Linux

How to boot into the BIOS of a Dell Precision WorkStation 410MT to change to SCSI booting

Why do all hardware producers make up their own key combinations to access the BIOS? I never remember. This time it was an old DELL, that forced me to download the user manual: It is Ctrl+Alt+Enter. I needed to change the boot priority in the BIOS to enable scsi booting. Funnily grub confuses the disks and you manually have to specify the correct root(hd0,1) in the /boot/grub/menu.lst. Grub writes its guess of hard disk order to /boot/grub/device.map, but the guess was wrong in my case.

Migrating my old mysql blog database to a new blog software (PluggedOut)

We updated my server from SuSE 9.3 to 10.1. php5 is the default on 10.1 and my blog software broke. As my blog software is not anymore maintained, I had to switch to another and I selected PluggedOut. The mysql database structures were quite different and this is what I did to do the conversion:

First I dumped the old database into textfiles:

mysqldump -u root -p --tab=/home/jeltsch/temp --fields-terminated-by=| --lines-terminated-by=# journal

Re-encoding mp3 files into smaller files with lame

My old mp3 player broke quite a while ago and now I am using a very primitive one that has only 128 MB and which refused to play some mp3s. In order to fit more podcasts into the memory and to play back those unplayable mp3 files I re-encode them with lame:
lame --mp3input -V 3 --strictly-enforce-ISO --resample 12 original.mp3 reencoded.mp3

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