Little bits of Linux
A few things which have filled my geeky world this week.
Rockbox. Simply Rocks.
iPod mini showing Rockbox System>Debug menus
A fellow Crunchbang user informed me of this firmware replacement for a number of digital media players including the Apple iPod series. I was recently gifted a 1st generation iPod Mini, which even with the default firmware worked great under Crunchbang Linux, using gtkPod for managing it. I quickly became frustrated with the missing ability to drag and drop music onto the player, rather than using the devices iTunes like database as the way Apple intended. I downloaded the Rockbox installer, plugged up the iPod via USB and ran the file. Five mins later and had a very detailed, very customizable and extent able interface on this neat little player. I can now drag and drop any media file supported by the hardware, including Mp3, Ogg and my beloved FLAC formats directly in a file browser or via command line like any other usb storage device. The unit has a failing battery which will need to be replaced soon and under the orginal Apple firmware it was only usable for about 30 mins. After switching to the open source Rockbox firmware I get about 2.5 hours of play, although I plan on replacing the battery eventually.
In my never ending search for a streamlined system of organization I take a lot of notes, up until recently anything that wasn’t a todo list item was kept as reference in a neat note taking application called Gnote. Being a fan of minimalism I like having access to my information in plain text, so I was dismayed to learn Gnote does not keep its files in plain text. After asking around on the Crunchbang forums I was informed of Zim, a great personal wiki which stores it’s notes in plain text, dated files and folder based notebooks.
This weeks quick tip.
Search and Replace text in all files in a folder and its subfolders
I don’t remember where I found this but it saved me a lot of work recently so I’m passing it along.
#To replace all occurances of a string:
find /your/home/dir -name “*.txt” | xargs perl -pi -e ’s/stringtoreplace/replacementstring/g’
#To replace the first occurance:
find /your/home/dir -name “*.txt” | xargs perl -pi -e ’s/stringtoreplace/replacementstring/’
Any finally I’ve become quiet a fan of the Linux Outlaws podcast, Fab and Dan are both very funny and provide a crap load of great Linux information. Their show is a real resource and a worthy addition to your podcast feed list.