After the recent system upgrade of my Debian x64 home desktop I’ve noticed Skype started to make creepy buzzzzzzz sound or no sound at all. The issue is caused by the new version of pulseaudio, 4.0. The workaround is to set environment variable PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=30: $ PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=30 skype &>/dev/null & Here is a thread devoted to this issue.

• Why unlock using flash drive: Because you don’t have keyboard or monitor connected to your RPi, do you?
• Information: I was using Pezz’s gist, which helped me a lot. Thank you very much, Pezz.
• Why Arch linux: because I wanted to try Arch, default kernels of Raspbian and Pidora lack(lacked? Maybe already have) needed encryption modules.

SD card preparation

Download Arch linux image from here: RPi downloads

On your desktop check list of devices:

$ ls -lah /dev | grep sd

brw-rw---T   1 root disk      8,   0 Aug 11 15:43 sda
brw-rw---T   1 root disk      8,   1 Aug 11 15:43 sda1
brw-rw---T   1 root disk      8,   2 Aug 11 15:43 sda2
brw-rw---T   1 root disk      8,   3 Aug 11 15:43 sda3
brw-rw---T   1 root disk      8,   4 Aug 11 15:43 sda4

Now insert SD card into card reader on desktop, and check list once again. You’ll see a new device we’ll write Arch linux image to.

I like Chef very much. Opensource version, of course, lacks some features of Enterprise Chef, for example there are no push-jobs. Imagine you’re using opensource Chef to deploy some web application using deploy_revision resource. It tracks some branch in git repository and if there are changes it deploys. The problem is that chef-client runs hourly by default and I don’t know a person who is patient enough to wait for deploy for an hour.

“find” linux utility may be very handy if you’re trying to grind large number of files. Trying to remove many files in the particular directory using

$ rm -f ./*

you may get something like

/bin/rm: cannot execute [Argument list too long]

but if you use find, you won’t hit such an issue

$ find . -maxdepth 1 -delete

Today I was asked to extract .xml files from zip archives. There were lot of zip files and lot of files with different extensions within archives.

This weekend my father complained he’s unable to write macros needed for faster Excel documents processing. He was eager to ask system administrator at work for help, but I don’t think it was a good idea. So I’ve spent several hours poking Visual Basic and Excel and made needed macros.