adjust code or webserver config).

See, that wasn’t that difficult, was it?

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) Beta 2 released

Ubuntu 10.04 Beta 2 Has just been released. Why don’t you head over to http://releases.ubuntu.com/10.04/ and download a copy?

If you want to upgrade your existing Ubuntu installation to the newest Beta version type “gksu update-manager -d” in a terminal.