Some time while jailbreaking and unlocking process iPhone refuses to boot in normal mode and every time you restart your iPhone it enters in Recovery mode. This situation is named as recovery mode loop. If you are in a recovery mode loop (i.e. your phone enters recovery mode on every reboot).
 
To get the rid of recovery mode loop we use iRecovery, iRecovery is a libusb-based command line utility for Mac OS X and Linux (perhaps Windows too). It is able to talk to the iBoot/iBSS in Apple’s iPhone/iPod touch via USB. If you are on Windows then you need to install LibUsb-Win32 in order to run iRecovery.LibUsb-Win32 is a port of the USB library libusb the Windows operating system. The library allows user space applications to access any USB device on Windows.
 
There are a few gotchas on Fedora so here are step by step instrucions.
 

 
There is a bug in irecovery.c code so in order to make it compile I needed to delete line 323 containing this code:
signal(SIGINT, irecv_quit); // Close USB on ^C
 
Use vim, gedit or any other text editor or your choice and delete this line, because it won’t compile if you don’t remove it, and you will get this error:
irecovery.c:323: error: ‘SIGINT’ undeclared (first use in this function)
 
Now we can continue the compilation process:
 

 
Now you have iRecovery installed and can use the instructions on how to use it to Get Rid of iPhone from Recovery Mode Loop on Restart.
 

 
I have seen question of how to make VIA VT6421 PCI SATA card work under Ubuntu on number of forum posts and only solutions I have seen on Ubuntu forum was: “Solved:: Installed Windows. Got data no problems.” :(
 
This obviously is not the solution. I found a solution that works on Ubuntu 8.10 but probably will work on any other Ubuntu version.
 
So in order to make this device work you need to see what module it uses:
 
lspci -k|grep -i VT6421 -A 2
 
01:07.0 RAID bus controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6421 IDE RAID Controller (rev 50)
Kernel driver in use: sata_via
Kernel modules: sata_via
 
So we can see that the module this card uses is called “sata_via”, now just load the module for this VIA card and of you go:
 
sudo modprobe sata_via
 

 
Quick tip to see which are the biggest currently installed packages on your Fedora box:
rpm -qa --queryformat '%10{size}-%{name}-%{version}\n' | sort -k1,1n
 
You might also be interested in fslint:
yum install fslint
It lists packages by size, and it will autoselect dependencies for packages you want to delete
 

 
I would like to upload geotagged photos via my Nokia N95 and every guide on the internet suggested installing Shozu.
 
There are a few issues with Shozu:
- it doesn’t add exif tags to jpeg files!
- it adds geotaggs only when uploading to flickr
- it isn’t free
 
Nokia actually made an application that fixes this but it is quite unknown.
 
Just download and install Location tagger.

 
In our local LUG we have been brewing a custom distro based upon Fedora and Omega linux distributions. We also added a lot of applications from many categories; like gps, astronomy, office and multimedia software.
 
What makes it apart from distributions that it is based upon are these points:

 
Why did we make this distribution? Because there are just too many things missing by default in current Fedora. Due to laws in US and because the software in question isn’t licenced under open source licence Fedora can’t provide things like skype and flash that most of users are just too depended upon and can’t work without them.
 
Any comments and suggestions are welcome, tell us what we are doing wrong and how to make this distro better.
 
Read rest of story…

 
If you use some Wordpress theme that doesn’t have “previous entries”, “old entries” or “previous page” in the footer of your blog then there is a really easy way to tweak this and add this functionality.
 
Read rest of story…

 
I have bought Asus M3N78-EM motherboard for my new HTPC. I’m currently testing it with KnoppMyth R5.5 and installation with KnoppMyth R5.5 worked flawlessly.
 
Motherboard specs:

 
After installation:

 
Only thing that didn’t work was digital SPDIF sound via optical (fibre) cable.
 
To enable optical sound you only need to edit etc/modprobe.d/sound file, it needs to have this line:
options snd-hda-intel index=0 model=6stack-digout
 
sound chip on this motherboard is MCP78S as seen via lspci -v command:
 
00:07.0 Audio device: nVidia Corporation MCP78S [GeForce 8200] High Definition Audio (rev a1)
Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Unknown device 82fe
Flags: bus master, 66MHz, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 21
Memory at fce78000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
Capabilities: [44] Power Management version 2
Capabilities: [50] Message Signalled Interrupts: Mask+ 64bit+ Queue=0/0 Enable-
Capabilities: [6c] HyperTransport: MSI Mapping
 
 
Enjoy your new digital sound.

 
If you have a new Fedora user (or user of any other distro) who has problems using his wireless card first thing you need is for him to tell you which wireless card he has and which wireless driver his card uses. For experienced users this is trivial and can be done in several ways. I found that this can be a bit tricky for new users and there isn’t one simple command that displays ONLY this information.
 
This one liner seams to do the trick for PCI wireless cards:
 
lspci -k|grep -i -E “wireless|wlan|802.11″ -A 2
 
UPDATE:
 
Also try this command:
lshw -class network |grep -i ‘description: wireless’ -A 11
 

BROADCOM:
30:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN (rev 01)
	Kernel driver in use: b43-pci-bridge
	Kernel modules: ssb

INTEL:
02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG
Network Connection (rev 02)
	Kernel driver in use: iwl3945
	Kernel modules: iwl3945

ATHEROS:
01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg
Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)
	Kernel driver in use: ath_pci
	Kernel modules: ath5k, ath_pci

INTEL:
3:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 4965 AG or AGN [Kedron] Network Connection (rev 61)
     Kernel driver in use: iwlagn
     Kernel modules: iwlagn

 
I tried this with Intel, Atheros and Broadcom wireless cards. Do you know of a better way to do this? How would you do this for USB wireless cards?
 

If you have digital camera then you also have lots of digital photos on your disk drive. For you who want to better organise your photos here is one quick tip.
 

Cameras name photo files in non human friendly ways, for example last few photos I took have these filenames:

$ ls
pa198126.jpg pa198130.jpg pa198134.jpg pa198138.jpg pa198142.jpg pa198146.jpg pa198150.jpg pa198127.jpg pa198131.jpg pa198135.jpg pa198139.jpg pa198143.jpg pa198147.jpg pa198151.jpg pa198128.jpg pa198132.jpg pa198136.jpg pa198140.jpg pa198144.jpg pa198148.jpg pa198129.jpg pa198133.jpg pa198137.jpg pa198141.jpg pa198145.jpg

 Just from looking at the file names and not oppening these photos you can’t really get much information. If you wish to smartly bulk rename your photo files so that the file names have more meaning continue reading.
 

First we need to install jhead. If you are using Fedora use yum for installing jhead and for Debian (Ubuntu) based systems use apt-get:
 

yum install jhead
or
apt-get install jhead
 

To give these images a new name we will use date written by the camera to their exif tags. Exif tags contain a lot of useful information like date and time the shoots were taken, brand and model of the camera, shutter speed and other info.
 

We will use only the time info for now, but you can play with all the settings as you wish.
 

To rename the images with date and time when they were shoot we can use jhead with these parameters:
 

jhead -n%Y_%m_%d_%H%M%S p*.jpg
 

After that we have a much more human friendly image names:
 

$ ls
2008_10_19_161728a.jpg 2008_10_19_162047.jpg 2008_10_19_172113.jpg 2008_10_19_173315.jpg 2008_10_19_161728.jpg 2008_10_19_162100.jpg 2008_10_19_172124.jpg 2008_10_19_173330.jpg 2008_10_19_161830.jpg 2008_10_19_162204.jpg 2008_10_19_172137.jpg 2008_10_19_173349.jpg 2008_10_19_161840.jpg 2008_10_19_162218.jpg 2008_10_19_172141.jpg 2008_10_19_173806.jpg 2008_10_19_161949.jpg 2008_10_19_171956.jpg 2008_10_19_172231.jpg 2008_10_19_173816.jpg 2008_10_19_162000.jpg 2008_10_19_172009.jpg 2008_10_19_173256.jpg 2008_10_19_162034.jpg

 If you have some more examples how this approach can be enhanced even more please post it in the comments.
 
UPDATE:
 
I read a great article on linux.com about automated image processing. Highly recommended.
 

 
If you have bluetooth GPS dongle that you have laying around, or can borrow one from somebody, and like driving a bike or a car around then this is the guide for you.
 

You need to have bluetooth wireless chip already installed on your laptop. If you have a laptop or a desktop without bluetooth you can buy and use USB bluetooth dongle.
 

You can check if you have a bluetooth and that it is working correctly using this command:
hcitool dev

Then let’s make sure you have bluetooth service running:
service bluetooth status
 

if it is not running just start it with:
service bluetooth start
 

Turn on your bluetooth GPS dongle and find its bluetooth mac address with this command:
hcitool scan
Scanning ...
00:1E:EE:00:11:22 LG KU990
00:02:78:99:FF:00 SJ GPS
00:12:EE:55:00:FF Device01
 

If you find more than one bluetooth device you should know the name of your GPS dongle. My GPS dongle has a “GPS” in its name so it is easy to catch its mac address: 00:02:78:99:FF:00 (SJ GPS)
 

You need to install gpsd and setup bluetooth config files, so let’s first install gpsd:
su -
yum install gpsd gpsd-clients -y
 

Then you need to edit bluetooth config file so that gpsd connects automatically to GPS bluetooth dongle.

gedit / etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf
 

and add these lines:
 

rfcomm0 {
# Automatically bind the device at startup
bind yes;

# Description of the connection
comment "GPS Bluetooth dongle";
}
 

After reboot check if you have /dev/rfcomm0 device with:
ls -al /dev/rfcomm0
 

If after reboot (or you don’t wan’t to reboot) you still don’t have /dev/rfcomm0 then just issue this command:
rfcomm bind rfcomm0
 

Now start gpsd daemon:
gpsd /dev/rfcomm0
 

Now you can start having fun! :)
 

Install gps applications like tangogps, gpsdrive and gpsbabel.
yum install -y tangogps gpsdrive gpsbabel
 

Now just start tangogps and gpsdrive and enjoy…