main September 2017

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12 participants
9 discussions

Reformatting a PDF
by Mark Rogers 03 Jun '19

03 Jun '19

On the Royal Mail website is a "handy" price guide available as a PDF: http://www.royalmail.com/sites/default/files/Royal-Mail-Our-Prices-March-20… It's only actually "handy" if you have a weird printer (or at least very unusual sized paper). I'm not sure what size/shape you'd call it but it would go into a DL envelope without folding... What I'd like to do is split the individual pages out and merge them to get three (maybe four) "pages" per A4 sheet so that I can print it on my very normal A4 printer. Suggestions? This is an annual headache and I'm fed up with a different manual solution every year. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Manipulating files from bash
by Mark Rogers 25 Sep '17

25 Sep '17

There are lots of ways to process text files (eg sed, awk, etc); I'm after suggestions on the best/easiest way to achieve something fairly trivial to describe. Below is example output from sfdisk -d: label: dos label-id: 0xe3f4f21a device: /dev/sdd unit: sectors /dev/sdd1 : start= 8192, size= 85622, type=c /dev/sdd2 : start= 94208, size= 5521408, type=83 /dev/sdd3 : start= 5615616, size= 25499648, type=83 I want to convert this into a new script to go back into sfdisk but with some changes; I want the start values skipped (so sfdisk will put partition boundaries wherever it thinks is best), I want the last sector not have a size (ie "rest of disk"), and I don't really need any of the settings at the top. In fact, a suitable (minimal) script to go into sfdisk would be simply: ,85622,c ,5521408 ,; I don't really mind at this point whether I end up with something more like the first format or minified like the latter. In fact to be honest I'm more interested just in learning the best ways to play with text files like this. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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RPi SD backup/restore
by Mark Rogers 25 Sep '17

25 Sep '17

I've been experimenting with backing up and restoring Raspberry Pi SD cards. There is of-course a very easy way: use "dd" or similar to create a disk image. However it has three disdvantages; it is slow, and it creates very large backups. And it's hard to extract individual files from the backups. I've written up a quick process [1] for doing it manually, which is essentially: 1. Backup (or restore) the partitions using sfdisk 2. (Restore only) Create the filesystems on the destination 3. Backup (or restore) the files using tar. However I'd like some advice on scripting and improving it. In particular, this process creates three files (one for the partition info, and one each for the files from the two partitions). I'd like to end up with a single file, which I can do by just tar'ing the three at the end, but given the size of the files I want to keep the use of temporary files to a minimum. Also, at the moment it's quite inflexible in terms of restoring to a different sized card, but ought not be. But regardless, I figured there'd be enough Pi users around here who might find it useful. (Use at your own risk, it's had very limited testing so far.) [1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vRk_zldu0Ra6MEEepTSKCzD55ANeasQ… -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Disk labels and partition names
by Mark Rogers 22 Sep '17

22 Sep '17

In my experiments with RPi backups, I note that the SD card has a label and that label is used when the partitions are mounted (eg disk label: 0xbff5ebb9, and /etc/fstab using PARTUUID=bff5ebb9-01 and bff5ebb9-02). Is it better that I (a) change my fstab to mount by partition name (/dev/sda1, /dev/sda2) and let the disk labels vary when duplicating across multiple Pi's, or (b) leave fstab to use the disk label and leave it the same across multiple Pi's? There's also option (c) which is to generate a new disk label but update fstab accordingly on restore. I'd rather avoid that unless there's a convincing argument for it though. I guess what I'm asking is how much it matters if lots of Pi's have the same disk label, and also weighed against that how much it is an advantage to mount based on disk ID instead of partition number. Mark -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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[ALUG Announce] ALUG Norwich Pub Meet Thursday 14th September
by Viperfang 14 Sep '17

14 Sep '17

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via https://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- Hello Norwich Aluggers, Our monthly ALUG Norwich social meeting will be held this Thursday, 14th September at The Coach and Horses (82 Thorpe Road, Norwich, NR1 1BA). The meeting officially starts at 8pm, although some people may arrive earlier. More information on those people can be found on the list and the IRC channel. If you are unsure if you will recognise us then make yourself and your intent to attend known by either posting on list or visiting us on IRC so we can look out for you rather than hiding in the corner. Optionally you could ask at the bar if they know where the geeky computer weirdos are and they'll point you in the right direction (seriously!). Another possibility is look for heaps of electronics on a table that may possibly look like movie props that would used for detonating explosives. Feel free to bring electronics/laptops/gadgets to the meet, you will by no means be alone. Ben Bewick aka Viperfang NB: This mail is automated, please refer to the usual sources for more information. ALUG Contact Details: Website : http://www.alug.org.uk/ IRC : #alug on irc.alug.org.uk List : http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo Twitter : http://twitter.com/anglianlug Identica: TBA Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2381613902 ----- Send discussion replies to main(a)lists.alug.org.uk (Reply-To set) Unsub, change settings via https://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

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Changing a static IP (Rasbian Stretch)
by Mark Rogers 14 Sep '17

14 Sep '17

Note: I have "net.ifnames=0" in /boot/cmdline.txt so that I get the old interface names (eth0 etc) back. I've always worked with /etc/network/interfaces in the past, but Googling suggests the correct way to set a static IP is now to edit /etc/dhcpcd.conf and append: interface eth0 static ip_address=192.168.0.28/24 static routers=192.168.0.1 static domain_name_servers=192.168.0.5 If I restart dhcpcd or networking: sudo service networking restart .. then the new IP address gets added, but the old IP address gets retained until reboot. (Regardless of whether the old IP came from DHCP or was a previous static.) What am I doing wrong? Note: If there's a better way to set a static IP then I'm happy to look at that instead. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Intelligently deleting thumbnail images
by Mark Rogers 07 Sep '17

07 Sep '17

A friend lost all their photos from their phone; luckily they had been on a MicroSD card and photorec recovered them all for me, and renrot renamed them all (and fixed their timestamps) based on their EXIF data. So what I now have is a directory of images, but of-course the phone had created thumbnails and the recovery has recovered them as well, and I'd like to delete them. As a human it's easy to do: find two images that "look" the same, and delete the smaller one. But there are hundreds so this human isn't up for the job. Any suggestions as to how to do this in software? Just deleting all the smaller images isn't enough as there do seem to be some small images for which there isn't a larger counterpart (I'm guessing maybe they came from the front facing camera or some other source). -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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OT Firefox and legacy add-ons
by Bev Nicolson 04 Sep '17

04 Sep '17

Possibly a bit OT. Legacy add ons are not going to be supported in FF57. I wondered if ALUG peeps had any recommendations for add ons they'd use instead of Better Privacy Cookie Monster HTML5 everywhere No Flash ScrapBook (onto my fourth folder so really don't want to lose this!) YouTube All HTML5 to do the same kind of job. Thanks. Bev.

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Nextcloud anyone?
by Phil Thane 01 Sep '17

01 Sep '17

Does anyone use, or have expertise in, Nextcloud? I'm an amateur user with Nextcloud running on a home server. Generally I'm very happy with it, it means I always have a mirror of my desktop stuff which I can access via the web and any photos taken on my phone are synced automatically next time the phone finds a wifi connection. Now it's got an annoying problem though. There is a corrupted .jpg file in the InstantUpload folder which throws up an error message in the desktop sync app. It gives the path and 'Server replied: Locked' The file is almost certainly one of a batch my 4 year old granddaughter took when she figured out how to do selfies. Most were rubbish so I deleted them using the phone, possibly interrupting the upload process. She took the photos at our place so the upload would have been more or less instant. If I use the phone app the file won't open, nor will it it delete, move or rename. Nor will it if I view the files via a web browser. It's not a critical error, everything else works OK, but it's annoying seeing the warning every time files sync. Any suggestions? Anyone with access to 4 year old children for example? -- Phil Thane www.pthane.co.uk phil(a)pthane.co.uk 01767 449759 07582 750607 Twitter @pthane

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