Migrating from Mezzanine CMS to static page generation
As the effort of keeping a complex Python software stack serviced outweighed the outcome, I migrated my little weblog to a static website generator.
Archive
2026
November 2026
October 2026
How to counter vCard address book "bit rot"
After a few years and mobile device generations the state of my address book was somewhat frustrating: Starting with Nokia Symbian S60 (SyncML) over to early Android (using Backups), on to BlackBerry 10 (Card/CalDAV backend) and ultimately back to Android (using a sync app) has introduced numerous duplications and invisible character additions by the respective address book apps (the Samsung Contacts app being the worst in that respect).
2018
April 2018
How to compare vCard address book entries
Following a little mishap with the DAVdroid app on my Fire HDX Android tablet, I ended up with a lot of duplicate contacts in my CardDAV account. Upon closer inspection I then noticed, that in the process of copying the contacts from the local contact store (on my Blackberry smartphone) to the CardDAV account, certain contact details had been lost and spurious characters (like spaces and question marks) introduced.
February 2018
How to get Mezzanine up and running on cPanel shared hosting
The follwing articles were of much use when switching this weblog from the no longer maintained Nucleus to Mezzanine, a modern blog and content management system, based on the Django web application framework and Python:
2011
November 2011
Manual restore of Android databases fails
As described in my earlier post, it is wise to create regular backups of your apps and data to SD card.
June 2011
Android firmware updates for the LG GW620
The OpenEtna community provides firmware updates for the GW620 phone by LG, which originally came with Android 1.5.
2010
November 2010
How to dual-boot Windows physically and virtually
While this is no longer possible with Windows Activation Technologies in Win 7, Windows XP allows using Hardware Profiles for a shared installation that can be run either physically or virtually (e.g. using the KVM virtualization stack built into recent Linux kernels, which is a lot more convenient than VMWare Player with its kernel module dependencies, at the price of 3D graphics acceleration). The recommended sequence for such a setup:
2009
February 2009
How to repair an ext3 filesystem after mkdosfs format
After shrinking a large ext3 partition using gparted to make space for an additional partition, I did not take sufficient care to notice the leading partition I newly created with cfdisk subsequently was denoted as sdc2 instead of sdc1, as one might expect.
2007
January 2007
How to boot a real harddisk in VMWare
The knack is to install the VMWare SCSI driver (included with VMWare Tools) before booting the SATA or PATA harddisk.