I spent most of last night (bit sad innit?!) backing up my computers – well it started off as I thought I should clone my Mac Mini (in case I decide to buy OSX Lion) which I’ve never done before. Booted Ubuntu 11.04 from a LiveCD, and dd’ed an 80Gb disk image to the 1Tb NTFS drive over USB. Ubuntu 11.04/Unity is a bit better than Fedora 15/Gnome Shell. Did the same with the laptop, 160Gb image that time, but its XP+Fedora, did the 80Gb desktop the other day and the other 64Gb desktop a while back.

I’ve given the blog a bit of a makeover as I’m fed up of trying to fudge Google +1 and Facebook Like buttons onto the old CognoBlue theme and G+ was posting the tag cloud content instead of the post itself! I’ve made a fork of the TwentyEleven theme with some modifications to header.php, footer.php and style.css to make the content wider and get rid of some wasted space. There’s some problems with WP-Syntax too – like the line number background colour is overridden by the main stylesheet, so I’ve put a custom wp-syntax.

As I’ve been compiling Cyanogenmod for the ZTE Blade, I thought I’d have a look at compiling the kernel instead of applying binary patches. I found this tutorial which kind of helped, here’s my simplified summary: Pull kernel source from Github (currently weighs in at 1.7Gb): git clone git://github.com/TomGiordano/kernel_zte_blade.git Get the .config file – most tutorials say to get this from your phone which is running the kernel that you want to compile, but actually its already stored in git: cp ~/kernel_zte_blade/arch/arm/configs/cyanogen_blade_defconfig ~/kernel_zte_blade/.

As part of my frustration with PulseAudio and my Skype headset, I thought I’d try using my little USB Bluetooth dongle and my headset. Well after a couple of hours I managed to get mplayer to play out of my headset but upon reboot I can’t get it to work, and PA didn’t detect it anyway, so no good for Skype – which annoyingly these days only uses PA and not direct ALSA devices.

I’ve been working on Edify scripting to create a flashable zip that allows me to patch a regular CM7 nightly build with a reverted libaudio.so and updated libcamera.so There’s literally no documentation anywhere! There’s some very old posts about Amend scripts (update-script) on XDA but nothing about the newer Edify scripts (updater-script and update-binary) that CM7 uses. My script is based on the script from gapps: ui_print("Mounting /system"); run_program("/sbin/busybox", "mount", "/system"); ui_print("Extracting libraries"); show_progress(0.