Archive for May, 2012

To Echternach and Back!

Tuesday, May 29th, 2012

The weather has been lovely here in Luxembourg for the past few days. And I was recuperating. Also known as being terribly lazy :)
Well, I promised myself I’d do something to enjoy the nice weather. So, I decided to bike to Echternach and back. That isn’t exactly next door, so it’d take me a while.
On the way to, it was easy going. Sure, there were plenty of uphills, but even more downhills. A suspiciously large number of them… at one point I wondered if I wouldn’t end up at sea level like this. At any rate, thanks to all this downhilling, my average speed lifted from the paltry 17 it was before, to about 20.3. One other thing was the detour — I don’t know if it’s this or my slightly more remote location, but it was 49.79 km to get there. I kind of figured that that’d induce some ouch on the way back. Oh, top speed on a downhill was 52.6km, but the coolest part was breaking the law by speeding 20km — ok, in a 30km zone, but still :) most I’ve ever gone over the limit on a bike (though not the fastest by far).

That would be of later consequence, first to enjoy the city! So, I’m here, let’s do the enjoying part!!
Options were:
– sit on a terrace and have food / drink (no thank you)
– go to a shop and buy something I don’t need (no thank you).

Given my famously short attention span, I left within an hour of arriving. Probably shoud’ve given my legs a bit more rest, but what the hey.

I kind of was right about the more rest thing. In the beginning, my average was below 15. Thankfully, a downhill part notched it up a bit, and I managed to motivate myself into peddling somewhere around 16, 17 an hour. Geez! Had a few breaks, and my tush was kind enough to inform me that it had had quite enough of the saddle, thankyouverymuch.

With an emergency piece of pie from a cafe on the way (they had just closed the kitchen half an hour before I came, can you believe that??), I made it back to the University, where I had a more extended rehydration break and then went back home.

107 km in 5h20. Yeah, Tour de France beware and such :) But: at least I moved a bit.
(and, better: consdorf and berdorf are near there, meaning I can bike there to go on a hike!)

Remove protection of OpenOffice/LibreOffice spreadsheets

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012

Sjouke and I just ran into a minor hitch with a spreadsheet: some cells were protected, and in the new Ubuntu / Open/LibreOffice version they just looked plain wrong.
How to fix this?
Turns out that protection isn’t that hard to break. In a nutshell, an .ODS file is very much like an EPUB file — it’s also a ZIPped file which also contains a structure with a mimetypes file and a content.xml file.

To remove protection, edit contents.xml and change the attribute *protected="true" to say false. Rezip the file in the correct way, that is: store mimetype uncompressed as the first file, the rest doesn't really matter. Et voila, you have removed protection!

In a nutshell:

mkdir tmp
cd tmp
unzip ../FILE.ods
sed 's/protection="true/protection="false/g' content.xml c2.xml
mv c2.xml content.xml
zip -0X ../FILE-unprotected.ods mimetype
zip -r9 ../FILE-unprotected.ods * -x mimetype