Akom's Tech Ruminations

Various tech outbursts - code and solutions to practical problems

Hardware Hacks Setting the date/time on the Mini Keychain Spy Camcorder

Posted by Admin • Monday, April 25. 2011 • Category: Hardware Hacks
Keychain Camcorder
The instructions that come with this little gadget are priceless in their verbatim Chinese glory, but are not helpful in their vague "Leave the details as an exercise for the reader" approach.

Here are the exact detailed steps to actually set the clock

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Linux Backing up cPanel without hitting logout

Posted by Admin • Thursday, April 21. 2011 • Category: Linux
cPanel based hosting presents some challenges for automatic backups - there isn't an automatic way of creating local backups or any standard way of triggering their creation remotely. Numerous scripts exist yet none were quite the solution I was looking for - I am primarily interested in the databases and mail forwarders, though files wouldn't hurt either. Moreover - you can do this in a single line!

My Goal therefore is: Create and retrieve backups nightly. I don't want cPanel to push files to my off-site box, I'd rather initiate everything remotely and not have to open up access to some other system. cPanel does permit one to do this using a browser, hence it can be scripted. Really, scripting isn't even necessary - wget is all that is required! That said, I had a very hard time convincing wget not to visit the logout link on each page - once you log out, you're not getting anywhere anymore. So here is how I did it.

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