Strav's blog

I'm going to maintain a list of absolutely necessary Firefox extensions here.

Start with this one to disable the installation delay:

MR Tech Disable XPI Install Delay

NOTE: in firefox 3 this addon does not appear to work. This same result can be achieved by navigating to about:config and setting security.dialog_enable_delay = 0

Then:

Adblock
All-in-One Gestures
Quickdrag
Greasemonkey
Tab Mix Plus
Custom Download Manager
Searchbar Autosizer
Check4Change
FireBug

Also I have a Greasemonkey script and Adblock prefs here: http://www.strav.net/firefox/

FF3 prerelease of Tab Mix plus is here.

Other good extensions:
View Cookies
View Source Chart

FF# prerelease of View Source Chart is here. Note: there is a $10.00 charge for this version.

older extensions:
Tabbrowser Preferences (incompatible with some extension so I no longer use this)
Super DragAndGo (no longer maintained so I'm now using quickdrag)
Download Manager Tweak (no longer maintained so I'm now using Custom Download Manager)

I'm going to post miscellaneous information here regarding the Car-X and CarMedia iBus based media players.

Here is how to convert the video to fit on the 16x9 screen properly:

There is actually a solution to this issue without using a different solution for 16:9 display.

The easiest way to correct the aspect ratio would be to resize the video horisontally by 75%. This can be achieved in the following way:

1. Uninstall all video playback codecs from your CarPC Windows installation
2. Install a recent version of ffdshow from here. WMP and Car-X will now use this for decoding MPEG-4, DIVX and XVID. Make sure you include the AVS rendering option.
3. Install a recent version of AviSynth from http://www.avisynth.org/
4. Now, open ffdshow Video decoder configuration and select AviSynth checkbox. Make sure "Add ffdshow video source" is selected and paste the following code into the textbox:


global x=0
x=Width*75
x=x/100
BiLinearResize(x,Height)


5. This corrects the aspect ration for all content played, and all you have to do now is to choose a suitable zoom level to fill more or less of the screen.

bash script to monitor file/dir listing in a directory

while ((1)); do ls -l | wc -l; sleep 30; done

Use one of these to determine drive UUID's.

vol_id /dev/sdc1
ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid
blkid /dev/sda1

And use this to change the UUID change uuid of an ext3 partition

uuidgen
tune2fs /dev/hdaX -U numbergeneratedbyuuidgen
verification with
vol_id /dev/hdaX
Change uuid of an ext3 partition

Recently I've had a need to perform work on newer systems which have SATA drives in them. Unfortunately, my trusty Super WinPE disks haven't been working since the SATA drivers aren't included on the disk. After some searching, I've found a couple of methods which should work and settled on this one (from here):

Copy the .sys file to i386\system32\drivers. If there are related .dll files (unlikely) copy these to i386\system32.

Navigate to i386 folder and open txtsetup.sif. Add controller information to the [HardwareIdsDatabase] section. Only the PCI Vendor and Device ID are required (normally contained in the inf file)

Example: PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2652 = "iaStor"

Now add the controller information to [SCSI.Load] in order to have it load during the boot process.

Example: iaStor = iaStor.sys,4

Many of the WinPE bootable images end up reporting significantly larger image sizes if edited. It turns out that some iso creating programs allow for optimizing the image. This means that if there are multiple copies of the same file in the image, links will be created for all but 1 file so the data is only written to the drive one time. The Super WinPE disk I normally use balooned from 4.7 gig to 22 gig after I injected the drivers. Using the optimize option in UltraISO (under file->properties) resolved this issue.