Vendetta Solutions Notebook

Title: Ignorance Show
Location: The Kave, Bucksport, Me
Description: This Is Hell, The Carrier, Ignorance, More TBA
Start Time: 18:00
Date: 2008-10-04

Title: Ignorance Show
Location: Anchors Up, Haverhill, MA
Description: THIS IS HELL, THE CARRIER, IN REMEMBRANCE, THE EFFORT, IGNORANCE, HOSTAGE CALM
Start Time: 18:00
Date: 2008-10-03

Connect through SSH to your iPod. Make sure you have a strong, solid connection, auto-lock is set to “Never”, and the iPod is plugged in and charging, because this will take more than an hour to transfer all the files.

This is how I backed up most, if not all, of my settings/apps/games/customization while upgrading from 2.0 to 2.0.2. Everything is back exactly the way I had it, all I have to do is reorder my icons back to the way they were, and it’ll be like I’m on 2.0 again!

Copy the following folders on your iPod to a secure folder under the name of something you’ll remember (I.E. “Backup”, “iPod Restore Files”, etc):

• First, we’ll start off with the most complicated. /Applications. I recommend applying the default theme before backing up. This way, all of the icons will be default, and you can just reapply the theme through Customize/Winterboard after restoring. If you really want to keep your theme, then leave the icons as is and copy the WHOLE /Applications folder. NOTE that this WILL be the default theme if you attempt to apply a defualt one, and you will NOT be able to get backup icons.
• If you want the default theme back, apply it and erase all changes made through Winterboard/Customize, and then copy everything but default applications. Skip over App Store, Calculator, DemoApp, Maps, MobileAddressBook, MobileCal, MobileMail, MobileMusicPlayer, MobileNotes, MobileSafari, MobileSlideShow, MobileStore, MobileTimer, Preferences, Stocks, Weather, and YouTube. This will make the overall SSH’ing process much shorter and will save you a lot of hassle.
• /usr/bin, if you want to backup command line utilities you’ve installed
• /private/var/mobile/Media/DCIM, to back up photos from Safari and screenshots in the camera roll
• If you have ROMs and don’t have them backed up on your computer, you might want to backup /private/var/mobile/Media/ROMs
• /private/var/mobile/Documents, if you have it
• /private/var/mobile/Library, for settings
• /private/var/root/Library, for contacts, SMS, etc.
• If you want to backup all of your installed applications on Cydia so that you can get updates as soon as you SSH them back in, /private/var/lib
• For Winterboard themes, /Library/Themes
• /private/var/stash/Wallpaper.xxxxxx, if you want to backup the wallpapers
• If you want to keep your theme totally, /System/Library/CoreServices (Docks, Badges, Carrier images, etc). I don’t recommend this.
• (THIS MAY HARM YOUR iPOD. You don’t have to do this unless you really want to backup changes made to frameworks such as the music player, video player, etc) Even more totally, go ahead and copy /System/Library/Frameworks
• Hell, go for /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks too
• If you changed fonts and want to keep them, /System/Library/Fonts

After restoring, Install OpenSSH from Cydia, and put these bitches back where you found them. The best way to put them back is to go into the folder you copied one directory (I.E. double click the big folder names up there on the PC side of your SSH client) and copy the files/folders inside of them, and then drag them and drop them inside of the new folders that are there after the restore. Your settings, savestates of applications, preferences, themes, etc, will all be back after you copy the files back. Hope this helped for people who want to upgrade, but didn’t want to lose everything.

Temporary before iPhone Utilities is released.

Taken from here.

I have an old Lexmark Z23 printer, and it takes a little extra work to get it running.
sudo apt-get install alien libstdc++5
wget -c -P /tmp/ http://www.downloaddelivery.com/srfilecache/CJLZ35LE-CUPS-2.0-1.TAR.GZ
pushd /tmp
tar -xvzf CJLZ35LE-CUPS-2.0-1.TAR.GZ
tail -n +143 lexmarkz35-CUPS-2.0-1.gz.sh > install.tar.gz
tar -xvzf install.tar.gz
sudo alien --to-deb *.rpm
sudo dpkg -i *.deb
sudo ldconfig
popd
cd /usr/share/cups/model
sudo gunzip Lexmark-Z35-lxz35cj-cups.ppd.gz
sudo /etc/init.d/cupsys restart
gksudo /usr/bin/system-config-printer
and then click the New Printer button.
If the printer is connected directly to the computer via USB, select Lexmark Z23-33 USB #n
and click Forward
If the printer is to be accessed via the network, select Other, and enter
http://$SERVER:631/printers/$PRINTER
where $SERVER is the server hostname or IP address and b>$PRINTER is the printer name on the server, and then click Forward. You can find the names of the shared printer on a server by visiting the following URL in your web browser:
http://$SERVER:631/printers
where $SERVER is the server hostname or IP address.
Select the Provide PPD File radio button, and click the button initially labeled None, and navigate to /usr/share/cups/model and choose the file named Lexmark-Z35-lxz35cj-cups.ppd.

Several years ago, I bought many albums from the iTunes Music Store. I know, it was a stupid thing to do, and I regret it. But back then, I had a PowerBook (which has since broken), so everything “just worked”. Well, I have a new laptop now that I’m running GNU/Linux on, so it no longer “just works”. Luckily, I’ve found a solution that does work.

The first step is stripping the abysmal “FairPlay” DRM (that’s Digital Restrictions Management to those in the know) off of the encrypted m4p song files that I purchased. This was fairly easy using a program called QTFairUse — unfortunately, it only runs on Windows. You won’t find anything to do it under GNU/Linux because it needs to use iTunes to work.

So once I stripped the encryption off the .m4p files, I was left with these .m4a song files. They’re not encrypted, but they’re also not a very widely used format, and aren’t supported by most audio player software. The simplest solution would just be to transcode them to ogg or mp3, but that’s a bad idea. You shouldn’t ever convert from one lossy format to another. It’s like making a xerox copy of a xerox copy; the quality loss accumulates. Now if you have a non-iPod portable digital music player, you don’t really have many choices, because none of them support m4a. Personally, I don’t see anything ethically wrong with downloading nice quality mp3s of songs you’ve already purchased just to avoid the transcoding quality loss, but I’m sure the law disagrees with me there.

Anyway, I digress. This tutorial is about playing m4a files natively under Gentoo GNU/Linux, without having to transcode them and suffer a loss of quality. It works perfectly for me, since I don’t even use my portable digital music player anymore. I just play everything on my computers. I’ll be using my favorite Free Software audio player program in this tutorial, Amarok. Luckily, everything necessary for the playback of m4a files is already in the source code — it just isn’t compiled in by default. So we’ll have to modify the USE flags to get it to work. But don’t fret; this is a very common procedure in Gentoo GNU/Linux.

First off, Amarok doesn’t actually do any of the music decoding on its own. It’s just a front-end. It uses xine-lib for the actual decoding. So we’re going to modify the use flags of xine-lib to support the m4a file format. Add the following line to /etc/portage/package.use using the text editor of your choice (I prefer GNU emacs):

media-libs/xine-lib aac

The aac USE flag adds support for MPEG-4 AAC Audio, which is what we want. That’s all you need for the playback of m4a files. But wait, we’re not done. There’s another USE flag that we probably want to set. This one is for Amarok itself. It enables write support for tags in m4a files. It isn’t strictly necessary, but if you like keeping your collection organized by fixing errors whenever you find a missing track number or incorrect album name or what not, you’ll want this. Add the following line to your /etc/portage/package.use:

media-sound/amarok mp4

Now, all we have left to do is recompile Amarok with the new USE flags. So run this command at a command-line prompt:

emerge --ask --deep --newuse media-sound/amarok

Verify that everything looks good. It should be merging media-sound/amarok, media-libs/libmp4v2, and media-libs/xine-lib. There may be additional dependencies if you haven’t installed Amarok before. Then, once you’re satisfied, enter Yes to begin the merging, go enjoy a leisurely caffeinated beverage break, and when compilation is finished, you’ll now enjoy the ability to play all of your m4a song files from within Amarok.

That’s the end of the Amarok tutorial. But if Amarok isn’t your favorite music player software, don’t despair, there’s probably a way to get m4a files playing in whatever your favorite player happens to be. Use the equery program to get a list of all possible USE flags for the software you’re interested in, figure out the one(s) that enable playback of m4a files (it’s probably along the lines of m4a, aac, or faad), and add them to your /etc/portage/package.use. For instance, to see the USE flags that mplayer supports, run equery uses -a media-video/mplayer. You’ll find aac in that list, so if you want to enable m4a support under mplayer, be sure to enable that USE flag.