How to expand a partition on the fly

I’ve just had some troubles with my Odroid XU4 complaining that there was no more space left on the micro SD card. It’s a 16 GB card so I was wondering what caused this. As it turned out I simply forgot to expand the root partition to the size of the SD card, so I thought I’ll write a post about how to easily and safely expand a mounted linux partition on the fly without having to reboot the system.

How to silence an Odroid XU4

I love these little single-board computers. They’re small, cheap, energy efficient, powerful, extremely versatile, have several digital and analog I/Os and… generate the fan noise from hell! In this tutorial I will demonstrate how I modded my Odroid XU4 to make it (almost) unhearable.

How to shrink PDFs

Sometimes a PDF document you’ve created is several megabytes in size due to high resolution images. This may cause problems when you want to send this PDF via email if the attachement’s size is limited by your email provider. There is a way you can reduce the file size of an existing PDF without having to render it again with low resolution images.

How to create a video DVD with command line tools

Maybe you know this scenario: You’ve been invited to a family get-together and you take some videos of the most memorable events. Afterwards a family member comes to you and says: “I’ve seen you recording this and that. Could you give it to me on DVD?”. As a matter of fact, you can easily create a video DVD of any video you have recorded with just a view command lines.

How to root the Gigaset QV1030 Android Tablet-PC

This article is about rooting the Gigaset QV1030 Tablet-PC. The only thing you will need is your Tablet-PC and a working internet connection, so there is no need for a computer. In theory the described method should work for many other devices too, but I only tested it for the QV1030. By rooting your device you will gain administrative privileges, which will give you full control over your device and the freedom to do anything you want to do with your device. Please make sure to read the disclaimer before proceeding!

How to use a remote firewire port and transcode DV video locally with ffmpeg

I recently moved into another appartment and found some old VHS tapes I recorded years ago. As luck would have it, I got my hands on a VCR and a MiniDV camcorder with builtin ADC, so I can get analog video signals into the MiniDV camcorder. So all I needed was a computer with firewire or IEEE1394 port. The only computer I have that still has a firewire port is my server, so I hooked the VCR to the MiniDV and the MiniDV to my server.

How to add a hard disk to hddtemp and read the temperature

Hddtemp is an application for reading the temperature sensor of hard disks with S.M.A.R.T support. In case the software doesn’t recognize your hard disks sensor, but you are sure that your disk has one and is also S.M.A.R.T enabled, you can manually add the correct parameters for your disk to the hddtemp database. I will show this based on my INTEL 530 Series mSATA Solid-State drive in the second part of this post, .

How to use your iPod Shuffle in Linux

In this article I will describe the probably best way to use your first or second generation iPod Shuffle in Linux. The described method is based on a python script called rebuild_db. The script will allow you to simply copy/paste music files to your iPod like to any other regular MP3-Player. In case you have a different or newer version of the iPod, the described method may not work for you and you should try using gtkPod instead.

How to enable and use Wake on LAN

In this article I will describe how to enable Wake-on-LAN (WOL) and how to use it to start-up a system remotely. In order to use Wake-on-LAN your systems hardware and network driver needs to actually support this technology. You will also need to know the MAC address of the systems ethernet card.

How to use an SSH connection as a SOCKS proxy

In this article I will describe how to use an SSH connection as a SOCKS proxy. This basically means that you can route the network traffic of any application or even your entire systems traffic through an SSH connection.