Avoid hogging bandwidth with curl’s –limit-rate

At work we have a slower (1.1 Mbps) internet connection and I don’t want to hog it when I need to download a big file. Fortunately, curl has a –limit-rate option. For example (should be one line):

curl –verbose –output bigfile.tar.gz –limit-rate 3000 http://download.example.com/bigfile.tar.gz

Making PDFs on Debian Etch

This are my notes on setting up a PDF printer on Debian Etch for the local machine (i.e. not as shared printer).

Install cups-pdf:

sudo apt-get install cups-pdf

Add a printer. I find that the browser-based configuration works better than the GUI versions (Foomatic-GUI and Gnome CUPS Manager):

• browse to http://localhost:631/
• Add a printer
• Choose the type Generic postscript color printer rev4
• Choose the location cups-pdf:/

The PDF files are put in a PDF subdirectory of your home directory (~/PDF). However, if you print while logged in as root (for example, the test page from the web interface), the PDFs usually end up in /root/PDF but once I found it in /var/spool/cups-pdf/ANONYMOUS.

One other thing to note is that it uses the title of the print job as the file name. The title is set by the program that’s printing, but if it is there is an existing file with the same name, it will overwrite it silently. Generally this isn’t an issue, but Firefox/Iceweasel uses the page <title> as the print job name, so if pages have generic/bad titles, you have to be careful.

Making images of floppy disks and CD-ROMs on Linux

I have several books that came with floppy disks or CD-ROMs. I’m worried about whether they’ll last and wanted to make copies of them. It is trivially easy on Linux:

dd if=/dev/scd0 of=/iso/book.iso

I got a rawread script that supposed solves some compatibility problems. I found that dd worked fine on two disks that the script had problems with. The script is called with

rawread.sh /dev/scd0 >book.iso

To mount a image (mkdir /media/iso directory first):

sudo mount -o loop book.iso /media/iso

For floppies, use /dev/usb0 (I have a usb floppy drive) and .img as the extension.