XMPP module HTTP File Upload (formerly XEP-0363) provides a way to share files between XMPP clients, it works transparently and even in multi user chats. The sender uploads a file on an HTTP(S) server that will then generate an URI, this is sent to each one of the recipients that can then download it. The interesting bits about this XEP are various: File sharing now works even in multi-user chats (MUC), in any case the file is only uploaded a single time even if the recipients are more than one. …

Sparse files are nice to use to store virtual machine’s virtual disks but can be a real pain in the ass to backup efficiently, especially over the network. Luckily rsync provides a way to intelligently copy sparse files both locally and over the network. The trick is use --sparse and --inplace options. Let’s say we have a sparse 60 GB qemu virtual disk with only around 7 GB used: $ ls -lh fedora24. …

All Cyanogenmod 13 nightly builds past July 28 seem to be affected by a bug that makes the phone reboot just a few seconds after opening the Gallery application. The issue seems to be related to the newly added support to sdcardfs which obviously isn’t playing well at the moment. A workaround to prevent the phone from crashing and rebooting is to edit the build.prop file located in /system; this can be done either via adb using the command adb shell or more practically directly on the phone using the built in file manager and text editor (provided that in file manager’s settings access mode option is set to Root access mode). …

RawTherapee from my experience is by far the best program to manipulate RAF files, it’s demosaic algorithm for Fujifilm X-Trans sensors is astonishingly good. Too bad that, like for Darktable, the version included in Fedora’s repos is outdated to say the least. To install from source first install some dependecies: $ sudo dnf install bzip2-devel cmake exiv2-devel expat-devel fftw-devel gcc-c++ glib2-devel glibmm24-devel gtk3-devel gtkmm30-devel lcms2-devel libcanberra-devel libiptcdata-devel libjpeg-turbo-devel libpng-devel libsigc++20-devel libtiff-devel zlib-devel gtkmm24-devel lensfun-devel Git clone and install …

Darktable documentation on this matter is somewhat fragmented, so I figure a small how-to on how to install it from source on Fedora 23 could be useful. The version included in the official repositories is really old (version 1.6.9 as per today) and is missing some important presets for many widely used cameras. The latest version source code archive can be downloaded from here: https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/releases. Before compiling and installing the software the following dependencies must be installed: …

CentOS repos (both official and EPEL) does not provide an up to date version of Ejabberd, installing from source is the only way if one want or need a version from this century. Problem is that doing things manually is a never ever a good idea, luckily Ansible and a bit of Python love come to rescue. Supposing Ejabberd is already installed and configured (I wrote a post on the subject a couple of years ago: https://uwot. …

Android ROM scene is cluster fuck of inhumane proportion; the complete lack of documentation, decent how-to, decent guides and the retarded works for me attitude the whole community has really amazes me. TWRP project is a good example of a really useful tool used by [millions] of people all over the world, one would assume that it has to be maintained in a professional way but this is as far from the reality as something can get. …

Every time I have to setup a software RAID in Linux using mdadm I forget something, this time I am writing it down once and for all (or at least I hope so). For the sake of simplicity I will use the creation of a RAID1 as example but this very same procedure can be applied for any other kind of RAID. RAID array creation 1. Partition the drives This step must be repeated for each drive of the array (/dev/sdb and /dev/sdc in my case). …