Freecom firmware - USB TV dongle/stick

I was trying recently to get one of my old Freecom USB TV sticks working, and was unable to load the missing firmware file. I performed a search on Google and came across not only my missing firmware file named dvb-usb-wt220u-02.fw but 3 others so I've taken the chance to upload these on hosted web space and they are listed below for reference/download.

dvb-usb-wt220u-01.fw

dvb-usb-wt220u-02.fw

dvb-usb-wt220u-fc03.fw

dvb-usb-wt220u-zl0353-01.fw

Respect to Chandler's Zen.

Lightscribe on Linux Mint

I was somewhat disappointed to find out that the old Lightscribe website doesn't work any more so I had a dig around on my system archives and found a couple of .deb packages which, after installation, seem to work perfectly.

You can download them from here:

Lightscribe
Lightscribe_Application

The utility gets installed to the following location on my Linux Mint 17 install:

/opt/lightscribeApplications/SimpleLabeler/SimpleLabeler

When used with the K3b application to burn the DVD/CD, it all works perfectly.

Harty Church, Isle of Sheppey

I took my goddaughter Hannah with me on the 25th June 2013 to commemorate my brother Mark, who sadly passed away in 1999. We travelled down to the island and spent a wonderful day together, for which I am forever grateful.

The sun was shining and the weather was beautiful. Whilst touring around the Isle of Sheppey, we decided to visit the church in Harty, close to where the old Harty Ferry used to run from. The Church of Saint Thomas the Apostle at Harty was built around 1089 AD.

As you can no doubt see from the photograph, the church makes for a lovely picture.

[Taken on a Panasonic Lumix DMC LZ20 bridge camera, date 25.06.2013 at 15:11]

Stop systemd spamming the syslog with entries from ftp

Not content with systemd clambering all over my Ubuntu box, I went on a rather lengthy voyage of discovery trying to find out why each and every single ftp transaction was cluttering up my syslog, despite having the usual two logs in my /var/log/proftpd path.

Every time my webcam uploaded a single JPEG photo/snapshot, systemd made entries in my syslog, a minimum of 3 lines at a time. If you know me at all, there's nothing I hate more than 'not being able to see the wood for the trees'. All these entries made looking through my syslog a real chore. systemd is the biggest piece of crap. I'm going to be looking at Devuan in the very near future. Anyway, rant over. Here's how to disable the barking-mad systemd entries for ftp transactions in the syslog:

R2D2:/ $ sudo /usr/bin/systemd-analyze set-log-level notice

You will need to add this line to the file /etc/rc.local so that it runs on boot.

George Goodwin - my autobiography