Linux

NetworkManager is fast becoming the de facto network provider in desktop Linux distributions. The reason it's so popular is that it "does the right thing" 99% of the time. However, there's not many examples out there that extend that functionality. NetworkManager provides hooks in which you can have scripts launch when network settings change. In today's post, I will show you how to launch the Synergy client whenever you plug into your corporate network.

So, you store all your CD's as FLAC, and encode FLAC to MP3 on the fly. Now, you've gone and lost that CD, or in my case, your 3 year old daughter loses it for you. How do you regenerate a CD from your FLAC's?

mp3cd does just that. I was all set to code something up myself, but mp3cd is currently maintained, and even available in the Ubuntu repositories! It has a man page, and it even works -- why reinvent the wheel?

I refuse to do DRM. If there's an album I want, I buy the CD. The first thing I do after opening a new disc is to rip the disc to FLAC. The second thing I do is to copy the disc so that the loader in my car doesn't do permanent damage to the master copy. The third thing I do is to put the album on my MP3 player. Now, my player runs Rockbox, so I can play FLAC files, but they eat up too much space. However, I hate to keep both an MP3 and a FLAC laying around when I only need access to the MP3 once. Enter MP3FS - a fuse filesystem that converts FLAC to MP3 on the fly.

I've done a lot with LVM in the past, but up until now had never really played around with LVM snapshots. I recently used LVM snapshots to implement a "hot backup" of my LAMP stack running this blog. I quote "hot backup" because, while mysql is indeed running, I do have to place a read lock on all tables for a second or two. You don't need to do this if you're using Innodb, but you do if you use the MyISAM engine (which Drupal does by default).