Firelog

I’ve spent part of the last two days setting up IPv6 on my home network, using 6to4 on my Debian based router/server/firewall to enable the outgoing traffic (my lousy ISP doesn’t have full IPv6 support).

I had most of it up and running already yesterday, but hadn’t configured iptables correctly so that some sites, like IETF and releases.mozilla.org were unreachable. It turned out that traffic from those sites, unlike all the other ones I tested, were sent as IPv4 packets directly to me and not coming in through the tunnel interface (update: see the comments section for an explanation why). A simple

iptables -A [CHAIN-NAME] -p ipv6 -j ACCEPT

solved that (don’t worry, though, all those IPv6 packets still go through your ip6tables setup, I tried and verified it).

I’m amazed about how well radvd and the underlying systems work. Just change its config and reload it, and all your client immediately have corrected IP numbers. That’s a bit better than DHCP…

A few useful references for configuring were:

• IPv6 6to4 config generator for Debian
• How to get IPv6 running with Debian Linux
• ipv6only.se (for testing and verifying)
• nostrad, a friend of mine, and his scripts (mostly himself) were a lot of help!

I also made a few scripts along the way, e.g. one to handle change of IP(v4) address (my external IP is configured with DHCP, but it’s been the same for about two years now), but probably won’t release them (at least not right now) due to code smell (or rather stench)…

Of course, since the server now has IPv6, firetech.nu (including Firelog) now has an AAAA pointer in DNS, which, among other things, means that firetech.nu/ip now shows your IPv6 address (instead of IPv4) if you have one. :)

Set up IPv6 and go greet the future (and my server) today, it won’t take long!

—

Update (2009-05-29):
The AAAA pointer is now updated to point to my SixXS tunnel interface, since that IP is static. My intentions are to migrate to the SixXS tunnel once I’m able to request a subnet for it. The reason? 1) Entirely static IP addresses! 2) My brother-in-law has had a few problems with 6to4 and its inconsistency of place where the IPv6 to IPv4 conversion is made (which is by design, nevertheless).

I’m one of those bastards who loved (still do) Amarok 1.4, but just hates Amarok 2 (sorry Amarokers!). It’s just not the same thing. The same thing also applies for me when it comes to KDE 3 vs. KDE 4 (to give you a clue where that ended up, I’m now a happy GNOME (Ubuntu) user)…

Anyhow, since Amarok 1.4 is not going to be left in Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04), I knew I had to look for new alternatives. I tried Exaile a while ago, but missed some features and decided to wait and see what happened. Back then (some months ago), Songbird even refused to start on my computer…

A few days ago, I got fed up waiting, seeing very little development on Exaile, and somehow decided to try out Songbird again. It fired up just fine this time, and I tried out its features and a few add-ons. Right now, after spending the day porting my G15-simple Amarok script to Songbird (with next to no previous experience in XUL extension development), I’m at the position when Songbird is “good enough” to replace Amarok. I’m still missing a few features, most notably queueing support when using smart playlists (and playing in random mode). The Now Playing List add-on helps a little, but in the current version, it’s not possible to rearrange its items when using smart playlists, which is what I use the most. I guess I can wait for that to be implemented, since the latest version was released just two days ago… :)

All in all, Songbird is quite good. I mean, how many other media players can you check your mail in? ;)

What’s this? A new post after almost a year of silence? I suck at blogging. Anyhow, I write this post mainly to get this thing out to the massive audience that is called Google (since I searched high and low for it before making it myself).

The thing is, Firefox 3 (yeah, I know, old news) has this new nice keyhole form factor for the Back and forward buttons (see Wikipedia). However, they somehow thought it was a good idea not to let Linux users in on that fun in order to let Firefox integrate better with the current GNOME theme. I know there are some themes around with keyhole buttons, but they all made Firefox stand out too much from the rest of my apps. In other words, the integration of the default theme is nice, and I can’t really live without it, apparently, but an option for the keyhole buttons would be nice.

Enter userChrome-keyhole

No, you’re not imagining, that’s the default Vista keyhole buttons together with the default theme in Firefox on my Ubuntu installation (I did change my GNOME theme to make it more obvious, though).

It’s basically a userChrome.css hack, using code and images ripped from “Strata Aero” (orange and green buttons, from “Strata Human” and “XP on Vista“, respectively, are also included in the package).

And you can have it too: userChrome-keyhole.tar.gz! Full installation instructions are available in the README, so don’t come asking how to install it ;)

Disclaimer: I make no copyright (etc.) claims on the images or CSS code used (Mozilla and/or the respective theme authors made them, not me). If you have any problems with me putting this thing here, let me know, and I’ll remove it if neccesary.

This story begins Monday night, at about 11pm, when my ~5 year old 17″ TFT screen (HP 1730) suddenly decided to go black. Its power LED still indicated that it was on, so I guessed the backlight was to blame. When restarting the screen, it just lit up for half a second (showing the correct image) and then went black again. Since the backlight had gone black a few months ago, when it somehow resolved itself after me unplugging the screen trying to find a culprit, I tried unplugging the screen for a few minutes, to no avail. :/

I then googled the issue using my laptop, and found out that the culprit most probably was an old or broken CCFL tube (the backlight, that is) which made the CCFL driver shut itself off as a last resort, in order to not set itself on fire… Because of the age of the screen, I started to look for a new one instead of fixing it.

I endured using a very old 15″ screen, full with stuck pixels and other mayhem, for three whole days while ordering a new one. Thursday evening, just about 32 hours (it took a while deciding which screen to buy since I wasn’t really prepared for this) after placing my order and spending some of my savings, I got my hands on the new one, and I can’t say I’m not happy with it. Samsung SyncMaster 204B. Three inches (or 609 280 pixels) larger than the old one (17″ 1280×1024 vs. 20″ 1600×1200), and a picture so crisp it makes my laptop screen look blurry. It’s just perfect! :D

The only bad thing is that I have a bad habit of maximizing all applications I use. In 1600×1200, that only results in grotesquely large windows and a lot of wasted space. I guess I just have to get rid of that habit. That way I can actually see the wallpaper… ;)

//firetech

Whoah, December is only a week away! *Queue up some christmas songs*

Time goes fast when you’re in school, I guess. On the other hand, that’s a good thing, since I don’t have time to long for the perfect christmas (which will never come, of course)… I hope I’ll be able to go skiing this year, but I doubt it’ll happen, as I don’t have anyone to go with.

Anyway, on the more geeky side, I bought my first own domain, firetech.nu. The single largest reason for this is to use Google Apps (mostly Gmail and Google Calendar) on it, since my old Gmail address was getting a bit too much spam (around 10 mails a day, probably because it’s listed on quite a few web sites and in some open source code). Google has more or less taken over my life, but has also made me a lot more organized (partitially thanks to GooSync, which gives me my Gcal in my P990i smartphone). Due to this organized lifestyle, I managed to get some things (which I really should have done ages ago) fixed in less than a week: getting a haircut (the hair passed my nose in length… last time was in April), getting new shoes (my old ones were looking a bit too shaggy) and getting new glasses (my old ones are 5 years old and a bit too small, they also turned out to have the wrong correction). Also, using Gmail as my primary (and only) mail client is such a breeze. Especially using this script for handling mailto: links (I modified it a bit for use with Google Apps, and removed the browser check) and KCheckGmail for checking for new mails every two minutes. I doubt I’ll ever use a “normal” mail client again…

//Firetech