Planet ScotLUG

Failure: ping successful: plaquewatching

2012-01-31T21:38:07+00:00

Some scribblings that may be of interest to those folks over at open plaques (@openplaques) about the Scottish Film Council, now merged into 'Scottish Screen'

Googling for plaque info reveals that there was a plaque erected in 1996 in Castle Gardens, Dunoon. Later taken down as Eric Campbell came from Cheshire (Ref)

One in Aberfeldy main square unveiled in 1997? for Donald Crisp -- may also be fake (ref) [1353]

Sean Connery unveiled his own one after it had been down for 4 years (ref, ref) after the demolition of S&N plant and building of 'Springside' development [8553]

Chariots of fire at St Andrews (pic pic) [added as 8822]

Duncan Macrae in Millport (pic) [already there as 8521]

Who Stole the Light?: Loch Fyne

2012-01-28T18:14:03+00:00

Today we drove up the West side of Loch Lomond, across to Arrochar at the head of Loch Long and then on over the Rest and be Thankful to Loch Fyne. The weather was dry but extremely cold, much more so than on Rannoch Moor yesterday, but there was high level blanket cloud cover with no gaps for the sun to shine through. This leaves colours flat and uninteresting on the whole and you can pretty much forget capturing wide vistas with snowy mountains against bright grey clouds!

I’ve got a couple of reflection based images that hold promise, but need some effort put into processing them carefully. For now, I’ve done a very quick B&W conversion on one and left the other unedited.

Tomorrow, I rest. No more driving for several hours to find myself swearing at the sky on a regular basis for a while yet.

Who Stole the Light?: Rannoch Moor and Glen Etive

2012-01-28T09:57:54+00:00

Yesterday I spent the day doing photography stuffies through Rannoch Moor and Glen Etive in the Highlands of Scotland (right beside Glencoe, if that helps you pinpoint the location). The weather was variable to say the least, with several experiences of finding a wonderfully lit spot, stopping the car, setting up cameras and discovering low cloud had obscured everything more than a few dozen metres away. Yet we persevered and I managed to grab a number of images I’m happy with. Here are a few samples with no editing at all yet.

Now we’re off to the area around Arrochar, Cairndow and Inveraray. Let’s see what the light does today. I wish the clouds would stop stealing the light from me!

Failure: ping successful: Fedora / Netatalk / OS X Lion / TimeMachine

2012-01-27T12:52:32+00:00

Being the cheapskate that I am, I'm not buying a shiny apple-branded time-capsule for backups when I have a perfectly stylish NAS (since the pic was taken I'm using the via-eden board there's a 1.5TB HDD in the box)

I'd previously used netatalk with leopard under mythbuntu, but following a clean-up and migration to Fedora 16 (Verne) it needed reinstalling (esp as we upgraded to Lion on some of the macs)

So, a HOWTO if anyone is hunting for this and some notes

You don't need avahi separately anymore - new netatalk includes it
You need to allow tcp/548 in your iptables rules (I added to /etc/sysconfig/iptables)
-A INPUT -p tcp -m state --state NEW -m tcp --dport 548 -j ACCEPT
SELinux. Yeah. probably needs fixing but 'setenforce permissive' worked :-/
I'm not convinced you need the 'defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1' anymore.

Here's what I did

1) Create a separate disk partition for time machine and mount it (I'm using LVM and XFS)

$> grep time /etc/fstab
/dev/mapper/linuxvg-timemachinelv /export/timemachine xfs defaults 1 2
$> df -h /export/timemachine
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/linuxvg-timemachinelv 200G 6.0G 194G 3% /export/timemachine

2) create a separate user for the backups (not strictly needed but I chowned /export/rimemachine to that user to sort out permissions

#> useradd timelord
#> passwd timelord
#> chown timelord: /export/timemachine

3) Install and configure netatalk (although 2.2.0 is in Fedora 16, I decided to use the rawhide version of 2.2.2)

#> yum --enablerepo rawhide install netatalk

The config files are in /etc/netatalk and (see the gude at An Esurient Trollop ) you'll need to edit afpd.conf
(I added -mimicmodel Macmini and uams_guest.so to -uamlist: I have a ro media share)

- -tcp -noddp -mimicmodel Macmini -uamlist uams_guest.so,uams_dhx.so,uams_dhx2.so -nosavepassword

and AppleVolumes.default

# Share out the Videos
/export/media/Video Videos options:ro,noadouble
#Time Machine
/export/timemachine TimeMachine options:tm

Startup netatalk

#> systemctl start netatalk.service
#> systemctl enable netatalk.service

So far so good -- assuming no failures you should see something like this in your logs

afpd[28742]: AFP/TCP started, advertising 192.168.1.251:548 (2.2.2)

Now, onto the mac -- I wasn't seeing the host automatically appear in the finder, but a simple command-k (connect to server) and typing the hostname worked (it expands to afp://hostname automatically), and was prompted for my (normal) username and password to connect to $HOME on the netatalk server.

In the time machine preferences I could then select the remote TimeMachine volume on the NAS, enter my 'timelord' username/password combo and it started to so a backup.

More news (and a rest restore) to follow...

Failure: ping successful: Metering

2012-01-27T11:49:08+00:00

So I finally got round to wiring in the 'Teleinfo' shield into my EDF meter (see my earlier post for more info) and left it running while we're away. Hacked up an initial couple of graphs using trusty gnuplot: exhibits A and B -

It's rather easy to spot where the fridge-freezer kicks in, but more worrying is the fact that the baseline never dips below 170VA. The only things that should have been running in that time was my via-eden server, with one HDD, the livebox and samknows monitoring box. I suspect I need to investigate more.

Made a minor hack to the shield as digi-6 is used by the LED on a nanode - but digi-7 is free.
Details were tweeted over here. Next up is to get it sending the info out to main box (well, another nanode or my bifferboard) and spitting to pachube and / or a jeelabs display board.

Failure: ping successful: Sniff...

2012-01-27T11:48:46+00:00

Updated to include the plots from monitoring box:

jriddell's blog: Plasma and KDE Applications 4.8 on Kubuntu

2012-01-27T00:16:24+00:00

Kubuntu has packages for 4.8 bringing updates to Plasma workspaces and a load of KDE Applications.

To quote a nice user posting on kde-devel

"I upgraded to Ubuntu's Precise Alpha 1 a few days ago. After the upgrade completed, I tried out KDE 4.8 RC 2. It worked great until the final release of KDE 4.8 Final. KDE 4.8 Final is even better than the RC!"

or later in the same thread

"KDE 4.8 is rocking for me too.Using the Kubuntu PPA's on Sandy Bridge system and it's just lightning fast to do anything. "