imroy's Journal: USB drive and poster scanning

With my recent wealth of christmas/birthday presents (I really only get money anymore) I went out and bought a USBdrive. $AUS68 for 32MiB from Dick Smith Electronics in case there are any other aussies looking around.

Here are my adventures with the USBdrive:

• I first compiled a new Linux kernel with the usb-storage module. I could have just compiled the module, but I wanted to update as well.
• With usb-storage it shows up as a SCSI disk.
• It came with a VFAT fs on the whole device (/dev/sda).
• With fdisk I put a DOS partition on it, then made a 4MiB partition (/dev/sda1) and put a VFAT fs on it. This will be for things like my resume. I hope Winders will recognize the partition table.
• A second partition (/dev/sda2) holds an enrypted ext2 fs. I use the (seemingly outdated) international kernel patch. 256-bit Twofish sounds pretty un-crackable, I hope. So far I only use this area to store a backup of my ~/.gnupg directory. Who knows what else I will store here, you certainly won't! :)
• The big lid/cover thingy was a bit loose which made it rather impractical. Two small pieces of Magic Tape(TM) on the main body added enough thickness to make a firmer fit. No doubt the texture of the tape helped as well. Now I don't have a problem with carrying it in my pocket attached to my keyring.

I spent some time debugging the hotplug subsystem because I had this crazy idea of auto-mounting the device upon insertion. I made a script in /etc/hotplug/usb/usb-storage to mount it and stuff. I found that hotplug only ran the script if the specific module (e.g usb-storage) wasn't already loaded (i.e the first time). So I fixed that but then realized that I didn't really want to do things that way. In the end I just added an entry to the Mtools config file. I now have a u: drive that I can use with mdir/mcopy/mmkdir/etc...

In other news, I got a Harry Potter poster book and have been busy scanning in the posters. This is made difficult by the fact that the posters are just a little too big for my A4/letter-sized scanner. So I have to do two side-by-side scans and join them together. And I have to cope with the half-toning patterns as well. I'm getting better at that although it's still not perfect. But I still get nice big images in the range of 2.5K x 3.5K. Good for scaling/cropping down to 1600x1200 for wallpaper. Certainly much better than scaling up crappy 800x600 or 1024x768 jpeg's from some losers' web site.

So now I have a few good Hermione wallpaper pictures. The way i see it, a lot of guys have cute girls as their wallpaper. Only, Hermione really is a girl :P

Update: Actually, the Hermione pictures/posters aren't that good. I must try to get the poster book for the first movie. Hermione was absolutely adorable in that one. For now the Quidditch poster is my wallpaper. It has Harry reaching out for the little winged gizmo, looking front-on at him. It's landscape so it's easy to adapt to a wallpaper, plus it's bright and colourful with good detail and action.