Springer ebooks are divided up into many small pdf files. Downloading them one at a time sucks. I wrote a little perl script that downloads purchased ebooks from the Springer website and concatenates them. It can be downloaded here.
springer ebook crawler
November 18th, 2009creating images of encrypted partitions with partimage
October 28th, 2009partimage is a tool for creating images of whole partitions. It supports all major file systems, like ext2/ext3. It will only backup the used blocks of a partition and thus save space. In order to do so, it needs to detect the type of the file system. Encrypted file systems can not be used directly. You first have to open the device:
cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdXX SOMENAME
After that you can use the new device /dev/mapper/SOMENAME. You have to specify this device directly on the command line, because it will not be auto detected by partimage in the ncurses mode. Another important option is -M, which will not backup the MBR. If you forget this parameter the whole thing will fail. In the end the command looks like that:
partimage -z1 -d -M save /dev/mapper/SOMENAME FILENAME.img.gz
new Ubuntu version approaching
October 22nd, 2009In exactly one week from now a new version of Ubuntu will be released. The new features can be found in the release notes.