No pain no gain

The upcoming General Data Protection Regulation of the European Community has some dire consequences for web site admins. Due to the uncertain legal status of the Disqus comment system I use on this site, I have decided to disable comments for now. I hope this will be only a temporary measure and I can reenable them sometime in the future.

Update May, 13: Disqus reenabled

Disqus has been updated to conform to the GDPR regulations so that it could be reenabled on this site.

Recently I have switched from a Behringer X32 mixer to the smaller XR18 as I am a big fan of the small stage box type form factor and I can usually get by with using 16 channels.

One thing that I found missing compared to the X32 is the ability to record 2 channels directly to a usb stick. Therefore I thought about possible ways to work around this missing feature. In the end I settled on a Raspberry Pi 3 which is running the audio player distribution moode audio and is connected via USB to the XR18. With a small bash script it is possible to create an automatic recorder that will record mp3 files whenever audio is playing on the XR18.

I am using a Behringer X32 digital mixing desk both when mixing other bands and mixing my own band while performing at the same time on stage. In the latter case I always struggle to turn the vocal reverb on and off in time when a song starts or ends. When I was using an analog mixing console, I had the option to attach a footswitch to toggle this effect on and off. On the X32 this is not possible but it is possible to remote control the desk via MIDI commands. So I decided to build a footswitch controller that will send MIDI commands to the X32.

The iPhone does not support the IMAP Idle protocol to receive push notifications for new emails. Fortunately the open source project Z-Push implements the ActiveSync protocol which can be also used by iOS to receive push email notifications.

If you followed my other articles on how to install a mail server on Ubuntu, you have a running Dovecot server. You also need a running Apache server with PHP5. The server has to respond to https requests. If your server meets these requirements, adding Z-Push to this setup is easy.

I have a solid backup strategy in place where my 2-bay Synology NAS is the central data store. The HDDs in the NAS are setup in a JBOD configuration. I don’t need a RAID so this way I am more flexible in which data is stored where.

One HDD is dedicated as a backup drive. Every computer is backed up via Time Machine on this drive. The other HDD is used for network shares. Important documents, pictures, whatever are stored on a dedicated documents share on that HDD. This share is also backed up daily onto the backup drive.

Once per week I connect a USB drive to the NAS and create a backup of the backup drive.

I am in the process of scanning in all my paper receipts and correspondence. I use a small standalone document scanner that creates jpg images on an SD card. These documents are then converted into searchable PDF files.

The problem is that the images have not enough contrast to be easily readable on screen. Text is usually grey instead of black and you always see a grayish paper background.

Here comes ImageMagick to the rescue. You can easily stretch the color distribution so that light gray becomes white and dark gray becomes black. I use the following command line to modify all images in a folder before converting them to the PDF format:

for img in *.jpg; do mogrify -normalize -level 10%,90% -sharpen 0x1 $img; done

The level values fit my requirements. You should try different values if you don’t like the result.

Please note that pictures will look worse after the above step. Text documents will improve but the colors might change a bit.

Recently I bought a Raspberry Pi. My plan was to use this tiny computer as a lighting controller for my band on stage. I have installed the Open Lighting Architecture (OLA) daemon to talk to a cheap FT232 based DMX interface I bought from ebay and developed a simple lighting controller software in python which uses the OLA ClientWrapper API to talk to the DMX interface.

This is a follow up to my former article “Setting up a spamsafe Postfix server“. I will describe how to extend that installation to use Sieve for server side mail filtering in Dovecot. This article is based on an Ubuntu 10.04 installation but should work with other Linux distributions.

The last 1 or 2 years I have been running nginx as reverse proxy in front of Apache2. Now with the release of nginx version 1.2.0 I decided to revamp my installation and use nginx as a standalone server again. This guide explains my installation which uses nginx, PHP via FastCGI connector and SSL running on Ubuntu 10.04.

I want to use the current version of nginx, so I use the PPA repository where current nginx builds can be found:

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nginx/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nginx

Here is a quick shell snippet to change the time machine backup interval on OSX. The time interval is specified in seconds. If you want to change it to 4 hours open terminal and enter:

sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-auto.plist StartInterval -int 14400

You can restore the default interval with:

sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-auto.plist StartInterval -int 3600