Sending custom emoticons with Adium

I’ve published an updated version of the patch here.

When I chat, I rely on the MSN Messenger service. That’s not because it’s the best platform out there, it’s just the most used among my friends. One thing that has always bothered me is the lack of a good, dedicated client for Mac OS X. Of course there is Adium, you’d say. Being a multi-protocol IM client, Adium lacks of some of the most specific features of the msn protocol. Efforts have been made in that direction, but the client still miss the ability to send custom emoticons.

Prevent smartd from waking up your sleeping hard drives

I am afraid of disk failure more than the average person is. On my DNS-323 I’ve set up smartd to run S.M.A.R.T. self tests on the two drives each night and email me in the (I hope, very unlikely) event that something’s wrong.

How to umount a busy linux device

We all get there at some point.. we happily write:

dune@balthasar:~$ sudo umount /mnt/extUsb

and all we get is a clueless:

umount: can't umount /mnt/extUsb: Device or resource busy

So, who’s keeping the disk busy? Which process do I have to kill to get an umount around here? The answer is easy, and it relies on the linux tool fuser.

Vim Cookbook poster

I’m trying to get a grip on Vim’s keyboard shortcuts and I’ve made this poster to help me out:

It’s far from a complete reference, but I think it covers the most important ones. It’s an A2 sheet after all!!

iPhone streaming.. quick&dirty

On January, the 2nd my friend and I found a great way to keep busy during the afternoon: find a way to stream audio/video from a Windows PC to the iPhone. There are plenty of options out there, but we needed a lightweight solution. I immediately thought: “let’s build an iPhone web application”! Which, translated, means: let’s find a lightweight web server and write some fancy php directory listing page.. Abyss Web Server seems to be a nice windows web server: it is lightweight, it comes with a good web interface and it provides an easy php module installation. Googling around, we found out that someone already made a nice web-based, iPhone-compatible, php mini-website to list the content of directories.

Main

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