Lead Breakfast ('Pulp Fiction' Remix)

Another very cool video remix, this time using flicks from Pulp Fiction:

What happened to Syncany? Not dead -- really?

I recently visited the Syncany page again to check what (finally) the status is: Apparently a news entry from April 2012 is there telling that the project is not dead. Well, at least something, but hopefully this won't end up being the next Duke Nukem Forever. Don't get me wrong: I'm really looking forward trying out Syncany as soon as it's ready, but competition (aka OwnCloud, CamliStore and such) is not sleeping. While I don't really believe in SparkleShare coming up with something really good anymore there must be a new alternative ...we will see (and hope).

ASCIIFlow - diagrams the 1337 style

Ever wondered how much time certain people spent creating cool-looking ASCII diagrams in all sorts of documentation and technical stuff? Well, wonder no more because there's now ASCIIFlow! Without any registration hassle and completely for free you finally can draw ASCII diagrams using a hip and responsive web 2.0 application.

Be sure to give it a try! http://www.asciiflow.com/

Yet another backup solution: Backshift

If you follow my blog a bit more closely you surely recognized my habit of always looking for the perfect backup solution.

Well, here's another (rather new) one: Backshift.
To quote the webpage:

• rsync can be used to copy a filesystem from one host to another, or for backups using rsync's --link-dest option plus a small wrapper script
• Backshift is only for backups, and works analogously to rsync --link-dest, but it deduplicates variable-lengthed blocks of the files both intra-host and inter-host, and compresses those blocks using xz.

Although it's pretty new it already claims a lot -- just have a look at the nice comparison table over here.

O Fortuna Misheard Lyrics (Animated)

Make RSSOwl work with Mint 13 (Maya)

Sigh, that took me a while to figure out. After re-installing my Linux base system (moved from an ancient but steadily upgraded Ubuntu to Mint 13 aka Maya because of their lovely Cinnamon desktop) I could not run RSSOwl anymore.

I'm using RSSOwl because of their nice Google Reader integration which enables me to keep track of all the news on different devices I'm using nowadays.

Anyhow, RSSOwl just failed to load on my brand new Mint with the error message "Failed to create the browser", aborting the whole thing afterwards.

For Mint (and maybe other Ubuntu-related distributions out there) you need to do the following in order to make RSSOwl start successfully again:

1. Go into your RSSOwl/xulrunner directory (e.g. /opt/rssowl/xulrunner) and execute:
   chmod 755 $(file * | grep executable | sed 's/:.*//')
2. Then, do a:
   sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libhunspell-1.3.so.0 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libhunspell-1.2.so.0
   
   on a 64-bit system, or for 32-bit, do a:
   
   sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_32-linux-gnu/libhunspell-1.3.so.0 /usr/lib/x86_32-linux-gnu/libhunspell-1.2.so.0

The first step makes sure that all file permissions for xulrunner (a component RSSOwl needs) are set correctly, the second step creates a symbolic link to point from libhunspell-1.2.so.0 to libhunspell-1.3.so.0. Xulrunner apparently is dynamically linked with the older libhunspell 1.2 but Mint already has version 1.3.
To manually figure out why xulrunner is unhappy a

./xulrunner --register-user

in the RSSOwl/xulrunner directory will tell you.

After the two steps above your RSSOwl installation should run without trouble again -- happy reading!