My Humax freeview recorder (a HDR-FOX T2 with 1tb drive) has recently started to show signs that it might be about to fail. The Hard drive is getting louder when recording and my most recent recordings pause periodically, often with the screen going blank and displaying the message ‘encrypted video cannot be show’ (or something to that effect). At first the pauses were infrequent and short, but more recently they’ve been getting much worse often missing a minute or more of the recording per ‘glitch’. The hard drive test found in the setting menu is also failing now too.

I’ve always had trouble downloading footage from my old DV camcorder using desktop tools like Kino, with it often locking up when I leave it to download a full tape.

I prefer to use OpenShot for editing, so all I really need is a simple tool to allow me to download footage from the camcorder. I’ve recently discovered the command line tool dvgrab, and it works wonderfully!

I recently set up HA proxy on one of my Debian 6 (squeeze) servers.

There were a few rather annoying ‘gotchas’ that took a while to figure out, so I’m documenting them in case I ever have to set up HAproxy again.

This is a quick how to with the steps used to compile Node.js on Centos Linux.

These steps were successfully executed on Centos 6.2 x86 with node 0.6.18

Building Node.js on Linux is fairly simple, as there are few dependencies. This is how I did it on Debain 6 (Squeeze). At the time of writing the current release of Node.js was 0.6.15. You’ll need to adjust the intructions below to reflect the version you’re building.

Update: I have also successfully tested these instructions with node.js 0.6.17 on Ubuntu 12.04.

I needed to extract/generate a public ssh key from a java keystore so that the Java application could SFTP some files using public key authentication.

The problem was that I couldn’t find any way of converting an ssl public key to an ssh public key. It seems that although ssl and ssh private keys are compatible, the public keys are not.

Like the fool I am, whilst messing about with user privileges in phpMyAdmin I managed to delete the root account. Suddenly I found myself with no access to any of my databases

It took a while to figure out how to re-create the root@localhost user, so here’s how I did it.

I recently gave K9COPY a try, it’s supposed to be the Linux equivalent of DVDshrink for Windows. It certainly looked the part, but when I ran it with a disk I wanted to back up it ran for a short while and then crashed

Looking at the output of dmesg revealed that the disk was having trouble reading the encrypted disk:
`[235.097347] sr 5:0:0:0: [sr0] Add. Sense: Read of scrambled sector without authentication

Today saw the release of Xen 4.1. Major changes include support for greater than 255 CPUs, a new credit scheduler and CPU pools.

However, the most significant change to those that use Xen will be the new XL toolstack which replaces XM/XEND and will ultimately replace xcp’s xapi and libvirt.

I was converting a TV show I’d  to DVD format using ffmpeg, but the resulting file had the wrong audio channel. At first I thought it had no audio at all, but then I noticed it had a voice over occasionally explaining what was happening; “so-n-so has just entered the room…”.

It appears that ffmpeg had selected the wrong audio stream. For some reason, it had had selected the second audio stream instead of the first. The fix is simple enough, you can manually set the streams to use with the -map option. The command below works well for UK freeview.