Bram Schoenmakers -

Never miss a phone call again with Tasker (Android) and KDialog (KDE)

Bram Schoenmakers — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 22:15:12 +0200

Since a little while I use headphones at home, so my housemates are not bothered by my music and I'm less distracted by other noises in my surroundings. However, I realized that I often miss phone calls this way. Sometimes I put my phone out of sight (while charging), or I simply don't see the display light up even when it's on my desk. I could call them back all the time, or wait until they call back, but both are not really desirable solutions. So instead I implemented a solution, which most of you would consider over-the-top.

Workaround for licensing issues when connecting with rdesktop or KRDC

Bram Schoenmakers — Wed, 25 May 2011 15:54:41 +0200

This article shows a workaround whenever you cannot connect to a Windows Terminal Server anymore with either rdesktop or KRDC (which uses rdesktop). KRDC is an RDP client, part of the KDE distribution. Running rdesktop directly from the command line results in the following error:

$ rdesktop rdp.example.net
disconnect: No valid license available.

scponly: scp works but sftp doesn't

Bram Schoenmakers — Tue, 10 May 2011 23:20:09 +0200

Today I spent some time in getting scponly working. Actually my end goal was a chrooted sftp-only environment for users, so it took a while to get all binaries and libraries together. In an attempt to make life easier, I raised the scponly's debuglevel to 2, to see slightly more output than Connection closed when trying to log in.

Backup online services with Backupify

Bram Schoenmakers — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 22:56:23 +0200

The Cloud. Personally I hate the word, yet I'm using it every hour of the day (when I'm not asleep). Especially my Android device helps me appreciating cloud services, to have all my emails, calendars, tasks and notes available within a few seconds. These cloud services often provide decent search capabilities and I assume they take care of making backups at a regular basis. Previously, a hardware failure could end up being disastrous without a decent backup policy, nowadays it has become merely an inconvenience. The degree of inconvenience depends on the cost of a hardware replacement.

Backup your brain with Evernote

Bram Schoenmakers — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 12:49:03 +0100

Two months ago, I wrote about Remember The Milk, which keeps track of all things I should do. I also started to use Evernote, where I can put all things I should remember. By making that distinction, these two services are perfectly capable of complementing each other.

Remember The Milk: Selectively show tasks in Google Calendar

Bram Schoenmakers — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 01:23:32 +0100

Remember The Milk offers several methods to integrate your task list in Google Calendar. One of the methods is to put a task gadget in the sidebar (it's the same gadget you can embed in GMail as well). Another method is to add a special calendar, which results in checkmarks at each day. When you click those, a popup appears with all tasks due for that day. The final method which is relatively easy to find is in the Info tab of the Settings page. There you'll find a link pointing to an iCalendar resource, containing all your tasks (possibly represented as events).

Android keyboards: an overview

Bram Schoenmakers — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 02:59:17 +0100

The Qwerty keyboard originates from the 19th century and is still widely used. As far as my knowledge goes, the touch screen was not yet invented at that time, there were only massive type writers with hammers which could occasionally clash. In fact, the Qwerty layout was designed to be as tedious as possible, to minimize the chance that two hammers would collide. These days Qwerty is obsolete, almost no one has an old style type writer. Still it's used for convenience, while more ergonomic alternatives are available. Dvorak, for instance, is the most well-known alternative layout, which is supported by almost every major operating system.

Debian: logrotate fails when MySQL is not running

Bram Schoenmakers — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 01:24:36 +0100

I have a MySQL instance on my PC, but by default it's turned off. However, when I leave my PC running overnight, the next morning I find this friendly email from a person called Cron:

/etc/cron.daily/logrotate:
error: error running shared postrotate script for '/var/log/mysql.log /var/log/mysql/mysql.log /var/log/mysql/mysql-slow.log '
run-parts: /etc/cron.daily/logrotate exited with return code 1
Job run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily terminated (exit status: 1) (mailing output)

Get organized with Remember The Milk

Bram Schoenmakers — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 22:12:10 +0100

To keep sane in a life with study, work and personal stuff, one should remain organized. There are several ways to do so; the most effortless way would be to keep all things in memory. While not everyone is gifted with random access memory in their heads, other tools should be used instead. Think of post-its, a notebook or a calendar. A less common way is to create empty files on your Windows desktop, with a filename describing a task. To keep track of all my tasks I use digital task lists. To be more precise, for almost two years I use Remember The Milk (RTM) and since then I barely forgot about doing something.

Review: Beejive for Android

Bram Schoenmakers — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 10:47:14 +0100

Yesterday I bought the Beejive instant messenger from the Market and gave it a spin.