O’Reilly on iPhone!?

You can now meet your tech reference book needs on the iPhone! O’Reilly media has published over a hundred of their books on the iPhone in cooperation with Lexcycle. And they’re way cheaper than their paper counterparts!! Check the App store for the cookbooks and pocket references we love.

Is this a sign of things to come? Hopefully well be seeing more reference and textbooks soon on the app store.

Nice Dice released!

After an intense night of coding, I have finished the first release of my dice game, Nice Dice. Check it out!
http://sites.google.com/site/amysnicedice/news

notecards, one new and one revised

Last week I posted my ZSphere quick notecard. With the help of iWork I have revised and fancy-publified (yes, a new word) it and added a new ZBrush Hotkey notecard. As with everything else on this site, these are protected by a Creative Commons License, so please only distribute with credit!

Clone and Restore a Linux System

This has been working very well for me with Arch Linux on my netbook. Check that your flavor uses Grub before proceeding. This example tutorial uses a system with the following partition scheme:

• sda1: /boot
• sda2: /
• sda3: swap
• sda4: /home

Linux System Backup

Before backing up, it’s a good idea to put any relevant dotfiles into /etc/skel
also check that the system does not use uuid’s for rc.conf or menu.lst. If it does, you’ll have to correct those files manually (I leave it to you.)

• boot on a live-usb-disk
• mount the partitions of the HD each in separate folders in /mnt/
• plugin an external drive
• in each partition:
• # tar cvfp partitionname.tar . –exlude=partitionname.tar
• copy it to the external
• backup mbr and partition table
• # dd if=/dev/sda of=MBR-backup bs=512 count=1

now when you do this last step, remember that the mbr backup also backed up the partition table.

Restore a system

• boot on a live-usb-disk
• restore mbr and partition table
• # dd if=MBR-backup of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1
• write the partition table
• # cfdisk
• format the partitions like this:
• / ext3
• /boot ext2
• /home ext3
• mkswap swap
• mount the / partition in /mnt/sys/
• # tar xvf root.tar -C /mnt/sys
• mount the /boot partition in /mnt/sys/boot
• # tar xvf boot.tar -C /mnt/sys/boot
• reinstall grub
• # umount /dev/sda1 /dev/sda2
• # reinstall grub to the harddrive
• # mount -t ext3 /dev/sda1 /mnt
• # mount -t proc proc /mnt/proc
• # mount -t sysfs sys /mnt/sys
• # mount -o bind /dev /mnt/dev
• # chroot /mnt /bin/bash
• # mount -t ext2 /dev/sda2 /boot
• # grub-install /dev/sda
• unmount everything and reboot

NOTE.1: i have duplicated effort by both restoring the mbr and then writing it with grub-install. this is not a mistake.

NOTE.2: how to format

ext2: mke2fs /dev/sdXX
ext3: mke2fs -j /dev/sdXX
swap: mkswap /dev/sdXX
fat16: mkdosfs -F 16 /dev/sdXX
fat32: mkdosfs -F 32 /dev/sdXX

Notecard for using Zspheres

I like notecards a lot. I’ve even started making them digitally now that i’m using a wacom tablet so much.

Here’s a card for using Zspheres inside of ZBrush. Hope it helps someone else.

(hint: click for full notecard image.)