Category: Miscellaneous

Samsung Soundbar does not connect to SmartTV

When you own both a Samsung Soundbar (HW-[something]) and a Samsung Smart-TV, you would assume that they work in nice harmony. Which they usually do! Just once in a (seldom) while, the both just don’t connect any more and it seems there is no way to connect them again.

Recently we ran into the same trouble. It required a lot of forum reading, searching, reading support pages. Especially as it requires sound-resetting both devices and does not require hard-resetting the TV (loosing channel list, favourites et. al). As it was a real pain to figure it out, I wrote down my process.

The following steps worked for me the last time I had to try it.

  1. Soundbar (maybe this is not required?)
    • turn off
    • press (and hold) the stop button until the soundbar displays “init, ok”
  2. TV:
    • Remove soundbar from the config:
      Menu > System > Device manager > Soundshare > remove Soundbar
    • turn off the TV
    • disconnect from power
    • wait ~3 min
    • reconnect & power on
  3. Soundbar:
    • Power on
    • switch to TV mode and wait for connection
    • MAYBE reset soundbar: press & hold “play” until it displays “reset”

Hope this helps! Leave a comment if it helped you or if there’s a faster way to reconnect both devices.

Mount vmWare shared folder in Ubuntu guest

If you want to share files between a Windows Host and a Ubuntu Linux guest, the “shared folder” feature is really handy. Just enable it in the VM-Settings, install guest additions and … then wonder where this shows up in the VM. “They appear under /mnt/hgfs” I read everywhere.

Well, they do – as soon as you do a

sudo mount.vmhgfs .host:/ /mnt/hgfs/

It took me a couple of minutes to figure this out as all tutorials endet with “the folder appears” …
If it doesn’t work, maybe just rerun

sudo vmware-config-tools.pl

How to rename a GIT tag

Once in a while (yet often enough) it happens that I have to change an already pushed git tag. Usually because I violated my own naming scheme.
Yet I also somehow can’t keep the necesserry commands in mind:

git tag newTag oldTag
git tag -d oldTag
git push origin :refs/tags/oldTag

Basically it is just: copy/link newTag to oldTag, remove oldTag, delete remote oldTag.
Also see the git man page for further parameters.

Fix Twitter share button in WordPress’ Huge-IT Share buttons

I just tried the Huge-IT share plugin for wordpress and realized that the twitter share button seems to have a bug: When sharing, the tweet will not link back to the URL. Not cool :-/

Fix:

changed the file (via edit plugin): wp-share-buttons/Front_end/share_front_end_view.php

case 'share_twitter_button':
 $link= 'https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=http%3A%2F%2F'.$linkthispage.'&text='.$str;

Now the URL is prepended with http and thus displayed in the twitter share-dialog as well. Mission accomplished.
(And Huge-IT is also informed about the bug + fix)

Have fun and a happy new year

Compiling Cascading: FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.

Today I ran into a really stupid error message when I tried to recompile cascading-jdbc:

Evaluating root project ‘cascading-jdbc’ using build file ‘/home/…/cascading-jdbc/build.gradle’.

FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.

* Where:
Build file ‘/home/…/cascading-jdbc/build.gradle’ line: 68

* What went wrong:
A problem occurred evaluating root project ‘cascading-jdbc’.
> Could not find method create() for arguments [fatJarPrepareFiles, class eu.appsatori.gradle.fatjar.tasks.PrepareFiles] on task set.

* Try:
Run with –stacktrace option to get the stack trace. Run with –debug option to get more log output.

BUILD FAILED

Total time: 5.355 secs

Solution

Check your gradle version … I ran a brand new Ubuntu with the shipped gradle version 1.4. Well the cascading readme states that gradle 1.8 is required … and it really is.

IntelliJ IDEA and Scala being awfully slow on Windows 8.1

At work we are working mostly in Scala and most of us are using IntelliJ IDEA for coding. The choice of the operating system is up to the developer. As I am quite convenient with Windows (and use MS Office quite often), I am a happy Windows 8.1 user (btw: who the hell needs a start button when you have the windows key!? Anyways … different story).

The Problem

After a while when I started a Scalding project, IntelliJ became very slow and often turned to be non responsive for some seconds about once per minute. So over all it was a very inconvenient and unproductive situation.
Continue reading IntelliJ IDEA and Scala being awfully slow on Windows 8.1

“Easy going” vs “Taking care”

Freitag Abend. Heimfahrt in der BOB (BayerischeOberlandBahn). Wochenende here I come!

In Bad Tölz (eine Station vor meinem “Zielflughafen”) höre ich “Hausham? Da sind sind im falschen Zug.” (Hätte man vor einer halben Std in Holzkirchen umsteigen müssen). Ich denke mir “Arme Sau – jetzt fährst erst mal wieder zurück – oder du kennst hier jemanden der dich fährt – Ist mir aber wurscht – denn ICH bin gleich daheim. HA-HA!”.

Der Zug steht noch – ein junges asiatisches Mädchen das gerade ins Teenageralter eingetreten sein muss läuft etwas hektisch herum und spricht mich dann an “schuldi-gung – Hausham?”
Ohoh. “Hm tut mir leid, falscher Zug, steig schnell um in den Zug am anderen Gleis. Du musst zurückfahren.” Verzweifelter Blick ihrerseits. “ik ver-stehe nicht?”
Oh verdammt – kurzer Versuch in Englisch – nada. Noch maximum 2-3min bis der andere Zug fährt. Oh – scheiße – das bekomme ich jetzt nie erklärt. Die Hoffnung stirbt zuletzt: Noch ein Versuch es ihr zu erklären. Auch die Taxioption versteht sie natürlich nicht.

Option A) Schultern zucken, mich nicht weiter kümmern, das Mädel bis nach Lenggries fahren lassen (wo sie nicht weiter von Hausham weg sein könnte) und gleich daheim sein (also ich – sie sicher nicht). Ist ja schließlich nicht mein Kind.
Option B) Zusammenpacken, das Mädel in den anderen Zug setzen und hoffen, dass mich irgendwer fahren kann (oder dass diesmal wenigstens Taxis da sind) weil MEIN Zug dann ganz sicher weg ist.

Continue reading “Easy going” vs “Taking care”

“bad subifd directory” Replacing/removing bad SubIFD

Handling bad SubIFD entries in photos you want to geo tag / the problem

I just converted some of my RAW photos in RawTherapee and polished them in Photoshop CS. Of course I also wanted to GeoTag them (using GeoSetter) before putting the images in my archive. Fortunately, a GPS point was found in my trace for all photos. Unfortunately, I couldn’t write the Exif-GPS position due to a “bad subifd directory”. That’s what exiftool (which geosetter uses) tells me.

So – how to get the geo information into exif – or how to get the bad SubIFD directory out?

The solution:

In the end the issue was rather easy to solve:

  1. copy your images to a linux machine (or vm or whatever)
  2. copy all images to a directory “conv” AND in parallel to “conv2“
  3. enter “conv2“
  4. remove all exif information from the conv2 images by
    find ./*.jpg -exec exiftool -exif:all= {} ;
  5. enter “conv1” & copy the exif information (except SubIFD) to the cleaned images in “conv2” by
    find ./*.jpg -exec exiftool -tagsfromfile {} -exif:all --subifd:all ../conv2/{};
  6. you’re done.
  7. (fire up geo setter and geo tag your photos)

Be happy!

Convert Mercurial repository to Git

I have converted yet another googlecode Mercurial repository to Git – and as it took me (again) a bit too much time, here is my recipe:

Prepare

Log into a Linux shell (Windows will hardly work – at least it didn’t work for me). If you don’t have some remote shell, download an Ubuntu VM and fire it up (you might need to install VirtualBox if you haven’t installed it already).

Check out your HG repo:

hg clone https://code.google.com/p/MyHgProject/

Check if you have to remap some author information:
hg log MyHgProject

If you want/have to remap, simple create an author map file
oldemail@example.com=Firstname Lastname

Convert

Get fast-export and convert your repo:
git clone git://repo.or.cz/fast-export.git
mkdir new_git_repo
cd new_git_repo
git init
/path/to/hg-fast-export.sh -A ../authormap -r /path/to/MyHgProject
git checkout HEAD

Push

Now change the source setting in your google code repository to git and push the local codebase:
git remote add origin https://code.google.com/p/MyHgRepo/
git push --all

At this point, your upload might fail with something like “error: RPC failed; result=35, HTTP code = 0”.
This can happen if your upload takes too long and this is a documented bug.
I simply solved this issue by pushig the git repo from a shell with a fast enough upload speed as my local connection obviously was too slow.

Wiki

Now you might realize that you have “lost” your complete wiki – don’t worry, it’s still there!
Switch back your repo setting to Mercurial and repeat the process for your wiki which you can usually find at https://code.google.com/p/yourProjectName/source/checkout?repo=wiki

That’s it. You should now be ready to use Git!

Thanks to following sites hedonismbot, scrambled tofu