Tiny Tiny RSS and Synology NASes

Today I spent a bit of time to evaluate Tiny Tiny RSS, an Open-Source and web-based RSS client with API support and much, much more.

I simply wasn't too happy with my last Feedly experiments, namely: No plugins, no filtering / tagging / scoring support and, well, it's closed-source. So I decided to give Tiny Tiny RSS a try. Why? Maybe you've heard about Google Reader closing soon.

Luckily, Syno Community is offering a (beta) package for Synology NASes, like for my DS212+. To get this package you have to add Syno Community's package repository with a special parameter:

http://packages.synocommunity.com/?beta=1

(Note the ?beta=1 at the end)

After adding, installation should go pretty smooth. Oh, and did I mention you have to enable MySQL and Web Station before doing that? Otherwise it won't work. Really.

In case you're wondering what's your admin user default password (in case you didn't change it yet) for the MySQL server: it's empty, nothing, nada.

If Tiny Tiny RSS' update daemon is not running correctly, that is, your feeds don't get updated, see the next steps:

Stop the package in the Synology package manger.

Check what's going on by manually running

su -m nobody -c "php /var/services/web/tt-rss/update.php --daemon"

on the SSH command line.

If there's an error like "sh: /usr/syno/bin/php: not found" you have to link the existing PHP binary via

ln -s /usr/bin/php /usr/syno/bin/php

After that the regular "--daemon" should work and also update the feeds. Now you can start the package again in the package manager.

Hope this helps.

Replacing OpenJDK with Oracle/Sun Java on Ubuntu and Mint

Ever wanted "the real thing" on your lovely Ubuntu or Mint installation when it comes to Java? Search no more, here's the solution: Duinsoft developed a very nice script / installer which does all the installation of the most recent Java Runtime from Oracle (formerly Sun) for you:

http://www.duinsoft.nl/packages.php?t=en

So in order to replace the pre-installed OpenJDK on your box you essentially need to follow the quick instructions ("Repository") on the site mentioned above plus purging the OpenJDK stuff afterwards with:

sudo apt-get purge openjdk-\* icedtea-\* icedtea6-\*

After all the voodoo is over you should get the following prompt when doing a

java -version

Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_06-b24)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 23.2-b09, mixed mode)

(Note: Exact build numbers may vary, depending on when you installed the stuff.)

Best thing is: You don't need to all that installation mess again, the script from Duinsoft will take care of it in the future from now on.

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.

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!

ZeroBin - a client-side encrypted pastebin alternative

If you're interested in running your own pastebin clone but don't want to let the server store the pasted text/code/whatever unencrypted you should give ZeroBin a try: It's a slick alternative to pastebin which uses modern browsers and JavaScript to encrypt the pasted content on the client before the data gets sent and stored on the server. To let someone else decrypt and view the content there's the decryption key built-in to the actual ZeroBin URL. Oh, did I mention it's also Open Source? Here you have it.

Try the demo here, more information can be retrieved on the actual project page here.

AMPPS - Try online software with no remorse

Some of you maybe already heard of it or even have used it so far, but I just stumbled over AMPSS, a free package (or better: software stack) containing over 250 software appliances such as Wordpress, Joomla or (my favorite!) Tine 2.0 in a ready-to-go state using the well-known Apache, PHP, MySQL combination.

Don't use this for production systems of course, but AMPPS is compelling and very time-saving when you want/need to evaluate online system like the ones mentioned above. Give it a try!

More backup: BUP

A pretty new project is BUP which is using GIT as a base and has some very promising features, as announced at the recent C8C3 in Berlin, Germany.

But be warned: It's far from being complete or even stable (even if they already do testcases and so on), definitly worth a look (later):

https://github.com/apenwarr/bup

More backup suggestions

Recently I've read a nice article over at Jon Dowland's blog regarding backup tools on POSIX machines. There he recommends obnam, another backup tool which sounds pretty interesting to me.

As I was a pretty satisfied user of Torsten Rupp's BAR (e.g. see here and here) I've switched over to rdiff-backup for the sake of easier restoring and accessing my backed up files.

rdiff-backup works pretty well for me, but I'll definitively give obnam a try soon ...especially de-duplication sounds awesome for non-ZFS users. Stay tuned.

Oh, and if you're interested in what's going on in your /etc (and also want a backup of it): Use etckeeper

Dropbox alternatives - SpiderOak

Ok, I've to admit that I've used Dropbox for a quite long time -- it just worked and I didn't really care about the security of my data. Simply, because I never stored any sensitive data on my Dropbox account(s).

But what if you need store some data others shouldn't have access to on Dropbox? Well ...it's easy: Dropbox does no end-to-end encryption. For the non-techies: The transfer itself to or from the Dropbox-servers are encrypted but the data itself on the server isn't. This basically enables the Dropbox administrators/employees to view your data with ease.

Wait! There's hope for alternatives to easily move away from Dropbox. One of the better alternatives (and believe me, I've tried a lot of them!) is called SpiderOak. Besides end-to-end protection and clients for Windows, Mac and Linux on PCs and Android + IPhone on mobile devices there's everything you need.

For starting you get a 2GB account for free for lifetime -- and if you signup using the link below you get another 1GB for free:

Click here to signup for a free lifetime 2GB (+ 1GB bonus!) account

Have fun!

Tired of Google Reader's new design? Try this!

For those of you who are using Google Reader (a web-based RSS-reader with synchronization for your lovely Android phone) and are not that amused about the new Google+-ish design:

Give NewsBlur a try. This Open Source software project isn't that new anymore but still very actively being developed. It features a very nice and slick web-based UI which - now comes the best part - offers a kind of learning feature based on tags and your given likes/dislikes. With that you can filter out stuff content you don't like (*couch* Apple *couch*) and highlight stuff you really care about.

NewsBlur comes in different flavors: A hosted edition which is limited to 64 feeds (too little for me news junkie) or you can host NewsBlur yourself you some Linux near you.

A techie-plus is the open webservice API which can be used to develop own clients for NewsBlur content (see Blar for a first Android client).

Thumbs up for this project!

Modelio goes open source!

For all of you who know Modelio, a very nice UML modeling tool (for Windows and Linux platforms), it now went open source!

Take a look while it's hot:
http://www.modelio.org/index.php

My $%&! MP3 player!

Ever wondered why the hell your shiny new MP3 player, TV media box or car radio doesn't play your songs in a certain directory in the order it's meant to be played? Think of some audiobook with track numbers in the file name (like "01 - Introduction.mp3", "02 - Foreword.mp3" and so on) ...?

Most of the media nowadays still is stored on some so called FAT(32) file systems. Too techy, I know. Because most of those MP3 players just play your songs / tracks as they find them on the media you get into trouble if the files were copied over to your player in the wrong order: These MP3 players simply won't respect the file name itself but just play the titles as found on the media!

To fix this you have to utilize a tool to get the ordering right on your player / media again: For this to do there's a neat utility called DriveSort for Windows.

Another nice collection of alternative tools was collected here: http://www.murraymoffatt.com/software-problem-0010.html

Web frameworks and presentations

While evaluating some web frameworks (like ExtJS, YUI, Sproutcore and others) the framework "Cappuccino" just does things a bit more weird (or just call it revolutionary if you want): It tries to hide all the funny HTML, CSS and JS bits from you by requiring to learn a new language called Objective-J. Not really what I want.

However, there's a really neat and useful application that already uses the Cappuccino framework: 280 Slides

With this you easily can create Powerpoint-like presentations just in your web browser and present plus export the slides into PPTX format. Did I mention that 280 Slides is free? Now I did.