Author: tsukasa

The fool's herald.

Short notice: Installing Grub4Dos on USB thumbdrives

USB thumbdrives are great. They are cheap, small devices packed with a lot of storage to carry all your important stuff. They are also great to boot administrative tools like True Image etc.

On themudcrab there is a great article for those who want to boot ISOs directly from a USB thumbdrive.

Unfortunately the article does not describe one major aspect: Making the stick itself bootable.

You need a little bit of extra software here to make it happen, thankfully the download is small and the software is free.

As I wrote, by default most thumbdrives do not have the bootable flag set. Also, they don’t have an MBR written. If you would try to install Grub4DOS on such a thumbdrive it would moan about an invalid partition table and recommend to use the –skip-mbr-check parameter.

That’s where HP’s tool comes in: Pop in your thumbdrive, start the HP tool and format the stick. The tool will write the necessary portions to the MBR, effectively making it possible to boot off the thumbdrive.

Done? Then follow the great guide on themudcrab showing all the necessary steps from now on. It even has the right software set as an example 🙂 .

Pangya! Vista Icon

I dig the Vista icons. Unfortunately not all applications come with nice icons. Pangya, for instance, still has a 32×32 low color icon despite getting constant makeovers, patches and improvements.

Since I had to reinstall Microangelo anyway, I whipped up a nice little icon for Vista users:

pangya_vista_compAs you can see, the icon still is the beloved Dolfini, now in all it’s might and shine. There are quite a lot of sizes packed in the icon, so even when scaling the icon size up, it still looks great.

Download the icon file right here and enjoy 🙂 .

Use Mplayer to watch DVDs, browse menus etc.

One of the weak points of Mplayer always seemed to be the support for DVD menus… or not?

Actually it’s quite easy to watch DVDs and browse menus with Mplayer. All you really need is a version that has dvdnav support enabled.

You can start the DVD the following way:

mplayer dvdnav://0 -dvd-device </dev/dvd | myfile.iso>

Quite easy, isn’t it?

XDCC Browser 4.41, XdccbLister and XCB files

XDCCB is a very nice script for mIRC. It automates the often lengthy process of grabbing files off IRC bots and eases navigation. XDCCB uses a list format with the extension .xcb, for this file format there’s a handy tool to convert text lists, html et cetera into the format XDCCB can process: XdccbLister.

Unfortunately, XdccbLister has long been forgotten and XDCCB development moved on, leading to a discrepancy in file format output. Fortunately, though, the tool is free software so I’ve hacked together a very simple patch that should fix at least the biggest issues.

The patch can be applied against the v.0.5 you can grab at SourceForge. If you don’t want to do that, be it because you don’t have Perl or don’t know how, you can also grab a prebuild executable here.