Raspbery Pi Time Capsule HDD managing power saving mode

I want to sugest power saving changes after installing and handling creation of Time Capsule for Time Machine for my home network (form my previous article). I like when it's quiet. And like when disks does not spin, when it's not necessary to do so. So if you usually backup once in some hours and main time (Night and a part of the day) you do not touch a Time Machine... You would probably want to slow down your disks for that time. Fortunately Linux does it very well. And support of it is encoded into Linux core (kernel). You just would need a UI for this possibilities and a bit of knowledge and luck ;)

Warning: Operations described farther may be potentially hazardous to your hardware.

So now after you are warned ;) let's continue. I guess I will not touch those hazardous functions, but you may, typing wrong letters to this command in Linux shell... So be careful. Better read manuals for farther commands and so on...

Anyway what we need is a UI. And we have it in form of nice utility called hdparm. It is not included in current Raspbian distribution (and it should not be perhaps) so you would probably need to install it by yourself. In fact you can find a package with it. But I'd recommend installing from latest version. It is http://hdparm.sourceforge.net/ situated. You can download it there. Using wget, for e.g. So move on to downloading and unpacking it. If you have a default Raspbian kernel, or did not screw up something useful while configuring and compiling your on one... You would probably simply enter a directory and type something like this:

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ wget http://switch.dl.sourceforge.net/project/hdparm/hdparm/hdparm-9.43.tar.gz
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ tar -zxvf hdparm-9.43.tar.gz
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ cd hdparm-9.43
pi@raspberrypi ~/hdparm-9.43 $ ./configure
pi@raspberrypi ~/hdparm-9.43 $ make
pi@raspberrypi ~/hdparm-9.43 $ sudo make install
pi@raspberrypi ~/hdparm-9.43 $ hdparm

hdparm - get/set hard disk parameters - version v9.43, by Mark Lord.

Usage:  hdparm  [options] [device ...]

Options:
...

Hurray! we have our desired utility. Reading through it's help you would probably find a useful for us paramether: -S Set standby (spindown) timeout
Here is our goal. I've set mine to 120 (10 minutes) by executing:

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo hdparm -S 120 /dev/sda1

/dev/sda1:
 setting standby to 120 (10 minutes)
pi@raspberrypi ~ $

I have a WD "green" drive and will benefit from this. But you may harm your drive with often standbys and spinups. So choose wisely and read man hdparm for more ;).
Hope you would benefit from my finding. Please comment in either way.

UPD: to persist this upon boots see article:
http://garmoncheg.blogspot.com/2013/01/raspberry-pi-boot-applications-autorun.html

Pretty git Log

SO you dislike git log output in console like me and do not use it... Because it looks like so: How about this one? It's quite easy... Just type: git log - - graph - - pretty = format : '%Cred%h%Creset -%C ( yellow ) %d%Creset %s %Cgreen ( %cr) %C ( bold blue ) <%an>%Creset' - - abbrev - commit - - It may be hard to enter such an easy command every time. Let's make an alias instead... Copypaste this to your terminal: git config --global alias.lg "log --color --graph --pretty=format:'%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr) %C(bold blue)<%an>%Creset' --abbrev-commit --" And use simple command to see this pretty log instead: git lg Now in case you want to see lines that changed use: git lg - p In order for this command to work remove the -- from the end of the alias. May the code be with you! NOTE: this article is a rewritten copy of http://coderwall.com/p/euwpig?i=3&p=1&t=git and have b...

Django: Resetting Passwords (with internal tools)

I have had a task recently. It was about adding a forms/mechanism for resetting a password in our Django based project. We have had our own registration system ongoing... It's a corporate sector project. So you can not go and register yourself. Admins (probably via LDAP sync) will register your email/login in system. So you have to go there and only set yourself a password. For security reasons you can not register. One word. First I've tried to find standart decision. From reviewed by me were: django-registration and django password-reset . These are nice tools to install and give it a go. But I've needed a more complex decision. And the idea was that own bicycle is always better. So I've thought of django admin and that it has all the things you need to do this yourself in no time. (Actually it's django.contrib.auth part of django, but used out of the box in Admin UI) You can find views you need for this in there. they are: password_reset password_reset_...

Vagrant error: * Unknown configuration section 'hostmanager'.

Sometimes you get a vagrant environment or boilerplate with a Vagrantfile config in there and do a vagrant up command. And see some errors. like this: There are errors in the configuration of this machine . Please fix the following errors and try again : Vagrant: * Unknown configuration section 'hostmanager'. To fix this one needs: $ vagrant plugin install vagrant - hostmanager Installing the ' vagrant-hostmanager ' plugin . This can take a few minutes . . . Fetching : vagrant - hostmanager - 1.8 .6 . gem ( 100 % ) Installed the plugin ' vagrant-hostmanager (1.8.6) ' ! So command to fix this as follows: vagrant plugin install vagrant-hostmanager

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