delx.au / blog

I bought the Acer Iconia A501 on special from Telstra for $200 a while back. It’s a good tablet and that was a great price for it, however I’ve been annoyed that Telstra hasn’t bothered to release the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich update that Acer released for unbranded devices. Acer blames Telstra for not releasing it and Telstra blames Acer for not making it available. Bleh.

Fortunately it was not too hard to unbrand the device and upgrade all the way to Android 4.0.3 and presumably 4.1 when Acer finishes that update too.

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This code is obsolete and probably doesn’t work anymore.

Most ABC radio shows are available to download as MP3s, usually with a convenient podcast feed. Unfortunately sometimes, probably due to copyright stupidity, they make a programme available only by Windows Media or RealPlayer streaming. I’ve written a simple tool to snatch this streaming audio from ABC’s servers.

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WebDL is a collection of Web TV downloader scripts with a consistent user interface. I’ve previously released these separately, but a while ago I refactored them to share common code and packaged them into a single utility. You can use this interactively or to download any shows matching a glob from a cronjob. Currently supported are ABC iView and SBS OnDemand. I’ll probably add more in the future.

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I use rdiff-backup to keep a copy of the latest version of all my files and compressed differential backups going a year in the past. This works great except when I have a GNOME login and a ~/.gvfs directory. These are special FUSE directories that root user cannot even enter or even lstat(), which causes an annoying error to be emailed to me every night.

I finally got sick of this and have hacked a solution, I’m not proud of it, but it’ll make the emails stop!

$ curl -L --silent https://delx.au/code/rdiff-shutup.patch | sudo patch --backup -p0


I recently retired an old server of mine, cerberus. It was hosted in a remote data centre to which I have no physical access. My goal was to zero the drives before powering it off for the last time.

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