28/12/2009

How to dismantle a Verbatim 3.5'' SmartDrive

WARNING: This will void your drive's warranty.
Most external drive cases are absolutely self-explanatory, this one is a bit scary (too many plastic notches and bendable stuff). If you've still got a choice, better get a completely unscrewable one like the Western Digital model with the silicone covers.
You need: a small Phillips screwdriver and a spudger or Mum's nail file. The drive inside is SATA (in my case, a Samsung HD103SI).

22/12/2009

Frescobaldi opening Kile

Today frescobaldi surprised me by opening source code references from PDF annotations in Kile. Hey, I love Kile! Still, not very practical.
Solution: open an external instance of Okular, go to Settings->Configure Okular…->Editor, choose Custom Text Editor instead of Kile (the command should read frescobaldi --smart --line %l --column %c), apply, restart frescobaldi and you should be good to go again. Apart from the fact that now your LaTeX source code annotations will be opened in frescobaldi…

17/12/2009

Copying calendar and contacts from Kontact to an iPod with the proper encoding

Copying your personal data to an iPod is surprisingly easy:
Calendar: export your calendar as an iCal file (File->Export…) and copy it to the Calendars directory on your mounted iPod (e.g. /media/MYIPOD/Calendars)
Address book: File->Export->Export vCard…, take care to export your contact list to several files. Copy to the Contacts directory on your iPod.
It's getting a bit trickier if you have special characters in your files, as these have to be converted from Kontact's UTF-8 to the iPod's ISO_8859-15 encoding. Recoding can be done by iconv with a shell script. Run from the directory where vCards and calendar have been exported to: