I’ve had this socked away for a while, but was just reminded of it. This is a method of concatenating PDF files. This takes multiple PDF files as inputs and outputs a single PDF file made up of those. This is particularly useful when a document needs to include sub-documents, such as a report that includes preexisting data sheets, or a proposal needs to include financial statements, resumes, or other supporting documents.
Month: March 2014
Protecting Email Addresses From SPAM Harvesters With a CAPTCHA
If you manage any websites, you should be aware of the risk of publishing an email address publicly. SPAM bots spider the web looking for these email addresses, adding them to lists that are sold and used to inundate you with glorious offers of organ enlargement and cheap watches. Today I encountered the most robust solution that I’ve yet to see.
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Fixing Magnet Links in Chromium on Linux
I just discovered that magnet links didn’t work out of the box in Chromium on CrunchBang Linux.
I tried a couple of other fixes found in other places and figured I’d repeat the one that worked here in case it can be helpful to someone.
The solution that worked came from here, although it turned out that only this one command was necessary.
xdg-mime default transmission-gtk.desktop x-scheme-handler/magnet
Arduino, 3D Printer, and USB Serial Device Permissions on Linux
When I first got started with Arduino under Linux, I quickly discovered that I had issues connecting to the Arduino to program it or talk to it via serial. I later found the same issue when I started working with 3D Printers, when trying to connect the host application to the printer to operate it.
This was clearly a permissions problem, as all of these cases (and other USB serial devices) worked just fine when run as root (not a good practice, don’t do this). This is just a quick post showing how to set yourself up with the permissions needed to use these devices as a normal user.
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Setting up the HP LaserJet Professional M1212nf MFP Printer on Linux (CrunchBang Waldorf)
I’ve got an HP LaserJet Professional M1212nf MFP printer at the office, and most of the machines in the office are running CrunchBang Waldorf. The stock version of hplip does not include the drivers for this printer.
Consistent Experience Across Multiple Computers on CrunchBang Linux
This is just a quickie, nothing too in-depth here. I just thought I’d mention that I’ve migrated all of my computers from Ubuntu to CrunchBang. I enjoy the lighter and more responsive interface, as well as the lower system overhead. It fits my workflow and interaction style well.
I don’t need a high degree of customization to be happy, I just want my customizations to conky and the openbox menu to be consistent between my various computers.
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Assigning Static Device Names for USB Serial Devices (Including Arduinos)
I posted this on G+, but figured I’d post here as well with a little more depth.
I was working on a processing sketch that needs to communicate with several USB Serial devices (mostly Arduinos). To make my life easier I wanted to find a way to make sure I could identify each one every time by the location of the port in the filesystem, which meant a static name for each. This setup will give you the same name for the device in /dev every time you connect it. This is particularly helpful if you have lots of devices to manage or want to hard-code a path to the port into a script or application (but only one that will only be running on your local machine).
Repairing an Aborted Ext3 Journal
As mentioned in one of my prior posts, I had a server that kept remounting the hard drive as read-only because of filesystem problems. The problem it was encountering was an aborted journal, which was identified by fairly unambiguous language in the output from ‘dmesg’. The solution, of course was to rebuild the journal.
Making Your Internal Computer Speaker Beep From the Linux Command Line
This one is a quick one. After looking around, this seems to be the easiest way to make a system beep to get your attention without having to install third-party packages.
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Creating a Named Pipe on a Read Only Filesystem in Linux
I recently ran into a problem with a remote Linux install that caused the root filesystem to keep remounting itself as read-only in an attempt to keep from eating itself. Because the filesystem was read-only, I couldn’t change any permissions, install any ssh certificates into different accounts, reset passwords or any of the other standard ways I would get at the data I needed. Likewise, because this was a remote system, I couldn’t just boot into a different environment to read the data (there was also the fear that the drive might fail or that there might be data loss upon performing the diagnostics needed to fix the volume). The solution I came up with was using a named pipe over ssh to funnel data. This worked really well, but took a bit of looking around to figure out how to make it happen.
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