Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

Note: This article is part of my Testing stuff with QEMU series.

From Wikipedia:

MenuetOS is an operating system with a monolithic preemptive, real-time kernel, including video drivers, all written in FASM assembly language, for 64-bit and 32-bit x86 architecture computers, by Ville Mikael Turjanmaa.

MenuetOS development has focused on fast, simple, efficient implementation. It has a graphical desktop, games, and networking abilities (TCP/IP stack), yet still fits on one 1.44MB floppy disk. It also facilitates easy, full-featured assembly language programming. This stands in marked contrast to the (as of 2007) widespread view that assembly languages are useful mainly for old and embedded systems.

Testing (the GPL'd) MenuetOS in QEMU is easy:

wget http://mesh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/menuet/M32-084.ZIP
unzip M32-084.ZIP
qemu -fda M32-084.IMG -m 384


There's also Menuet 64, written in 64-bit assembly, but that's not open source'd for some strange reason I don't understand. But you can try that one, too (the binary images, that is), using QEMU:

wget 'http://www.menuetos.be/download.php?CurrentMenuetOS'
unzip M64-059.ZIP\?3.1
qemu-system-x86_64 -fda M64-059.IMG


One of the single most useful packages when it comes to PDFs in Linux is pdfjam.

From the website:

• pdfnup, which allows PDF files to be "n-upped" in roughly the way that psnup does for PostScript files.
• pdfjoin, which concatenates the pages of multiple PDF files together into a single file.
• pdf90, which rotates the pages of one or more PDF files through 90 degrees (anti-clockwise).

The installation is easy as always: apt-get install pdfjam

PDF is not exactly the most easily editable format out there, but these tools can save you lots of time and trouble. Just recently I needed to merge two PDFs into one (and I didn't have any source format of the files). A simple pdfjoin foo1.pdf foo2.pdf --outfile bar.pdf does the job in a few seconds.

Equally useful when you need to print huge documents is pdfnup --nup 2x2 foo.pdf, which sticks four PDF pages into one (thus drastically reducing the amount of pages you have to print)...

Update 2006-09-20: As was noted by several people, pdftk is very cool, too. It can do some other things such as split PDFs, encrypt/decrypt them, manipulate metadata and more...

OMFG! There's a new 39 megapixel digital still camera, namely the H2D-39. I so want one of those. But I do not want to know how much such a thing costs, I really don't...

(via One Stop Under)

Don't ask me why, but my video iPod has unexpectedly arrived yesterday instead of sometime next week as I was told. But hey, who am I to complain?

Quick notes:

• Sound quality is great, videos look great.
• GNUpod doesn't work yet, it seems the iTunesDB format has changed. I'll investigate.
• I tried putting the whole Wikipedia on the iPod using the Notes feature. It's not that easy unfortunately, as the built in software limits file sizes to 4 KB, and the number of notes to 1000. Maybe iPod Linux software will support this.
• Speaking of iPod Linux — it doesn't work yet. I'll try to come up with patches.

No time for blogging, must play with iPod...

The infinite flickr slideshow. Better than TV, and more... ehm... recursive?

(via Beer and Speech)