I have been plagued by this issue for a while: After closing OBS, a zombie process would continue to block the TCP port previously used by OBS’s websocket plugin. Trying to query the process ID never yielded any results. So what gives?
In my case, it turns out that the likely culprit was the OBS Droidcam plugin, which just received an update to mitigate exactly this misbehaviour.
After installing the update I can confirm that the zombie process and the listening TCP port no longer occur.
Kagi, the search engine I was pretty hyped about a year ago, recently added support for loading up on credits via Paypal and other European-friendly, non-credit-card ways.
I have a ton of things to say about the way they flip-flop about their pricing model but that is neither here nor there. Today’s topic is all about adding Kagi to Vivaldi’s list of image search engines.
If you define the following image search URL for Kagi, the reverse image search will work in Vivaldi:
https://kagi.com/images?q={google:imageURL}&reverse=reference
That is some pretty hype stuff because that means I can fully kagi-fy my browser usage.
If you have Kagi’s Chrome extension installed, you will most likely need to uninstall or disable that extension. For some reason, Vivaldi (at the time of writing) ignores the search engine definitions created through the extension.
When running VMware Workstation 16 or 17 on a Windows host, you perhaps encounter the following error:
PANIC: VERIFY bora\vmx\main\hostWin32.c:559
This error happens when you have a Windows VM running and then try to launch a second Windows VM. As soon as the second machine boots into the desktop/login, it crashes, and the machine stops.
Luckily, this VMware forum post gave me a workaround that solved the issue. Hopefully, it will be helpful for you as well.
I am using an Nvidia graphics adapter and have set the “Max Frame Rate” and “Background Application Max Frame Rate” settings via the Nvidia Control Panel to values other than “Off”. This is what caused the issues for me.
The solution: Simply add a program-specific customization for vmware.exe, ensure both settings are set to “Off” in the customization, and you should be good.
I have several file-system operations I cannot perform during the day, the machine’s performance would suffer and I would get angry e-mails. So I have to schedule simple move operations.
Now I could do this with Windows’ own task scheduler but I would have to write either a vbscript or a batch file to specify the details. Performing a dry run also sucks. Apparently there’s no dedicated software that gives a new “Schedule Move” or “Schedule Copy” context operation (hint: I’ll develop one once I have beaten Grand Theft Auto V) for quick use, so I started experimenting.
It seems the amazing SyncBackSE fits the bill. I already own a license for this great piece of wizardry to perform sync operations between multiple machines and backup my files. Turns out you can configure a new, one-time job to be your scheduled file mover:
SyncBackSE will automatically move your file, produce a nice log for you to review and even allows for a dry run.
Vector Magic is pretty cool. I loved the project back in the days when everyone could use it for free and was happy to see that they started providing a desktop client after going commercial. Even better: The client is utilizing Qt so we have a Windows and a Mac version. But nothing for Linux.
Don’t fret, of course you can run this application with Wine:
The only thing to notice here is that you need to set your Windows version to Windows 98, otherwise the application will always go haywire when loading a picture.
All features are working perfectly, no native DLLs needed.
If you’re using a recent KDE version you’ll notice that Wuala’s Copy & Paste feature doesn’t really seem to work anymore. Instead of using the contents you specify within the application (say, files and folders) it’ll always use the contents of Klipper.
That’s pretty annoying if you don’t know that the contents does indeed come from Klipper. So, just clear your Klipper history and you should be fine.
Microsoft often delivers free-to-test disk images of their products (like, for instance, the new Visual Studio 2010 CTP). These images are – who would have expected that? – in Microsoft’s own VirtualPC format. Luckily, the specs for the disk format are available and you can use the VMware Converter to just convert it into a vmdk (or use it directly, which I can’t really recommend).
Upon installing the VMware Tools, though, you’ll notice that the mouse gets stuck in the lower right corner of the screen if you didn’t remove the VirtualPC tools beforehand. Quite annoying, isn’t it? This comment describes how to solve the problem:
Nifty.
To add a wildcard domain (i.e. *.subdomain.mydomain.domain) all you really need to do is set up a new vhost in the Apache config and use the matching ServerName and ServerAlias:
ServerName subdomain.mydomain.domain
ServerAlias *.subdomain.mydomain.domain
That’s it, you can easily utilize and parse all subdomains below subdomain.mydomain.domain now.
Okay, now this is really really bad, starting with MySQL 5 there is a strict mode. What does that mean? The strict mode will not silently swallow all your data and just cut off what’s left but throw an exception back at you when you try to insert more data than the field type allows.
Sweetcron is really vulnerable for this kind of problem. It always stopped fetching the feeds to complain about a single post. Now, while fixing the problem on the software side would be preferrable I opted for a simple configuration change on the server side this time.
All you really need to do is altering the my.ini line that activates the strict mode:
sql-mode=”STRICT_TRANS_TABLES,NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION”
will either become
#sql-mode=”STRICT_TRANS_TABLES,NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION”
or
sql-mode=”MYSQL40″
Simply restart the MySQL service afterwards and sweetcron should eat the posts without complaining (I don’t even want to think about the loss of data here, but who cares?).
Far Cry 2 comes with a nasty copy protection. Actually, it’s more like a strict DRM variant that needs to be activated online and can only be used X times when not properly deactivating it.
You can manually revoke an activation without uninstalling the game by simply calling:
FarCry2.exe /revoke
Easy, huh? I’d prefer Ubisoft to not use any of these bugger DRM crap at all, but then again we all know the story of software piracy (note: pirates probably have a better version without this crap, so this whole thing is totally beyond the point anyway!).
As I wrote earlier this week one of my disks kept dying on me. The solution – of course – is to replace the faulty device with a brand-new one and move the data to the new disk.
While I had great success in doing so with Acronis True Image’s “Clone Disk” feature I had a little hickup while mounting the disk into the storage cage of my case. So for the time being I had to use the broken drive for another 2 days (don’t do this at home, kids!). As you can imagine the data became desynchronized and since I didn’t really have the time to clone the disk again I opted for another, more time saving method.
Everyone knows how to pack an entire system, store it somewhere in the network and restore it – all thanks to Linux live CDs and my good ol’ friend tar. tar is great for a lot of reasons: It processes .files, it keeps permissions and ownership intact… oh yeah, and it packs things.
So, this time I didn’t need to pack my entire system but only a few selected folders. And I didn’t really need to pack them either. But tar makes a great companion for moving sensitive data between disks, no less. Just start your machine in single user mode (or with a Live CD if you plan on moving your root partition around), mount target/destination, cd into the directory you want to move and use this nifty little command:
tar cd - . | (cd /my/new/home; tar xvpf -)
Yep, that’s all that is to it. Keeps all properties intact, which is important for, well, just about any kind of file/folder.
Gee, sometimes I really want to push my router down a cliff: It runs out of memory and generally slow. Automatic reboot sounds like a good idea there…
Just add this as a startup script to reboot the router at 01:00AM:
echo '00 01 * * * root /sbin/reboot' > /tmp/cron.d/rebootrouter
Easy to do, powerful feature.
There are many things vi can do, for instance invoke other commands to process files. That’s pretty cool.
Since installing Okteta isn’t always an option, here’s a small snippet on how to work simple capabilities into vi:
vi -b myfile
[in vi]: %!xxd
[to return to previous view]: %!xxd -r
Pretty easy, pretty handy. Something to keep in mind. Another thing to keep in mind: Always open binary files with the -b switch, otherwise you’ll damage the files when saving them with vi.
If you’ve been a constant reader of my blog (and of course I know you are 😉 ) you could hardly have missed the ugly “0” date in the archives. Turns out that this 0 date was caused by all the old drafts I had saved but never published. Deleting the drafts would help, but simply assigning them a date seemed like a more sane solution. Voila, problem solved.
One of the very packages I always install when I have to work with Windows is Cygwin. Being able to use my beloved GNU tools really makes things easier. Often I don’t have the option to install it. I grieved a little bit about the fact that some problems could be solved with just 2 commands that were — of course — missing from Windows’ horrendous command prompt. So I snooped around and built the following batch that’ll start a full-blown Cygwin session from i.e. portable harddisk:
@echo off set PATH=%CD%bin;%CD%sbin;%CD%usrsbin;%PATH set HOME=%CD%homePortable mount -bfu %CD%/ / mount -bfu %CD%bin /usr/bin mount -bfu %CD%lib /usr/lib cd %HOME% bash ----login -i
Easy, huh? All you have to do to make it work is renaming your /home/Username to /home/Portable (or simply adjust the setting in the batch). Pretty neat stuff.