Linux

I recently purchased a h2dp bluetooth receiver from belkin which, with help from BlueZ, Pulseaudio and Phonon, works quite well and out of the box. There is only one problem. It does not connect automatically, at least not with KDE. To get it to work I always have to send a specific DBus command to a ever changing DBus path. However, it was not to hard to write a little Python script to do just that and display a notification while doing so. Without much comment, here it is:

Since I switched to use a notebook only, my backup requirements raised with the vulnerability of my data at the same time my loved backup tools failed to work. dirvish does not work when it is only sporadicly used. So I wrote me a script that does something similar using rdiff-backup and mysqlbackup. Here it is: Download, Gitorious.

Having used your computer for decades, your hard disk is full of personal data. And being a careful person you have a lot of backups, probably dating back till the eighties. What if somebody got a hold of them? Say by stealing your PC. Or maybe you have confidential data on your laptop, e.g. unanonymized data of a clinical trail Or maybe you sometimes enter your credit card number to order something in your browser which saves it on disk to help you entering that form the next time you want to order something. Either way you have to protect your data. That’s why you update your software and use a password for your user account. But that does not help you if somebody was to steal your hard disk. Unless of course you have encrypted it.