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This work by Stephane KATTOOR is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
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Getting Spotify to run on Gentoo/Linux: A Gross and Cruel Hack - January 26, 2012 by Stephane Kattoor

Spotify is a great way to listen to music. Unfortunately the official client only runs on Windows and Mac machines. There is an experimental unsupported client for linux, however it’s provided as a DEB (ubuntu/debian) package.

Here’s a gross hack for whom is desperate to get it working on Gentoo.
read the entry »

Asterisk 101 : How to get rid of your mother-in-law … - April 30, 2011 by Stephane Kattoor

… or anyone else really, with a little trick to implement a black list and filter unwanted callers.
read the entry »

Asterisk 101 – Ghetto GoogleVoice : Signing up for / using GV even if you’re not in the USA using Asterisk - January 9, 2011 by Stephane Kattoor

GoogleVoice (GV for short) is a great service (I won’t go into the details, but you can read up about it here), but it is unfortunately accessible only if you are in the USA.
Granted there is already plenty of documentation about how to circumvent this, but I’m not aware of any of those using Asterisk.

So this post will document how to sign up for a GV account as well as how to use it with Asterisk afterwards, in the prospect of using it if you are not in the USA.

In order to be able to sign up for GV, you need to meet 2 prerequisites :

  1. You need to have a US IP address
  2. You need to have a US phone number, which will be used to validate your GV account

Step 1 is left as an exercise to the reader (“Good luck ! I’m behind 7 proxies !” :D ).

Step 2 is the one we’re going to describe here, as an example of what you can pull with simple Asterisk configurations.

read the entry »

Unix 101 : Showing non-printing characters in text files (ex : DOS files) - January 7, 2011 by Stephane Kattoor

A non-printing character is a character which won’t actually get directly printed (or displayed) but rather interpreted. Such non-printing characters are for example line-feed or tabulation. The interpretation of those characters can differ from one system to the next. For example the line-feed character is different on Unix or DOS.

If you need an easy way to confirm that a text file is DOS or UNIX formatted (they differ with respect to the end of line character(s) for example) or if you wish to display normally non-printing characters of a text file, you can use the -vET command line switches of the cat utility.

As explained in the man page :

  • -v : will use the ^ and M- notation for control and multibytes characters
  • -E : will make ends of lines visible
  • -T : will make tabulations visible

For example : read the entry »

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Asterisk 101 : How to troll telemarketers (aka automatically send hidden Caller ID to a waiting music forever) - December 16, 2010 by Stephane Kattoor

If like me you get tons of telemarketers calls, there’s an easy way to get rid of them with a quick Asterisk hack. The following Asterisk configuration snippet will immediately send any hidden caller ID (99% telemarketers, and I have a general policy of not picking up the phone for hidden caller ID anyway) to a holding music making them waste money and time…

read the entry »

Unix 101 : Filesystem basics & Special files - December 8, 2010 by Stephane Kattoor

This post is meant to clarify a few key concepts about Unix filesystems such as directory permissions, hardlinks and symlinks.

read the entry »

MisterHouse : Setting up “modes” - November 13, 2010 by Stephane Kattoor

MisterHouse is a fantastic home automation software with an impressive out-of-the-box feature set, and it only gets better if you know a bit of Perl.

You can conveniently set “modes”, which are settings with states you can define and use. You can then fire events upon state change, and so are they very useful to define some sort of macros.

A few examples :

  • the “Security” mode could be “on” or “off” : setting it “on” would close the shutters and activate the alarm system; setting it “off” would do the opposite;
  • the “Heating” mode could be “day”, “night”, “frost protection only” : setting it on “day” would set the target temperature to 20⁰C, “night” to 15⁰C and “frost protection only” to 7⁰C
  • the “Cinema” mode could be “on” or “off” : setting it to “on” would close the blinds and dim the lights; “off” would bring those back to their former states.

This post will show how to setup a mode, we’ll use the “Heating” mode described above as an example.

read the entry »

Linux + Xorg : Remapping caps lock key to escape - November 12, 2010 by Stephane Kattoor

In this post I’ll revisit the classical “how to remap caps lock into something useful” once again. In this post, I’ll show how to remap the caps lock key to have an extra Escape key, which is very useful for all VI/Vim users.

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Facebook API : Exporting your friends birthdays into vCards format - November 2, 2010 by Stephane Kattoor

The following sample Facebook desktop application exports your friends birthdays in a vCard file format. This file is suitable to be imported into your GMail contacts for example.

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AutoHotkey : Copying without formatting - September 6, 2010 by Stephane Kattoor

One of the common annoyances of copy-pasting on Windows is that it tries to copy-paste the formatting as well. This issue can easily be fixed by the following AutoHotkey macro, which will copy the selection to the clipboard as pure text.

read the entry »

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