Me and My Zaurus

Website News: sdjf.esmartdesign.com

sdjf — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 06:30:47 +0000

My companion site, sdjf.esmartdesign.com is temporarily down until I upgrade, but it will be back up soon.

If you have noticed links to my feed at tyrannozaurus being dead, my apologies, I was not sure where to move my feed when tyrannozaurus went offline, it looks like the packages and scripts will be getting moved to my esmartdesign site.

It has been a free site, and hotlinking and putting ipks there was not allowed, but I think I will be able to put ipks there once I upgrade, so stay tuned – it may take a while to get the feed links updated, but the basic webpages should be back up as Linux and Zaurus resources soon.

sdjf

Tyrannozaurus Feeds Have Moved

sdjf — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 14:10:02 +0000

Are you having trouble finding feeds or sites hosted by tyrannozaurus.com? Well, Tyrannozaurus became overrun by spambots and so Antikx decided to disable the forum early in 2010. And the URLS to all the feeds he was hosting at tz changed from http://www.tyrannozaurus.com/feed/contribs/xxxx/ to http://xxxx.tyrannozaurus.com/.

Antikx had posted a notice at OESF about new feeds and sites getting this new URL format, and I was busy and did not realize that that he did not put in any redirects and that all the old links would stop working.

Anyhow, it will take me quite a while to finish updating all the links to my feed here in my blog http://sdjf.wordpress.com and on my website http://sdjf.esmartdesign.com/, so if you are looking for a particular file on my feed, try changing the URL from http://www.tyrannozaurus.com/feed/contribs/sdjf/FILENAME to http://sdjf.tyrannozaurus.com/FILENAME

And, as always, if you are having trouble locating something I refer to on any of my webpages, please do contact me.

sl600l: More Corrupt Network Settings

sdjf — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 13:31:10 +0000

The solutions to my occasional difficulties getting online with my Tosa which I had written about in this other blog post worked fine for a while, but then I had trouble getting online again.

I had thought that I had all my connectivity problems resolved, and a clear list of what to do if my network settings got corrupted again, so I was quite surprised when I had trouble getting online again. Read the rest of this entry »»

Corrupted Networking Settings

sdjf — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 22:38:11 +0000

I had been getting online rather quickly and easily with my sl6000 for the past month or two. But, when I tried to go online the other day, I kept getting messages in my pppd log kept saying “Failed to authenticate ourselves to peer,” over and over and over again. I wondered whether my ISP had done something to block my account or reset my logon password to a previous one. I tried calling them and could not get through.

Opera had crashed during my last session online, and I did notice that there was no listing for /dev/shm when I did the “df” command. But, the files in /etc/ppp/peers did not seem to have been corrupted. They looked like normal text files. Read the rest of this entry »»

Finding Which File to Extract from a Tar Backup

sdjf — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 15:18:42 +0000

A primary reason I have so little free K bytes in internal memory on my Zaurus is that I want easy access to all the files and email I have written or downloaded, no matter which SD card I happen to be using, and whether or not I am using my CF modem at the moment. I do not want to have to putz around, hunting through backups and then having to extract the files, I want them quickly and easily.

But I have gotten very tired of the lack of space, and started wondering if I could find a way to quickly and easily locate old files I need and extract them. I have not found a perfect solution yet, not one good enough to make me feel comfortable about erasing a bunch of files, which I think I might need access to on a moment’s notice, but I thought I would share what I have figured out so far, as I have found some techniques which I have found quite helpful when I need to examine the contents of a backup file.
Read the rest of this entry »»

Battery Failure: Charging Light Issues

sdjf — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 12:08:37 +0000

My EA-BL06 had been in almost constant use since August 2005, since I always leave my Collie plugged into it’s AC adapter. And, there were signs it might be losing the ability to charge. For over a year, the charging light would occasionally turn on for no apparent reason and that was happening a lot the last couple of months.

So, when I could not turn my Zaurus on one morning, I was not very surprised.
Read the rest of this entry »»

The Myth About BCC Email

sdjf — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 03:47:51 +0000

Once upon a time, people could respect others privacy when sending email to a number of recipients, by putting the addresses in a “BCC” field, which meant “blind courtesy copy,” or “blind carbon copy.” That was supposed to mean that the server or email client would remove the addresses of the “BCC” recipients before sending the email on to everyone in the “TO:”, “CC:”, and “BCC:” fields.

However, despite common belief, when we send email to someone as a “BCC” email, their address may be sent to all recipients, and is not necessarily privatized.
Read the rest of this entry »»

I found some OESF/ZUG Downloads!

sdjf — Thu, 15 May 2008 11:18:18 +0000

Hey, trying to find an ipk I wanted to check out, all the download links for http://www.zaurususergroup.org I tried were dead, but I found they seem to have moved to http://www.oesf.org/howto/downloads.

I do not know if all the ipks that were on the old feed are there, but check out and bookmark the software index there, in case it might have what you are looking for!

sdjf

Make Backups to Prevent Grief

sdjf — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 14:06:16 +0000

Geeks will be geeks and hackers will be hackers, and any time one of us messes around writing scripts or going on a cleanup campaign, IMNSHO, it is just plain stupid to not make backups. It also is rather foolhardy to install new software on the Zaurus without making a backup immediately beforehand, at least that’s been my experience when trying to install some packages that ended up trashing my system.

One day about a month ago, silly me had not made a backup in about four weeks, being too preoccupied with other things to want to take the time to change cards around to do it, and I sure paid a price for that stupidity.

I was working on a script to automatically move and rename all selected files in the .operasave directory on my SD card, and erase all the rest of those files in each subdirectory that I was processing, as well as removing those specific .operasave subdirectories.

I had thought I had tested the complex chain of commands I was entering thoroughly, but somehow they ended up erasing the all the files in my home directory, /home/root, except those it hadn’t gotten to by the time I entered ctrl-c, those starting with letters a thru p or starting with any capital letters. So, then I spent an hour or two fetching month-old versions of the files it had not removed, using the technique I described here, about how to retrieve single files from a tar backup. (To retrieve an entire directory, you can read this page.)

Anyhow, after restoring the files, silly me turned right around and went back to work on my SD card operasave directory cleanup script without bothering to make a newer backup. I put a test in to have it check for valid arguments. I ran a few tests. Then I went into production mode, and this time managed to erase an even larger number of files. Grrrr.

So, my Collie’s calendar application now will remind me weekly to make backups. When I write scripts that are like this one, I am also going to build in changing to a directory that does not matter if the contents get erased, like /var/log.

Unrecognized CF and SD Cards

sdjf — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 19:56:37 +0000

I found a really cool, well-written wiki page at oesf about how to get your Zaurus to recognize a new CF or SD card which is not already recognizable:

http://www.oesf.org/index.php?title=Updating_the_Zaurus_to_accept_new_CF_cards

sdjf