Configure Raspberry Pi Composite Video Output for old TVs

Raspberry Pi comes with the composite video output configured to NTSC by default and older TVs aren’t able to detect that and change the format to PAL for example. In that case in a PAL TV youl’ll see the image in black and white:

Debug console PHP applications with NetBeans

Assuming you already have PHP and NetBeans configured to debug code using XDebug, these are the steps to debug a console PHP application:

In the terminal window export the value of the XDEBUG_SESSION_START get parameter that…

Force a file system check (fsck) on next system boot for CentOS

It’s as simple as creating an empty file in the root called forcefsck:

touch /forcefsck

Create a tar.gz file excluding git metadata

When using tar it's very important to obey the order of the options.

The last option always has to be “f" to indicate the file we want to be created. If you want to exclude some files or folders you can't either place the…

No splash screen on NetBeans

I’m not a fan of the splash screens the applications, even less on those that place it on top of all your applications all along.

The NetBeans splash screen is easy to hide. You can run Netbeans with the command line option “--nosplash" or add this…

Adding custom action to a keycode in XBMC

There are some USB IR remotes out there specifically made to be used in media centers. I bought one of those to setup my parents Raspberry Pi.

It looked like everything worked out of the box with XBMC but then we noticed that the…

Boost low volume in XBMC

AC3 encoded movies usually have very low volume. To fix this edit the /usr/share/xbmc/system/advancedsettings.xml file and add this audio ac3downmixgain parameter inside the <advancedsettings>...</advancedsettings> tags:

<advancedsettings>
  ...
  <audio>…