Here’s something small but interesting and useful I learnt today. Often times, I update my linux profile so that I can have aliases to work with on my server. Problem is that the profile is only loaded when you login so, in normal circumstances, you would have to relogin to have your profile loaded. Now that’s a pain!

An easier solution (which works at least on bash) is to do this:

source .bash_profile

It’s something so simple and yet so powerful! I’ve heard that for KSH, you would need to simply invoke the profile file name and it would be

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A problem I’ve faced quite a few times is having a folder full of files with a padded extension that needs to be removed before I can use the files. This often happens because I have uTorrent set up for having the extension “.!ut” for files which are not downloaded.

For reasons I cannot comprehend, sometimes on old torrents, files are all marked with that extension even though I know they are completed. It’s easy to rename all files when there are 10 of them. For torrents with 100+ files, it gets a lot more tedious.

In comes my laziness!

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I’ve been dabbling around a lot with Android customizations from my HTC Incredible S which I recently took from HTC’s India ROM to Android Revolution HD ;) Along the way, I S-Offed my phone and rooted it as well.

If you’re wondering how to how to do this transition or having issues using AlphaRevX, feel free to read up my extremely long writeup of this process on the XDA-Developers forum which has given so much to so many ;)

The tutorial takes you from your HTC Sense default ROM on your HTC Incredible S to S-Offing your phone, getting recovery

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It’s been a while since my laptop (a Sony Vaio VGN-CR35G/R) has been running Ubuntu and yesterday, I updated my OS to the release candidate for Ubuntu’s latest OS (due to release in 7 days time; 10-10-2010 ;)) 10.10 codenamed Maverick Meerkat. It’s been irritating me for a while that I didn’t have support for the inbuilt web camera for this laptop (which is one of Ricoh’s MotionEye USB cameras; model r5u870).

I had tried looking for drivers a couple of times prior to this but always failed. Finally, I found a package that supports Ricoh’s r5u87x series and the

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If you suffer from reception issues on your WiFi connection and would like a boost to your router/access point, you should try out this easy tutorial I read online. It’s free and really simple on following up. All you need is some aluminium foil, card board, glue for sticking stuff and a scissor/blade for some cutting.

It’s so easy (and cheap) to build, it would be silly not to try it out before considering actually paying for a booster on your WiFi router.

I suggest you go check out the Ez-10 Corner Reflector. I found it thanks to Read on →

Your first thought on reading this probably is “Why in the world would I need to do that?” Well, I would have thought of it the same way a week back. But it seems some times, Windows does not want to give access to certain features such as Advanced File Sharing options. It states that the administrator on my machine has disallowed this operation. Guess what? I’m the only administrator on this machine! Since I was unable to find the option to get that feature working, I decided to resort to some good old Command Line usage :)

To remove

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As of today, the primary OS on my laptop is Ubuntu and since torrenting is a good way to get open source applications (such as Eclipse), I thought I should definitely invest the time to get a decent torrent client. I’m not saying that Transmission isn’t a good client. I certainly can’t say that since I haven’t used it for more than 5 minutes. I simply lacks umph. It really doesn’t impress me as much as uTorrent does on Windows. So let’s look for an alternative client.

Using uTorrent with Wine is always a popular option, one most Windows to Linux converts happily embrace. Let’s face it, uTorrent is awesome. But I really wanted to embrace Linux which for me meant to stop using the mouse and GUI as much as possible (not that difficult for me) and getting used to native applications rather than applications via Wine. This meant no more uTorrent for torrenting and no more mIRC :( The alternative I settled for came highly recommended by quite a few users. And oh, look at that, it’s terminal based. Of course, I’m talking about rTorrent ;)

I have tried to install rTorrent before and failed. This time around, I had managed to get rTorrent to install and work fine but I couldn’t get a webUI for it to work. So I had dt walk me through the process. I’ll try to document as much of it as possible to help users going through the same issue.

If you want to see a couple of screen shots of the end result before beginning, visit the rutorrent website and check out the screen shots. The best part about it is the tracker based, per torrent and global settings along with the pretty amazing traffic plug-in which gives your multiple (group) views of your traffic statistics. It’s pretty cool ;)

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On a lazy Sunday afternoon when you’ve got nothing better to do, you either write rather useless scripts or update them. I chose to do the latter.

The file list generation script I wrote some time back was mainly to generate a list of movies I have. When I generated a list of all the HD movies I have on disk, I realized, my list was being ruined by loads of sample files which escape the file filter because they are the same extension as the videos themselves. So I decided to

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A lot of people today download videos (TV shows and movies) off the internet using torrents or Usenet. Most sources pack the videos in multi-part RAR archives to minimize loss in case of error prone transfer. Though this does not make much sense usually on protocols such as the bittorrent protocol but it does on the scene where data is transferred using FTP. In such cases, you are left with a lot of rar files that you have to keep (if you’re seeding on trackers) and extract every time you want to play them.

Some video players like Read on →

I have a whole load of movies that I’d like to generate a list of. I considered writing a batch script but it didn’t really do something I needed. I ended up writing my first regular use (non test) PowerScript and here’s how.

My first requirement was to list all my 1080p movies and for the list to leave out all the subtitles. So I was looking for a function to list files (dir in command prompt did that :)) and then remove files by extension. As it turned out, I could list files of a certain extension but not

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