Addison Lee on Cyclists

I wasn't that surprised to hear recently of Addison Lee head John Griffin's opinions on cyclists, after I had my own run in with one of their drivers in August 2010. At the time I wrote the following complaint, I heard nothing in reply.

Sir/Madam,

I was cycling home on Friday night/Saturday morning and encountered one of your drivers just before 1:30am at the junction of Abbeville Road and Trouville Road. He slowly cut across my path and seemed to stop in the junction. I wasn't particularly bothered and cycled around him onto Trouville Road and then turned into my house. As I was unlocking my front door the same minicab drew up and the driver shouted "Next time I'm going to beat you motherfucker!"

After driving down the street the minicab turned round and I walked out into the street to see what he wanted. He continued to shout at me for not having stopped for him. I explained that it was my right of way but he said that "that doesn't matter". He then drove off and I took a picture of the back of his cab using my mobile phone.

Considering that I was at my front door, ie, he knows where I live, I take his threat very seriously and would like your assurance that he will not come back and "beat me". I would also like to know what measures you are going to take to make sure that he does not threaten someone else who may be less able to defend him/herself than a 30 year old 6 foot male. I do not know how seriously the police will take a single threat of this nature, but considering all the information I have it surely would not take much to trace the driver.

I would describe the driver as 40ish, with lank greasy hair, tanned completion and a fairly thick, possibly Spanish accent.

Looking forward to your reply, Jamie Kitson

Arch Linux on an Asus Zenbook UX31E

Arch/Linux specific:

• The most annoying issue is that if I have an HDMI device plugged in at boot, which I usually do at home, then the laptop screen will not come on. Possibly related to issues I have unplugging HDMI.
• Adding i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 to you kernel boot options can result in considerable cooling and power savings. This Ubuntu article recommends disabling VT-d in the BIOS. Shutdown issues have been fixed in Kernel 3.3-rc6.
• UEFI: The boot menu seems to be on the last page of the BIOS setup page. This doesn't seem to be automatically populated beyond a single item for each boot partition, presumably booting /efi/boot/bootx64.efi, but you can add your own boot item by manually entering the path. If you always want to boot into grub, and use grub's own boot menu, then copy grub.efi to the above file.
• The Grub2/Asus UEFI issue seems to have been fixed by 2.00 Beta 2, 21 March 2012.
• The Sentelic touchpad works out of the box, but to get scrolling etc working use Saaros's patch. Recompiling the kernel with this patch is fairly straight forward if you follow the instructions carefully. I have to say that with the patch, the pad seems less accurate and tapping seems slightly less sensitive (or maybe just slower?), which is a shame.
• Sleep/suspend to RAM works if you add xhci_hcd, ehci_hcd and uhci_hcd to SUSPEND_MODULES.
• The function keys (mute, volume, brightness) either work out of the box(!) or carried on working from when I'd set them up for my X220.
• Brightness adjustments made using the keyboard do not get reflected in /sys/class/brightness, but this is being fixed.
• Battery life seems pretty amazing, at 5-6 hours, even under Linux.
  

General:

• Cheekily Asus advertise the disk capacities as 64G/128G/256G, when, as they are SandForce based drives, they will actually be 60G/120G/240G.
• The keyboard is not great, to say the least. Some of the keys do not register if you do not press them dead centre, however the trackpad is actually quite good as far as I am concerned.
• The screen is quite cold/blue. There is a UX31E ICC profile on this review. You can use xcalib to load it in Linux, although it does make the top right hand corner a little green for me, so I am currently using the UX21E version.
• The audio is excellent, for a laptop. Although the balance is off on mine.

Windows:

• Install the ATK/ACPI driver first. This is buried deep in the utilities section of the Asus download page.
• If your machine wakes immediately after sleeping then you need to install the Power Option utility.

Sorry, this program only supports ASUS notebook!

If after reinstalling Windows on an Asus machine you get "Sorry, this program only supports ASUS notebook!" or "This program can only be executed on the ASUS computer!" on trying to install/run drivers/utilities you need to install the ATK/ACPI driver first. This is buried deep in the utilities section of the Asus download page.

Extracting Images from SWF/Flash Websites

My brother is the head chef at the Foragers Pub in Hove. They recently won an award at the Sussex Food Awards. So far so good, apart from the tiny photo on the awards page and the fact that their pages are written entirely in Flash.

I know that the picture is available bigger, because I can zoom in, both by ctrl+mouse wheeling and using Firefox's zoom and by right clicking and using Adobe's zoom. However Firefox's zoom does not go far enough and I cannot scroll down the page while using Adobe's zoom. So to extracting the image, a simple enough task I thought. Except it's not, because the SWF file referenced by the HTML is virtually empty and once I had located the files they were apparently corrupt.

The best tool I found to get all resources used by an SWF is called SWF Web Vampire and if you need to do this a few times I would recommend buying it, $30 is not a lot of money.

SWF Decompiler, SWF Picture Extractor and the more Linux-y (ie, command line) SWF Tools all looked good, but all reported that the SWF image files I was getting from the website were corrupt. In the end I loaded them in IE and took a screen shot.

Incidentally I feel that the Sussex Food Awards have missed a trick here, if they made their photos easily available, but stamped their logo, and the logo of the company sponsoring the specific award on the image that would surely be a better situation for everyone involved?

ext4 Driver for Windows 7

I've tried a few ext2/3/4 drivers for Windows and by far the best seems to be Ext2Fsd. The only thing to watch for is that you need to start the service after you install it by going Tools -> Service Management (F7).

Virgin Media Netgear VMDG280 Wireless Connection Problems

I was having very annoying wireless connection issues with Virgin's Netgear VMDG280. Most devices would be fine, but the odd one would connect and have wireless access for a few seconds, but then the wireless connection would die, though the device would still report that it was connected. Restarting everything/anything would just repeat the same. Last night I tried reducing the maximum connection speed of the router from 300Mbps to 54Mbps, which seemed to solve the issue completely. I've since put it up to 145Mbps which seems like a happy medium.

Time Lapse with ffmpeg

Because I do it too infrequently to remember, here's how to put together time lapse/stop motion/animation with ffmpeg.

Firstly renumber you images. Make sure that this script won't overwrite anything.

x=1; for i in *.JPG; do counter=$(printf %04d $x); mv "$i" img"$counter".JPG; x=$(($x+1)); done

Then put the images together.

ffmpeg -ss 1 -t 70 -i music.mp3 -r 15 -i img%04d.JPG -b 15M -s 1440x1080 out.avi

The ffmpeg documentation mentions using the "image file demuxer" -f image2 before the input image file name template, but I haven't found that necessary.

Remember that ffmpeg options act on the next input or output, so for example you can set the frame rate of the animation by using -r x before the input image parameter or set the frame rate of the resultant video by using the same switch before the output filename.

In the above example we also add a sound track, starting 1 second into the track and cut after 70 seconds.

eBay Dicks

hi there would you accept 260 cash? bearing in mind i can pay cash on collection you wouldnt have to pay ebay and paypal fees(ebay 10% final value fee, paypal 4% service charge). put that ontop of my offer comes to over £300 on ebay which obviously if you look at completed listing they dont get. let me know

- morne1514

> put that ontop of my offer comes to over £300

No it doesn't*, and I'm hoping to get £330 for it, but I'll keep your offer in mind, thanks.

- jamiekitson

hi there no problem, i cant do more then 270 am afraid, if you look online you will see they are new 330 nowadays. as for what they go for on here, i have added you some links to completed listings so you can see for yourself, most of them are brand new and minues the ebay and paypal fees they dont even clear 250 so the choice is yours, let me know otherwise going the other route and buying a samsung galaxy note

- morne1514

Mine comes with a cradle and receipt.

Please go away.

- jamiekitson

no need to be rude, i was offering you a valid offer which in theory should have been good for you and me. you send me links for the ones going for most they go on ebay, thats just retarded as the average NEW ones still sell for under 300 as i showed this to you, as for the amazon link lol even xxx online sells them for 340 new so please you are embarrassing yourself. sorry i ever contacted you i can assure you i wont again

- morne1514

He lied.

lolz i would have actually been the highest bidder if you didnt block me from bidding. gutted

- morne1514

Well thank god I did.

* Yes I did embarrass myself with that maths.

HTTP Headers to Disable Caching in Firefox

It took me ages to find this:

Cache-control: no-cache
Cache-control: no-store
Pragma: no-cache
Expires: 0

To alter headers in the IIS7 GUI go HTTP Response Headers. It won't allow you to add two headers of the same name so either add no-cache,no-store or you can set no-cache by expiring web content immediately in Set Common Headers at the top right and add Cache-control: no-store manually.

VSTOR30.exe has changed since it was initially published

Note that the following error can be caused by a missing internet connection stopping installation files downloading necessary installation files:

Error: Setup has detected that the file 'C:\Users\...\AppData\Local\Temp\VSD5056.tmp\VSTOR30\VSTOR30.exe' has changed since it was initially published.

There are other posts mentioning installing VSTO 3.0 SP1. You might try installing this on the dev machine and republishing.