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My hard drives been feeling ill of late, making odd sounds and not being able to fsck itsself - yet the system will still bootup and work as normal. Anyway I figured I would mount the drive using a live CD and try fix it. However the drive was encrypted using Ubuntu's alternate install, so how do I get at my data?

First install the required software:

sudo apt-get install cryptsetup lvm2

Then edit /etc/crypttab adding in something like:

sda1_crypt /dev/disk/by-uuid/blah-blah-blah-blah-blah none luks

Twitter seems to have really taken off in the last few months, I'm noticing more and more the blogs I read are now using it. I joined a while back, as it was nice means to track my hosting people.

The idea seems great as it takes the whole social network thing and boils it down to most basic concept ie facebook without all the dam addons and myspace without the horrible music / pictures (though twitter does allow you to upload custom themes - baaad idea, though I'm yet to see anything myspace horrid yet).

Before Christmas I entered the world of HD gaming by getting a Toshiba Regza 32" 1080p TV for my PS3 - just in time too as I had come across one of my favorite games for while: Valkyria Chronicles by Sega no less.

Anyway cut to this year and finally ordered a PC to serve as a HTPC and a desktop, however getting an output to my TV has proved problematic, currently the best I can do is 800x600 - lucky this does seem fine for videos. However the full 1920x1080 would be nice.

I use this command to grab the latest copy of Drupal:

$ cvs -z6 -d:pserver:anonymous:anonymous@cvs.drupal.org:/cvs/drupal co -r DRUPAL-6-10 -d htdocs drupal

Stunnel is a rather useful tool available on Linux and Windows which allows programs which cant use TLS/SSL to connect to encrypted services. The example code would be if you wanted to connect to https, using http instead:

$ sudo stunnel -c -d 80 -r https-for-this-eg-web-page.co.uk:443

Then this would allow you to type http://localhost/ in your browser and access the normal https site.

As you may note in the previous post I've started using my PC to play games again. I do have a fairly high specification PC, but there has been rather a death in PC gaming of late, with the last decent release being the Orange Box (2007) and Painkiller (2004) before that (infact both those games are playable on on the 360 and Xbox).

During one of my trips to play rare Japanese arcade machines, I happened across some rather awesome shmups by a company called Cave. Cave specialise in danmaku (bullet curtain) type shooters, wherein around 60% of of screen is either filled with projectiles, or the alien crafts trying to make you put more change in the machine. Luckily you have a ship which weapons... which well fill the remaining space on the screen.

Well its space year 2008, and theres still only fleeting glimpses of our future robot overlords. So humanity and the people in it; namely me need something do to in the meantime. So while I suggested Drupal for use in a much more interesting project.