Link List 197
Tue, 19 Jan 2016 17:18:29 GMT

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Popular Culture:

Nerd Culture:

Science, Software, Hardware:

Send To Jolla ~ Mobile app, Web client and Firefox add-on that simplifies clipboard, notes & bookmarks transfer between the PC and your phone.
Warehouse for SailfishOS ~ Warehouse is a native client for OpenRepos.net
Windows Virtio Drivers
Smartphone with integrated e-cigarette
341 mal musste ein Mensch seit September 2014 das Steuer eines der selbstfahrenden Autos von Google übernehmen
Debugging Ncurses Programs
The First Flower Grown in Space is an Edible Orange Zinnia
Cow gas-extraction for automobile propulsion project
Feuerloses Feuerzeug
Baikal mit Thunderbird / Lightning synchronisieren
Virtio balloon
Raspbian: Swap-Datei deaktivieren

Zeroth World:

Hillary to open the X-Files (via)
We Talked to a Witch Who Casts Viruses Out of Computers With Magic ~ "Well, at least she's probably doing less harm than 'traditional' AV software"
Malware infiziert Lego-Mindstorm-Systeme

Comics/Images/Audios/Videos/Games/Art:

Quotes:

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Firefox Backups
Sat, 16 Jan 2016 22:02:41 GMT

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When it comes to web-browsing, I think I would call myself a "power-user". My current feed-list has 585 entries (some of them are comment feeds, but still a large number), and the usual way of reading them is letting newsbeuter manage them, then "pre-filter" them (most feeds do not have content embedded, and newsbeuter is a console ui, which is nice but not really suitable for webcomics, etc.) and putting them on a list that I then select in Firefox. Then I will use a feature of Tab Mix Plus, namely being able to open all selected links in new tabs. Furthermore, I configured Tab Mix Plus such that it shows these tabs in multiple lines. For a long period of time, I configured it to show the tab bar at the bottom rather than the top, but this feature someday began not to work properly anymore, and I did not have time to investigate further.

At present, Firefox seems to be the only browser that can really handle many tabs properly. Chromium has some extensions that sort-of work, but it is that kind of software that "knows best". Opera had this feature in the past, too, but they dropped it. Vivaldi seems nice with respect to that. I also used tab groups, which is a feature that will soon be dropped. Now I got used to bookmarks for the same purpose.

Firefox has a good crash recovery mechanism that usually works, but it occured to me several times now that my profile got broken and I lost many of my bookmarks or at least had a lot of work restoring them, and all the settings. In the past I used Weave, which is now called Sync. However, I wanted to run my own server, because the official Mozilla server had a 5 MiB boundary, which is not enough for me (and besides that, I have a server, so I want to use it), but someday they changed the protocol and dropped support for the old protocol, and there was no easy way of setting up a new server.

These are several reasons why I am trying to keep my local Firefox profile working. So here is what I am doing:

Firstly, my Linux runs on a LVM. So I can create an additional logical volume "firefox", which I made a 512 MiB ext3 partition. This partition will be mounted (via fstab) to ~/.mozilla. And then, I use a straightforward backup procedure:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

PATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin
SECPATH=/home/user/fbackups
BACKUPNUM=100

i=0;
while test -e "${SECPATH}/backup.$i"; do ((i++)); done

lvcreate -l 100%FREE --snapshot /dev/lvm1/firefox -n firefox-b || (wall "konnte kein backup erstellen!"; exit 1)
TMPFL=$(mktemp -d)
mount -o ro /dev/lvm1/firefox-b ${TMPFL} || (wall "konnte backup erstellen aber nicht mounten. tmp-directory $TMPFL wurde nicht geloescht."; exit 1)

rsync -alH --delete "${TMPFL}/" "${SECPATH}/backup.$i" --link-dest "${SECPATH}/backup.$((i-1))"

umount /dev/lvm1/firefox-b || (wall "Konnte backup /dev/lvm1/firefox-b (auf $TMPFL) nicht unmounten!"; exit 1)
lvremove -f /dev/lvm1/firefox-b || (wall "konnte /dev/lvm1/firefox-b nicht loeschen!"; exit 1)
rm -rf ${TMPFL} || (wall "konnte $TMPFL nicht loeschen!"; exit 1)

if [ $i -ge "$BACKUPNUM" ]; then
rm -rf "${SECPATH}/backup.0"
j=0; while [ $j -lt $i ]; do
mv "${SECPATH}/backup.$((j+1))" "${SECPATH}/backup.$j"
((j++))
done
fi

exit 0

Of course, I could just rsync the original directory, but that already broke some of my configurations (probably because it is not "atomic"). Creating an LVM snapshot leaves a directory that looks like the system has crashed – a situation Firefox can usually handle. I am running this script every 10 minutes in a loop. It is not perfect, but it serves its purpose.

Update: I now use BTRFS which has an internal snapshot mechanism. The code now looks like

while true;
do btrfs subvolume snapshot -r .mozilla/ snap/dot_mozilla_`date -u +%s`;
   sleep 600;
done

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Flight to Paris
Tue, 12 Jan 2016 12:00:00 GMT

Panel 1: Two persons sitting in a plane. The person on the right side crosses arms and looks out of the window sadly. The person on the right side plays with the table of the front-seat and says: "Come on, you really can't blame me this time. Besides that, you always wanted to see Paris!" -- Panel 2: The plane crashes into the Eiffel Tower.

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Link List 196
Tue, 12 Jan 2016 05:35:24 GMT

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My main laptop currently is in repair. It might therefore be that the next lists have some duplicates.

Popular Culture:

Neureiche Friseurin weiß gar nicht, wohin mit all dem Geld
At least 200 kids abused in Regensburg choir ~ let's make a compromise: deport the people from the cologne mob, and deport those people as well.
Russland will Affen zum Mars schicken

Nerd Culture:

Science, Software, Hardware:

Virgil 3D GPU project ~ Virgil is a research project to investigate the possibility of creating a virtual 3D GPU for use inside qemu virtual machines, that allows the guest operating system to use the capabilities of the host GPU to accelerate 3D rendering.
This Is Your Brain on God (via)
A Fossilized Ancient Ant Queen Emerges From a 46-Million-Year-Old Rock
Android mit dem Remix OS kostenlos auf jedem PC und Mac nutzen ~ klingt nach einer netten Idee, habs aber noch nicht probiert. Wo bleibt eigentlich mal ein LXC-Android? Ich meine, das müsste doch eigentlich recht einfach sein, oder übersehe ich etwas?
How to Stop Windows 10 Forcing Itself Onto PCs ~ zum Glück verwende ich nur Windows-VMs.
Mozilla streicht WebRT in Firefox für Android und Desktop-PCs ~ Mozilla streicht viel wenn der Tag lang ist.