Spinning down external usb hard drives in Ubuntu doesn’t allways happen automatically in Ubuntu. To force a spindown, you can issue the command
sync
sdparm --flexible --command=stop /dev/sdX &>/dev/null
where you should replace the sdX entry by the correct name of your external hard drive (usually sdb, sdc or similar).
To do this automatically every 5 minutes, save the code below as e.g. ~/bin/spindown/spindown.sh.
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When working with websites, you often need to move files to-and-fro a ftp server. This is usually done using a dedicated ftp application such as gftp. In this long run, this is a very time consuming process so why not just mount the ftp drive as a directory in your home folder?
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In this howto, we will describe how to download all files of a specific type from a website. The first thing you need is to install wget
sudo apt-get install wget
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I recently had the pleasure of meeting Robert Deegan from the University of Michigan. He has been involved in research that focuses on the dynamics of non-equilibrium systems for many years. Recently, he has become ‘famous’ among physicists for the discovery of the so-called “cornstarch fingers”. They can be observed when accelerating a non-newtonian liquid rapidly up and down by eg. placing it on a loudspeaker.
Deegan’s setup involves some pretty expensive hardware but this weekend, I decided to give it a try myself with a couple of friends: tjansson and haalle. Below is a photo of our setup, which consisted of a signal generator, an amplifier and a 8″ loudspeaker.
The first movie we recorded shows the effect of accelerating water rapidly up and down. You clearly see patterns, known as Faraday waves, forming on the fluid surface.
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December 21st, 2008
admin
As you may have noticed, a number of national and international tv stations are beginning to offer their products in the form of high-definition mp4 live video streams. Long gone are the days when streaming meant crappy realmedia video. Let’s hope they never return.
A natural question that arises is how to record and store such streams for future viewing. In this part one of our feature on recording with VLC we will look at how to save a tv stream to the hard disk. Read on for more…
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