Cyphen.net -

Formatting FAT32 in Linux

hack — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 00:47:51 -0800

If you want to fomat a drive with FAT32 in Linux, like a camera card, use can use the command:

sudo mkdosfs -F 32 /dev/sde1

Obviously change /dev/sde1 to match which drive you want to format.

Getting Rid of Reserve Space On EXT3 Drives

hack — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 10:51:40 -0800

Just a quick tip, by default when drives are formatted with EXT3 in Linux they reserve 5% of the drive for root, if you have a storage drive that root doesn't need to write to you can get rid of that reserve by using:

sudo tune2fs /dev/sdd1 -m 0

Obviously change /dev/sdd1 to match your hard drive. You can do this while the drive is mounted.

Error Reporting Error

hack — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 10:35:17 -0800

Check out the error Torvan managed to get when his hard drive committed suicide.

dfin

hack — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 23:07:50 -0800

The 'dfin' script is a BASH script that runs at the end of downloading/extracting in SABnzbdPLUS and is meant to rename TV shows to the same name they are posted on newzbin as, and then move the video file into the correct folder, and clean up any lingering superfluous files. I've only used it in linux, it will probably work just fine in OS X and probably in Windows using cygwin. Requires BASH and sed. You must change the 'complete' and 'dest' variables to match your setup.

You can download the most recent release here:
http://source.cyphen.net/dfin/trunk/dfin

SVN

hack — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 23:04:34 -0800

There's a few links to SVN repositories for a couple programs that someone might find useful. They're not exactly documented, considering thus far I'm the only person to ever use them, so you'll have to poke around a bit if you want to understand what's going on. If you have any questions, feel free to get on IRC and ask me.

Using chown

hack — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 19:43:58 -0800

If you can't access files on your *nix or OS X boxen since they're owned by other people (such as root) you can change the permissions of those files with this simple command.

sudo chown -R username:group file

The -R option is recursive, so if you chown a folder it will change the permissions of all of the enclosed files and subdirectories. If you only need to change the permissions on a file then you can omit the -R, although it won't hurt if you do use it.

If you can't figure out your own username you're an idiot. As for the group, it depends on your setup, it can be users or your username, or whatever group you decide needs access to it. If you don't know what to set it as, just use your username. You must have a ':' in-between your username and group.

For the file, you can use a file, a directory, or just a wild card and go crazy.

Things not to do:

sudo chown -R nobody:nobody /*

Formats

hack — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 12:11:33 -0800

Since I seem to get this asked a lot, here's my list of favorite formats:

Video:

h.264 encoded video in an MKV container, most shows that are available for download using BitTorrent and USENET in HD use this format, in 720p. TV shows that are 1080i are usually transcoded to 720p.

Audio:

Lossless flac is my preferred format, it's a FOSS format which is lossless (duh) and uses compression. An average album encoded in flac is around 300 megs, as opposed to 70-100 for an average album encoded via mp3.

Images:

No idea. I do like transparent PNG's though, since IE6 is too stupid to work with them. (Notice what the cyphen.net logo format is?)

File compression:

I like 7z. RAR's alright.

Don't like:

Any formats that use or can support DRM. WMV's are rubbish. M4P's piss me off. Zip is outdated and crap.

BSOD

hack — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 18:20:45 -0700

Check out the STOP code my coworker got.

Fixing an Xbox 360

hack — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 18:16:15 -0700

So Friday I finally convinced myself to buy an Xbox 360, considering there were I few games I'd really like to play and now I've got a pretty decent 52" Sharp 1080p LCD HDTV. I went one of the 24 hour wal-mart's here in town since it was about 10:30 at night when I got there, and first off there was only the Halo 3 edition and the Arcade edition, neither of which I wanted. I asked one of the sales clerks if they had the regular pro edition anywhere, so I got told someone would check the back.

And so I waited.

I waited a bit longer.

And then I walked around.

And then I came back.

All in all, I waited for that 360 for an hour before they brought it out. On the up side, it was a brand new bundle and came with Forza Motorsport 2 and Marvel Ultimate Alliance and had an HDMI port, I also bought a copy of Halo 3.

I quickly spead home to hook it up and play it, only to (you guessed it) have the red ring of death. To be specific, it was only a quarter of the circle that was lit up, and it showed error E68. After a quick search online, I found out this problem stems from a bad hard drive, so I removed the hard drive and the 360 booted up just fine. After playing with the connector a bit, I put the hard drive back on and tried to start up the 360 again, no luck. I then was pretty upset, and decited to just register it on xbox.com and get warenty support.

After filling out all of the warenty info, the site went down.

I was pissed.

I tried it again, same problem. And again, no change. At this point I was so upset I took the hard drive I had laying in my lap and threw it at the wall.

The drive works fine now.

Cyphen.net relaunch

hack — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 19:52:40 -0700

As you might have noticed, Cyphen.net went through a complete redesign from the ground up. I've swiched the backend from a heavily hacked up wordpress install to a Drupal based site, with a few modules to do what I think I need. The redesign took me seven hours total, but the site
went live in five. Considering I've never used Drupal before I think that's pretty good so far! If you're curious about the modules I'm using feel free to drop me a line; Likewise, if you have any Drupal modules or site changes to suggest please let me know!

If anyone wants to redesign the Cyphen.net header logo, please do so and email it to me. I'd need it released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license (I'll include your name in the footer)

Although Cyphen.net isn't very big (yet) the old wordpress based site had a lot of limitations that became a pain to have to work around, so after doing some research I settled for Drupal, which so far has been great. Let me know what you think about the site in the comments, or by email, or as always, IRC.