Pictures

 When taking the bus to the train station after work today I decided to get off a few stops early go go and check out a local graveyard. I'm rather pleased with some of the pictures I made there, so I put them in a gallery...

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Palm Pre in Belgium with Mobile Vikings

First of all: all credit for this trick goes to Andreas at TreoCentral. Here is the exact thread where I found it.

I've bought an unlocked Palm Pre in the Netherlands. Unfortunately, before it becomes usable, it needs to activate itself through your provider's data network. As it happens, I just switched to Mobile Vikings, a provider which the Pre doesn't know.

Oops.

Internet to the rescue!

It is said that WebOS 1.3 offers the possibility to enter custom data settings in the activation wizard. Let's upgrade this baby!

  • First of all: my device is originally German (the QWERTZ keyboard is a dead giveaway ;-) ), so I've downloaded the German WebOS Doctor.
  • To put the Pre in WebOS Doctor mode:
    • Turn it off completely
    • Put the wall charger into an outlet and connect the mini USB connector to the Pre. Do not connect the USB port to the wall charger yet!
    • While connecting the USB port to the wall charger, keep the "volume up" key pressed. You'll see a USB logo appear on the Pre.
    • Disconnect the USB port on the wall charger and plug the Pre into your computer.
    • Launch WebOS Doctor and follow the instructions in the wizard (I chose German just to make sure - don't know how important it is). It will recognize your Pre and start upgrading.
  • When the upgrade is done, your Pre will restart and relaunch the setup wizard. When it gets to the point where account creation fails, you will be given the option to enter custom data profile settings. Enter your provider's settings et voila, one working Palm Pre.

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Back!

 And that's that. The people at FreeFlux were kind enough to provide me with an export of both the database and the files of my account there, I got my domain names sorted out, managed to get the import done properly et voila, I'm personally hosting my blog. 

w00t!

Also, I caught up with posting my project365 pictures. Go me!

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Project 365

Oops ... hadn't taken into account that pictures take up diskspace. And that my diskspace on this account is running towards "full". I'm going to see what I can do about that (either host it myself, or work something out with the Freeflux people), but in the meantime I'll stop uploading pictures. I will keep making them, however!

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PageUp to irssi in Terminal (OSX)

 Note to self: sending a PageUp to irssi running in an SSH session in Terminal on OSX Snow Leopard (as opposed to sending it to Terminal itself) is done via fn+shift+up.

That is all.

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GPGMail on OS X Snow Leopard

With the upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard, and the included update for AppleMail, GPGMail was broken due to it using an undocumented API which has, of course, changed.

Fortunately, people more knowledgeable than I have fixed this by now, making it relatively easy to get things going again.

First of all, close AppleMail.

The next thing to do is to get gpg up and running again. There is an excellent explanation right here (http://macgpg.sourceforge.net/docs/howto-build-gpg-osx.txt.asc), which will allow you to copy/paste your way through the whole thing. It's your basic ./configure; make; make install; except that on Snow Leopard, you need to specify that you want to compile it for 32bit mode, like so : 

./configure CC="gcc -arch i386"

Next, download this GPGMail.bundle: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/20215/GPGMail-1.2.1.mailbundle.zip (see the discussion thread, there is probably a newer one by now), unzip it and place the result in ~/Library/Mail/Bundles/ 

In my case, I had to open the bundle (Ctrl-click, "Show Package Contents") and edit Contents -> Info.plist (using Property List Editor). It was missing two GUIDs, which I found like so:

venefyxatu@Succubus$ grep -A 1 UUID /Applications/Mail.app/Contents/Info.plist 
 <key>PluginCompatibilityUUID</key>
 <string>2F0CF6F9-35BA-4812-9CB2-155C0FDB9B0F</string>

venefyxatu@Succubus$ grep -A1 UUID /System/Library/Frameworks/\
Message.framework/Resources/Info.plist 
 <key>PluginCompatibilityUUID</key>
 <string>0CB5F2A0-A173-4809-86E3-9317261F1745</string>

For each of those, copy the GUID (the bit in the <string> tag) and add it as a child to SupportedPluginCompatibilityUUID.

That's it. Start AppleMail and it should load the plugin, once again giving you access to the GPG settings.

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TweetDeck on Gentoo with Awesome

After seeing it in action I wanted to give TweetDeck a try so, optimist that I am, I tried their installer. It didn't work, complaining about a corrupt .air file. So I figured I'd install the AIR framework first and then see where that would get me. All the way to this error message : 

Adobe AIR could not be installed because this is not a supported Linux distribution. Only RPM- and Debian-based Linux distributions are supported.

Gentoo? Source-based distros? Get lost! Fortunately, flashman already ran into the problem and figured out a way to get AIR applications running on his distro and documented it.

One more problem : I don't use Gnome. I don't use KDE. I'm an Awesome fan. AIR doesn't like it when people don't use Gnome or KDE on linux. It requires gnome-keyring or KWallet and it gets confused rather easily. According to the Adobe troubleshooting page, you can set it straight by exporting a variable.

For gnome-keyring:

$ export GNOME_DESKTOP_SESSION_ID=1

For KWallet:

$ export KDE_FULL_SESSION=1

If you've got a KDE4 based KWallet, you also want to do:

$ export KDE_SESSION_VERSION=4

Ka-boom! TweetDeck on Awesome on Gentoo. And I can start it with Winkey-F10 as well, like so : 

awful.key({ modkey }, "F10",
    function ()
        awful.util.spawn_with_shell("export GNOME_DESKTOP_SESSION_ID=1; 
        /opt/air-sdk/bin/adl -nodebug \
        /opt/air-apps/TweetDeck/META-INF/AIR/application.xml \
        /opt/air-apps/TweetDeck")
    end),
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New category : stories

 Since I write stories every now and then, I decided to start posting them on my blog as well. More content, whee!

It's also a nice opportunity to experiment with a FluxCMS site in two languages...

I started off with a story (English and Dutch versions) I wrote based on the walk back to my car after a NaNoWriMo write-in in Ghent. A vivid imagination can be a scary thing sometimes ...

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Those petty lights I see at night ...

... are flames that belong to some of the industries in the harbour of Antwerp. Sometimes they're really big flames, too. When seen by day, however, you see the less than pretty part as well : here

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Another picture ...

Another picture in the Miscellaneous gallery - I've discovered that the screen on my Macbook has some ... interesting properties ;-)

I've liked pictures like this for quite a while now, so I figured it was time to make my own ...

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