John Ó'Ríordáns Blog » Linux

iTunes URL Decoder

thesraid — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 00:44:22 +0000

I love my android. And I love podcasts. I often listen to them in my car on my way to and from work. I find it makes my commute go a lot faster when I’m listening to stuff I’m actually interested in. The problem I have however is that most sites make their podcasts available on iTunes only, which doesn’t work with android.

What is doubly annoying is that iTunes doesn’t actually store the podcasts, they are stored on another site. iTunes is in fact just a directory of podcasts. So if the people who make the podcasts just gave us the original link to the site they are using to actually store the podcasts I could easily add them to my android or any non-apple device for that matter. It’s really annoying!

Luckily the website http://itunes.so-nik.com/ allows you to simply paste in the iTunes URL and it finds the back end website URL that you can add to your android. Sorted!

Watching Irish Television in Canada

thesraid — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 19:50:56 +0000

Does this sound like you? Saturday night is looming. You’re looking to let you hair down. But the match is on at 10:00am in the morning. You know if you go out for “one or two” there is no way you’ll be able to get up and drag yourself to the pub to watch the match. And the funds are low so you don’t want to pay 20 bucks at the pub. Oh if only the TV could tune RTÉ or RTÉ Player worked outside of Ireland! Or maybe you really wanted to see the Rose of Tralee live when abroad. I don’t judge.

Well using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) you can fool RTÉ Player into thinking you are in Ireland. Or any country in the world in fact. And it couldn’t be simpler. You download the VPN Client onto your laptop, select the country you want to appear to be and in that’s it. Simple!

How does it work? Well VPN guys have a server in Dublin that will go to RTÉ Player and get the match for you. Then it sends it over to Canada to your computer.

An added advantage is that you can select the UK to watch Soccer on BBC Player, or USA to use US Netflix (which is much better than Canadian Netflix) or whatever else might be restricted in Canada (such as downloading torrents of your favourite shows). It can fool any software into thinking you are in a different country.

A quick search online give you a number of options such as surfbouncer.com, vpntraffic.com, overplay.net or ukproxyserver.co.uk. All of these allow you to pretend you are in Ireland for between 5 and 10 bucks a month.

You’ll never have to miss another episode of Republic of Telly again. And it’ll be great to hear Hook and Pope arguing during the World Cup.

vSphere Client Command Line Options

thesraid — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 10:53:09 +0000

I have a number of different ESX Servers and vCenter Servers to connect to at work. None are set up in DNS because they are just test servers. So every time I want to connect I have to try and remember the IP address. Also some are ESX Servers where the login is root, and others are vCenter where the login is administrator. So I often have to connect to two or three different IPs, trying both logins, until I get the one I want.

Today I decided to create a number of shortcuts to each server. I wanted to be able to click on a vSphere Client link and have it automatically connect to eh correct Server, enter the username and password and log me in. Turns out it’s quite easy as the client can’t take that information as a command line argument. However I found it hard to find anything on the internet explaining the options. Of course running \? on the client gives me nothing.

Anyway here is the options you need to pass to the vSphere Client executable to get it to connect to a server with a certain username or password. Now all you need to do is make a number of shortcuts to each server in a folder and you can quickly launch the one you want. Very handy!

VpxClient.exe -i yes -s 10.21.68.8 -u root -p vmware

Sharing my Laptops Network Connection with my Android Phone

thesraid — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 11:32:29 +0000

When I’m at work I don’t want to be using my Mobile Data Connection to download content onto my android phone. I had a look to see how I could easily share my laptops network connection with my phone. I came across a very useful piece of software called VirtualRouter. It takes care of everything for you. It bridges your network connections, installs a small DHCP Server and creates an ad-hoc wireless network for your phone to connect to.

Now I can browse the market, read emails, and check my social networking sites from my phone, at work for free!

Currently this software only works with Windows 7. If you want to do this for older Windows Operating Systems you can set up an ad-hoc network manually by following these steps. If you want to use Ubuntu you can follow these steps.

Open iTunes Podcasts in any Player

thesraid — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 20:31:18 +0000

I’ve installed Linux on my new Laptop at work and I’ve got nearly everything working that I would’ve used on Windows. Well except a client that connect to Exchange properly but that’s another story. Anyway, the one thing that bugged me was podcasts that I listen to that are only available on iTunes. There is no iTunes for Linux. However with Feed Flipper you can convert any iTune URL (itms://) into a standard xml based RSS feed.

Great now I can load all of my Podcasts on my iPhone to listen too on the long drive home.

Google Ireland Search Plugin for Firefox

thesraid — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 21:10:46 +0000

I was pretty irritated with the Google Search in Firefox constantly directing me to Google.com as opposed to Google.ie. When I search with Google.ie the results are better targeted to Irish people are therefore more useful to me. So as a result I wrote my own Google.ie Firefox search.

If you want to use it click here to install.

Make a Static Page your Home Page in WordPress

thesraid — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 20:48:41 +0000

I’ve been doing a couple of sites for a Friend of mine who also happens to be my MMA instructor. RebelMMA and KenHealyFitness. They aren’t so much blogs as advertising websites. As a result I wanted to make the static pages jump out, whereas the blogging function should be hidden a little further into the site. I still wanted to use WordPress though as it’s already running on my server. So I had a dig around and found it was actually easy to move the blog away from the front page. Now on those sites when you vist them you get a static front page and you have to navigate to the blog.

Check out the steps on the WordPress site.

bin/bash^M: bad interpreter: no such file or directory

thesraid — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 12:24:01 +0000

I got this error recently when trying to execute a bash script in Linux.

bin/bash^M: bad interpreter: no such file or directory

The problem turned out to be the fact that I downloaded it to a windows machine before copying it to the Linux box. When I downloaded it windows added a number of Windows Carriage Returns at the end of each line. Why? Don’t ask me!

After a bit of Googling I found a number of posts that recommended I use dos2unix to convert it into unix file format. Unfortunately I didn’t have this on my system. So instead I used the following command.

tr -d '\r' < inputfile > outputfile

Upgrade Free from Vista to Windows 7

thesraid — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:24:36 +0000

If you bought a laptop or desktop from Dell Ireland at any stage you might be eligible for a free upgrade to Windwos 7 which is supposed to be way better.

Check out the dell website for more details.

Of course i would recommend installing Kubuntu on your Dell system :-)

Install the “old” amarok 1.4 in KDE 4

thesraid — Fri, 15 May 2009 18:11:59 +0000

I installed KDE4.2.2 recently. I used KDE4.1 for about 5 minutes but uninstalled it because it was very slow, couldn’t do half of what KDE3 seemed to be able to do and was very frustrating. The 4.2.2 release is much nicer. Very polished and stable.

Unfortunately my favourite Linux Application amaroK has been butchered in KDE4. The playlist is shoved to the right and isn’t as intuitive as it groups albums together in a seeming random way. There is a huge panel in the middle that just shows the cover and on the left there are a few menus. Also it doesn’t detect my iPod, or at least I can’t figure out how to drag music into the iPod.

As a result I decided to keep KDE4 but uninstall amaroK2 and install amaroK1. Since I use Kubuntu I had to look for how to do it in Ubuntu. After a bit of googling I found the ubuntu-blog which showed me how to do it. I have pasted the instructions below.

echo -e “\n## amarok 1.4 \ndeb http://ppa.launchpad.net/bogdanb/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main\ndeb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/bogdanb/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main” | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install amarok14