I saw this on TheDailyWTF recently, and decided I had to try it for myself, and it works!

You get it if you go to "Clear History" in the "Go" menu in Nautilus.

This is a camera-geek post, so if you're not one of those, feel free to skip. I've just been having a bit more of a play with the custom functions available to change how the 400D operates. There are a couple of things that I've found that I can't believe I didn't know about - they look like they'll make things a lot easier. I'm making a note here so that if I lose them, I can find them again.

I now have set:

Now I just need to get out and do some more shooting. Not done very much of late that hasn't been with my N95, which is disappointing.

In other news, I've been spending far too much time recently with my camera. One thing I quite like doing is timelapse photography, which my camera (a Canon 400D) can't do by itself, however I did acquire a cheap intervalometer from eBay, which together with my new tripod (a Velbon Sherpa 250, highly recommended) is quite for this kind of work.

I can't, however, ever remember the command to create the timelapses. So, here's a note to myself and anyone else who's interested. If you have a folder full of .JPG files, with a sequential numbering scheme like most cameras have by default, you can run this command to create a video file using each JPEG image as a frame:

 mencoder "mf://*.JPG" -mf fps=25 -vf scale -zoom -xy 1024 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 -o output.avi

This will output an MPEG4 file in the file output.avi. It will scale the images so that the video ends up being 1024 pixels wide, and set the height to keep the aspect ratio. It will also run at 25 frames per second. These values can be tweaked, depending on the effect you want.

I'll update this post once I've figured out a few more things - I'd like to be able to do panning and zooming as well, and I know it's possible, though perhaps a bit fiddly.

A couple of years ago, I think, I became sufficiently motivated by the defectivebydesign.org campaign that I decided to go and join the Free Software Foundation to support them. However, recent events are making me actively reconsider my membership.

They've come up with a campaign involving people signing up for appointments to Apple's Genius Bar technical support questions, and asking them a series of questions with regard to Apple's stance on DRM. It basically amounts to a denial of service attack on their technical support. I, and many others, believe that they are Doing It Wrong on several levels. I tried to sum my thoughts up in an email to them, to which I haven't yet had a response (not that I particularly expected one):

My position is now that if they go ahead with this campaign, I'm going to resign from the FSF. Someone in there seems to have some seriously misguided views about what is and isn't acceptable in terms of getting their message across.

LugRadio Live 2008 is happening on the 19th and 20th of July at The Lighthouse Media Center, Chubb Buildings, Fryer Street, Wolverhampton. This'll be my first time there, and so I've been very sensible and volunteered for the crew. Should be fun!

I've spent some time recently playing with a couple of Linksys NSLU2s. These are small devices which have 2 USB ports and an Ethernet port, and are intended to be used to share USB drives across a network via CIFS (Windows file sharing). The best feature of them though is that like the early WRT54G routers, it runs Linux by default, and uses Samba to share the files. This means that with a bit of hacking, it's fairly easy to extend it to make it more functional. There are a few projects doing this, the most famous being the Unslung firmware.

Another project that has been working on support for the NSLU2 is Debian. As of version 4.0 (Etch), the default Debian installer has had support for them out of the box. More information on this can be found at http://cyrius.com/debian/nslu2/. I've installed Etch on both my NSLU2s, though I found it quicker and easier to use the manual install method, which just means unpacking a tarball of the base system. This is described at http://cyrius.com/debian/nslu2/unpack.html. The instructions there are far better than I could describe, so I won't bother trying to replicate them.

So, what can you do with these things once they're running Debian? Lots of things. Just now I'm going to describe one of the most basic things I use it for, which is for serving DHCP and DNS on my LAN.

You can, if you like, run the full ISC BIND and dhcpd servers on your Slug, but there isn't really that much point. They're big, sometimes tricky to configure, and overkill for a small LAN. A decent, light alternative is dnsmasq. It's a small daemon that uses the existing /etc/hosts and other related files to handle serving the network. I run it for a couple of reasons - firstly, my ISP's DNS servers are somewhat less than reliable, so I use dnsmasq to proxy to OpenDNS. Secondly, it allows me to use internal DNS names for my machines. So, for example, rather than having to remember that my router is 192.168.1.1, if I want to go and change something in its configuration, I can just type "portal" into my browser. Similarly, my NSLU2s can be accessed by just typing "ssh kaylee" or "ssh inara". I've picked a domain name that doesn't exist in the wider Internet to ensure I don't collide with anything real.

Setting it up

dnsmasq doesn't come installed by default, but it's only an apt-get away.

apt-get install dnsmasq

After that, there is a configuration file at /etc/dnsmasq.conf which you may want to have a look at. The defaults are mostly sensible. In my setup, I have changed the following options:

# Set the domain name for hosts on this network
domain=internal.lan
# Set the start and end of the DHCP pool, and set the
# default lease time to 24 hours
dhcp-range=192.168.1.100,192.168.1.150,24h

# Set DHCP option 3 (which supplies the default route) 
# to the IP address of your router - otherwise dnsmasq 
# will assume that the gateway is the machine it is running on
dhcp-option 3,192.168.1.1

# Answer DNS queries based on the interface the request was sent
# to - the effect of this means that you will never get 127.0.0.1
# returned when looking up the name of the dnsmasq server. 
localise-queries

You can also hard-code the MAC addresses of your machines into the dnsmasq.conf file, using the dhcp-host statement, so that each machine will always get the same IP address. This is a neat trick, but personally I don't think that dnsmasq.conf is the right place to do that when there is already an /etc/ethers file that stores this information. So, for now, uncomment the "read-ethers" line in dnsmasq.conf. I'll get back to setting up that file in a moment.

Next, you want to set up your resolv.conf file. This will contain the IP addresses of the nameservers you want to use, and which dnsmasq will proxy for. In my case, I'm using OpenDNS, so I've grabbed the DNS servers from https://www.opendns.com/start. My resolv.conf now looks like:

domain internal.lan
nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220

To set up internal hosts on your LAN, you just need to enter them in /etc/hosts, and dnsmasq will read them from there. Beyond the normal entries for localhost and some IPv6 ones, I have things that look like:

192.168.1.1     portal.internal.lan        portal
192.168.1.5     zoidberg.internal.lan      zoidberg
192.168.1.10    inara.internal.lan         inara
192.168.1.11    kaylee.internal.lan        kaylee

You can add as many of these as you like, making sure that the domain name part of them matches what is in /etc/dnsmasq.conf, otherwise they may not work properly.

Finally, back to /etc/ethers. This is a simple mapping between MAC addresses and either IP addresses or names, as long as the names can be resolved by either DNS or (in this case) the /etc/hosts file.

00:12:34:56:78:9A zoidberg.planetexpress.lan
00:BC:DE:F0:12:34 animal.planetexpress.lan

All the hosts in this file will be issued the same IP address every time they do a DHCP request, provided they also exist in /etc/hosts. Bear in mind that MAC addresses are per interface, not per machine, so if you have a laptop with a wired and a wireless interface I'd advise having two entries, one for each. Last of all, ensure that your router or other device isn't running a DHCP server any more, and run /etc/init.d/dnsmasq restart. The new settings should take effect, and all being well, everything should work.

(I have updated this based on feedback from Jason Liquorish, adding a bit about DHCP option 3 and the localise-queries option, which I forgot earlier. Thanks Jason!)

This is where I start to wonder if Flickr aren't taking their "How to say hello in language X" thing a bit too far...

I have rebuilt my website once more. This time, I'm using eZ Publish, which I know better than Wordpress. I've also mostly managed to import my weblog entries from the old Wordpress install, though I haven't got the comments to come across yet. It should work later though. The site is a bit of a work in progress, there's not much content yet and the theme looks bare in Firefox and probably completely broken in IE. Not that you should be using IE, of course...

TheyWorkForYou.com is a great resource for tracking what UK Parliament MPs are up to, however there isn't currently a version of it covering the Scottish (or indeed the Welsh) Parliaments. There is a mailing list set up for people who are interested in a Scottish version here but there doesn't seem to be a lot happening. I intend to sign up and say hello, to see if there's anyone there. On the off chance that anyone else reads this, perhaps they could too...

I just got one of these through the post from Amazon. I had ordered it on about Thursday last week, kind of hoping it would get here by Saturday, but unfortunately no such luck. When it did arrive the Amazon box it came in was pretty battered as well - though the actual packaging was OK. That'll be ParcelForce then...

It's currently attached to the laptop and charging, and I can't quite inspire it to turn on yet so I'm going to wait and hope that it's meant to do that. What I can say is that the Windows software installation is about the most annoying thing I have ever seen. The wizard moves the mouse around to what it thinks is the option you want, then it will go full-screen and get in the way of anything more useful that you happen to be doing, and pop up occasional dialogue boxes to steal the focus. Then when you reboot it will launch a full-screen Flash gizmo to register the device, before something to do with Audible comes along and does something similar.

Final gripe so far - the headphones it comes with are pathetic. I'm not sure why they do that - surely better headphones give a better impression of the device. I didn't have any intention of using them though. I'll either continue to use the slightly battered Sony things I have or give my E2cs another shot. I seem to have the smallest ears in the world, and even the very smallest rubber parts for them don't properly fit me.

I'll write some more when I've got the thing up and running, including if I have to mess about to get it to work in Linux.