Thursday, February 26, 2009

Firefox Add On Review

Have you ever watched a video online, through youtube or google video or just some embedded stuff and thought to yourself. I sure wish I could keep that video to be used on my portable device or even to put it on a DVD for offline viewing?

Well I'm pretty sure the answer is yes, and I have a solution for you... I have used this for almost a year now and it's been most excellent in it's task of ripping video and even audio content directly off the page for my selfish, grubby little hands...

It's called Download Helper, and it's a firefox extension. You can find it at http://www.downloadhelper.net/ It is easy to install and well, you should already be using firefox anyhow :)

Basically how it works is by automating the process of finding not just the meta files that process the streaming video but it digs deep into the source and finds the mp3/flv/avi/mpg etc that is the actual video, it then waits for it to stream to a file in your temporary internet folder and then saves it to wherever you want. When youtube first came out this was as easy as looking at the source code and clipping and pasting where the original file is, then they got smart and changed the code a bit... I had to create a meta file of my own etc... Now it's even more difficult, buried in php code etc...

If you want to keep the media your watching, download helper is the way to go!

Best of all, it's FREE!

Cheers!
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Thursday, February 19, 2009

Tweet Tweet in Linux Gnome...

If your using twitter for your sms type communications, and I highly recommend you do. Linux users will really like the twitux application for Gnome. It has a mozilla like icon that sits in the system tray and will notify you of new tweets and allows you to publish tweets directly to your twitter account.

The latest client uses https for it's updates instead of regular http giving some added security.

One major feature that is missing is the minimize to system tray when you click the close widget. Like most instant messengers this feature should be built in, I hope the author includes this feature soon.

A thumbs up though, this is a cool application for the Gnome desktop.

The project can be found at http://live.gnome.org/DanielMorales/Twitux

SVN:

svn co https://twitux.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/twitux/trunk twitux

Enjoy!!!
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Wednesday, February 18, 2009

VirtualBox 2.1 upgrad in Ubuntu 8.10

Yesterday my upgrade notifications in the menu bar lit up telling me there were upgrades. Well I was super busy but clicked to start the upgrade just before leaving the house. Out of the corner of my eye I read that there was an update to VirtualBox... Well this excited me because I use VirtualBox all the time to design web pages and to run my invoicing software. Major downside of virtualization has always been that I can not pay Subspace Continuum.. Just wouldn't run because of the lack of proper 3D graphics support... Well that may all change soon enough.

VirtualBox 2.1.4 (released 2009-02-16)

This is a maintenance release. The following items were fixed and/or added:

All in all this is an excellent fix...
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Thursday, February 12, 2009

Sharing LONG website addresses or URLS

Have you ever needed to share a link with someone, only to find out that the link you need to share is a really really long one? Retyping it or even clipping and pasting it becomes a nightmare and does not always translate properly in some instant messengers. Well there is a stupidly simple solution to it. Point your web browser to http://tinyurl.com and there you will be able to enter a HUGE link to make it smaller...

I wanted to share an eBay item with someone, but surprisingly giving people just the eBay item number can be confusing, they end up saying where do I enter the number it? eBay has not quite made it clear that you just put the number in their search bar.

Example:

Tiny URL will take a long URL like;

http://cgi.ebay.ca/DVD-Multi-Drive-Burner_W0QQitemZ280312663161QQcmdZViewItemQQptZPCC_Drives_Storage_Internal?hash=item280312663161&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=72%3A1215|66%3A2|65%3A12|39%3A1|240%3A1318#ebayphotohostinge

And it creates one like;

http://tinyurl.com/cdp7cf

Much easier to share!

If you have useful geek tips like this, please email them to romrider@gmail.com and I will share them on this blog with credit and a link back to your website or email address!
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Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Great Software Review - flashcam

Well, I can't rave enough about this little baby...

But to make it short and sweet, for free, this gem allows your flash based camera utilities like ustream.tv and possibly facebook etc to be able to use v4l based cameras as if they were v4l2 based devices. It does this by creating a Vloopback device that translates every frame from the camera into the new virtual device. Thus your programs can now poll the new device and in real time use the frames.

BRILLIANT! absolutely useful software.

The flashcam project is available at http://www.swift-tools.net/Flashcam/

Cheers!
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Ubuntu Sound Server Restart

Occasionally in Ubuntu Linux, some application hogs the pulseaudio sound server causing other programs like vlc and mplayer to not be able to actually play sound. There is a simple fix for this problem and it can be found at the command prompt level.

Open up BASH and do the following...

mousecrash$ cd /etc/init.d/

mousecrash$ sudo pkill -9 pulseaudio
password:

mousecrash$ pulseaudio

mousecrash$

That's it... If that didin't make any sense to you just reboot your computer ;)

Cheers!
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Coining the phrase, "Mouse Crash"

What is a "Mouse Crash"?

A Mouse Crash is best described as the state when your mouse pointer seems to freeze on the screen yet other computer processes seem unaffected. To be considered a true "Mouse Crash", the mouse pointer must be the only process affected. This means that other processes such as a video could continue playing without interuption and the operating system can still be controlled by other input devices such as a keyboard. It's happened to all of us at one time or another. Some operating systems such as linux are less prone to this type of computer glitch but if the problem is not mouse driver related it generally affects all computer users at some point in their lives. Sometimes we reboot the computer or much like kicking the washing machine to make it work we whack the mouse down onto the table thinking it will correct the issue.

The problem can be caused when little bits of dust and debris get trapped in the bottom of your mouse making the distances measured by the ball or optical device less accurate. It may also present itself when the computer itself is underpowered for the processes it is working on, causing higher priority programs to still run and the lower priority mouse driver to fail. The term itself almost always inspires memories of a frustration in computer user.

Don Millette,
MouseCrash.COM
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Sunday, February 1, 2009

Handing over ownership of a file in Linux.

Occasionally in linux you will find that you have moved a file to someone's directory only to find that they can not manipulate the file. They do not have ownership of the file and are not a member of the file's group so no access to it.

To display the access permissions of a file or directory use the the command:

ls -l superfile

This displays a detailed line for the file or directory and looks like:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 romrider romrider 49211 Feb 1 12:50 superfile

This first part -rwxr-xr-x shows the access permissions on this file. Then the number of links, username, who owns it, size of the file, a time and date stamp, then the filename itself.

Now lets say you want greg to take ownership of the file. The command would be:

chown greg superfile

You should also change the group to greg so he takes complete ownership:

chgrp greg superfile

Now greg completly owns the file called "superfile" and to top it off it is in gregs group so unless you are a member of that group you don't have any permissions anymore to alter the file.

So if you are a member of the greg group, greg the user themselves, or root you can access the file.

Simple eh?
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