When installing VMWare tools in my Mavericks VM, I got an error that VMWare tools can’t be installed due to an expired certificate. (resetting the clock doesn’t help… 😉

VMWare Tools can be downloaded from VMWare update server, e.g.:

https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/vmw-desktop/fusion/11.5.3/15870345/core/

The downloaded TAR contains a ZIP.
The ZIP contains the OSX Fusion app.
The Fusion app (in its package content) contains the VMware tools ISO files.

darwin.iso for newer OSX versions.
darwinPre15.iso for older OSX versions, such as Mavericks

The full paths are:
com.vmware.fusion.zip\com.vmware.fusion\payload\VMware Fusion.app\Contents\Library\isoimages\darwin.iso
com.vmware.fusion.zip\com.vmware.fusion\payload\VMware Fusion.app\Contents\Library\isoimages\darwinPre15.iso

Mount the according ISO image to your client, install VMWare tools.

ping ubuntu1804server
ping: cannot resolve ubuntu1804server: Unknown host

can be solved by installing libnss-mdns in the guest OS.
The guest can now be addressed by

ping ubuntu1804server.local

Since Plex offers offical packages for raspberry systems, installing plex got really easy. The official installation documentation can be found here but misses a few steps when setting up on a freshly setup raspi:

curl https://downloads.plex.tv/plex-keys/PlexSign.key | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt install apt-transport-https
echo deb https://downloads.plex.tv/repo/deb public main | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/plexmediaserver.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install plexmediaserver

1. create a mountpoint, e.g. ‘mkdir /media/Malaga/’
2. use ‘sudo blkid’ to get the UUID of the attached USB drive
3. extend /etc/fstab by an entry like:

UUID=5B86-AAAA /media/Malaga exfat defaults,auto,umask=000,users,rw,uid=pi,gid=pi 0 0

Then remount all mount points:
sudo mount -a

Are you trying to finally get rid of your old laptop, but don’t know if it contains still some data that might be relevant some day? If it still runs, just boot it up with a recent Knoppix boot medium and backup its data.

The default settings of mkisofs can’t handle deeply nested paths well, so I suggest the following parameters:

mkisofs -input-charset iso8859-1 -iso-level 4 -udf -o /path/to/destination.iso -V your_volume_label /directory/to/backup

Note: For easy handling of the data in OSX, you should copy the ISO file to a backup disk that’s formatted with exFAT filesystem.

The open source tool Subler offers a perfect feature to convert VobSub captions to TX3G format that is more compatible to iTunes and other clients (like Plex).

But the stock version of Subler only supports English text recognition. In order to recognize German umlauts and other latin special characters like this, you need to download extra data files for the OCR library ‘tesseract’.

Subler’s documentation mentions that but the link is outdated. So here’s the correct link to the data files for the (old) tesseract lib that’s included in Subler:

https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/wiki/Data-Files#data-files-for-version-302

The tar files have to be unpacked and the data has to be copied to ~/Library/Application Support/Subler/tessdata

I used TagSoup some years ago, but last week I came across ‘JSoup’. It also allows parsing of ‘real world HTML’, and comes with a really neat API to download and select subsets of your document.

See for yourself:

String url = “https://javaspecialists.teachable.com/p/refactoring2j8”;

Document doc = Jsoup.connect(url).get();
Elements items = doc.select(“a.item”);

ccextractor is an open source tool to extract subtitle tracks.

To install it via brew:
brew install ccextractor

To extract the default (English) subtitle to default (SRT) format, just use
ccextractor video.mp4

To extract all subtitles from all m4v files in the current directory (.):
find . -name "*.m4v" -exec ccextractor {} \;