monline

Let's assume you've a bunch of files (in a directory tree) on a linux/unix system and you'd like to copy them over to a Windows NTFS filesystem. The latter allows a lot less characters in filenames (and directory names), then linux/unix. The following code goes through the entire tree (starting with the current working directory) and removes all invalid characters from directory entries. Note that it relies on a few non-standard extensions (eg. not all find implementations have a -print0 option.


P.S.: I used David's writeup on how to process directory entries correctly and the Wikipedia article on NTFS for the list of valid characters.

P.S.2: Beware that simply removing invalid characters might result in data loss since several filenames can be converted to the same string this way. Eg. both the filename "my test?file.txt" and the filename "my test:file.txt" will be converted to "my testfile.txt" and only one will be kept. If you really need to cover such special cases, you could replace invalid characters with a number (instead of simply removing the invalid characters) and increment this number after each processed file (ie. directory entry). This way you could be sure that no file is lost during the process.

The mail.serverDefaultStoreContractID preference sets the default storage engine for new accounts and the mail.server.server5.storeContractID preference (substitute the number 9 with the given server id) stores the engine name/implementation for a specific server/account. The default value for these is @mozilla.org/msgstore/berkeleystore;1 standing for the mbox format and @mozilla.org/msgstore/maildirstore;1 stands for the Maildir format. The latter is experimental though and should be handled with care (ie. at least frequent backups).

"DMG2IMG is an Apple's compressed dmg to standard (hfsplus) image disk file convert tool."

I don't know about other browsers, but in Firefox I do this ...

There're obviously a zillion ways to do this. Here's a simple one-liner I've found quite useful:
It starts up instances of dd, each pulling pseudo-random data from /dev/urandom (actually the kernel providing this pseudo-random data creates the CPU load). The number of dd instances is taken from the number of processors reported by /proc/cpuinfo. To stop the extra load, you can easily kill all instances via killall dd (assuming there're no other dd instances running on the server that you've the right/permission to kill and that were not started by this one-liner). And this doesn't even require root access, any user will do. Of course on servers using advanced resource control (eg. cgroups) this won't work since the kernel will limit the total load one user can put on the system (regardless of how many processes you start up).

1. Download the https://android.googlesource.com/platform/system/extras repository:
   
   git clone https://android.googlesource.com/platform/system/extras
2. Check out a revision of your choice:
   
   cd extras
git checkout android-4.1.1_r1
3. Compile simg2img:
   
   cd ext4_utils
gcc -o simg2img -lz sparse_crc32.c simg2img.c
4. Unpack your Android image files:
   
   cd ../../
./extras/ext4_utils/simg2img system.img system.raw.img
./extras/ext4_utils/simg2img userdata.img userdata.raw.img
5. Do whatever you want with the images (eg. you can use Paragon's ExtFS on a Mac or just simply mount the images in linux via the loop device).
   (Update, 2012.02.16: Paragon's ExtFS -or at least v8- does not work well. It doesn't show all files that are in the ext4 image.)
   Eg.
   
   mkdir /mnt/my_system /mnt/my_userdata
mount -t ext4 -o loop system.raw.img /mnt/my_system
mount -t ext4 -o loop userdata.raw.img /mnt/my_userdata
6. Compile make_ext4fs:
   
   cd extras/ext4_utils
gcc -o make_ext4fs -lz make_ext4fs_main.c make_ext4fs.c ext4fixup.c ext4_utils.c allocate.c backed_block.c output_file.c contents.c extent.c indirect.c uuid.c sha1.c sparse_crc32.c wipe.c
7. Repack the images:
   
   cd ../../
PATH="$PATH:$(pwd)/extras/ext4_utils/make_ext4fs" ./extras/ext4_utils/mkuserimg.sh -s /mnt/my_system_dir my_system.img ext4 /tmp 512M

P.S.: if compiling stuff is not your thing, you can just download simg2img and make_ext4fs from here.

1. Type in address bar: about:config
2. Enter in search field: geo.enabled
3. Double click the geo.enabled line in the list so it's value changes to "false"

A pro photographer (Riley Brandt) shares his experiences on a test run regarding the possibility to switch to linux as a pro photographer. He gives useful tips about various software that you can use in a RAW workflow.

The MP4 encoding option (which I think uses Camtasia Studio's builtin H.264 codec) cannot be tweaked to provide the same visual quality as the original capture. At least not in v8.0.2. Even if you set quality to 100, keyframes at every second and/or adjust H.264 profile/level ... nothing really helps. The image quality will be inferior compared to the quality of the original recording (the one with the "TechSmith Screen Codec 2" codec) that you can preview in Camtasia Studio.

However if you install Quicktime (you don't need Pro, the free version will do just fine) and use the MOV output, you can get what you want.

"Below you will find a list of extra simple file-sharing services. With these services, there are no accounts, no clients and no interfaces to learn. Simply upload your file, get a link, and share it. Sounds simple enough? It is!"

I really like Dropcanvas, Snaggy and Clipica from this selection of file sharing sites. The last two are quite similiar, but Clipica lets you crop your pictures before you upload them. So if your bandwidth is not large enough to deal with the image sizes you want to upload, Clipica might be a better choice for you.