Ubuntu - 20x things you need after installing

A nifty little link with some good ideas.

Windows - Make, Edit, or add to .PDF

For Windows users who want to Create, Edit, or Add-To .PDF

Previously visited sites of worth.

Recently visited sites with some actual educational use.

Videos in Wordpess

Finally a nifty little trick to embed videos in Wordpress.

Top 7 Ubuntu GUI tips

1. Make your fonts looks spiffier.

Usually if you have an LCD display the font config isn’t set correctly and you have slightly edgier fonts. You can easily fix it by going to System > Preferences > Appearance > Click on the Fonts tab > Select Subpixel Smoothing. It should update in real time. Also it will crash/close your firefox session so you have to restart it.

2. How to share your home folder / any other folder easily. (Tested in ubuntu 8.04, 8.10)

Right click on a folder. Click Share, Select the name you want for your shared folder, select if you want or not writing permissions or if someone can access that folder directly without any password (guest functionality) . For the first time only it will ask you approve to install samba. The problem is that it doesn’t tell you that you have to login/logout to be able to share folders after that (i really don’t know if this is a bug),

3. Configure any boot parameters

So if you don’t want to see a bunch of choices in your grub editor, want to change the timeout, the colors, prompt for a grub password etc, you can easily install Startup Manager

Click on Applications > Add/Remove > Select Show All available Applications (if you didn’t already), confirm that choice > type in the search bar startup manager > check the package with the same name > apply changes.

Now the application will be in the System > Administration > StartUp-Manager.

4. Enable Ubuntu Backports

Some packages remain fairly old in Ubuntu after a release is made, but thanks to the community the most popular packages get updated once a new release is made.
To enable this is fairly easy. Go to System > Administration > Software Sources > click on the Updates tab > Check Unsupported Updates.

5. Add a nice clipboard manager

Sometimes when you close a program from where you copied some text the paste becomes unavailble. To easily fix this and also have an history of past copies you can install the lightweight Parcellite clipboard manager.
Go to Applicatiosn > Add/remove > select all available applications (if you didn’t do that already) > ype parcellite in the search box > Select the package and apply changes.

The nasty part about this is that you have to manually start it each time you start the computer. You can fix this very easy by going to System > Preferences > Sessions > Startup Programs tab > Click add > Enter Parcellite as the name of the program (so you know what program starts), Click browse for the command > Select Filesystem on the left side > double click the usr folder > double click the bin folder > select an entry and start typing the programs name, the search feature should take you to the parcellite entry > Click Open. On the comments entry you could add Clipboard manager (just to respect the gnome HIG :P) > click Add and that’s it.

Remember that you can change parcellite’s options by right clicking on it’s icon from the tray and selecting Preferences.

6. Automatically open the currently started applications when you start the computer.

Go to System > Preferences > Sessions > Options tab > Click Remember currently running application
If you always want to remember the applications that you have started you can check the Automatically remember running applications when logging out option.

7. To see the weather in your current location you need to configure the clock applet from the panel
Right click the clock, select Preferences go to the Location tab and add yours. Go to General tab and check Show Weather and Show Temperature. the Configure the weather tab if you want to change different settings like temperature options or wind speed options.

Firefox image improvement

If the digital photo you just uploaded looks washed out on Flickr compared to in your desktop image editor, that’s because Firefox 3’s advanced color profile support isn’t turned on.

To enable it, type about:config in Firefox 3’s address bar,
then click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button.
Then, in the Filter field, type gfx.color_management.enabled and set that value to true (its default value is false).
Restart Firefox. From there on in, your photo colors will be richer than they were.

Why isn’t this value true by default? Well, according to Mozilla, you’ll see a 10-15% performance hit using this setting, but if you’ve got a reasonably fast machine, it’ll be worth the better-looking photos. Hit the link below for an extended explanation of Firefox’s color profile support.

X/Ubuntu media streaming.

Xmms may be “ok” for an initial install, however people usually want more, and the group at Helix have brought us Realplayer for Linux using their DNA engine.

To quote their website: “What is Helix DNA Client? The Helix DNA Client is the universal digital media playback engine, supporting playback of any format and codec on any device. It provides the underlying multimedia functionality to a whole host of applications that require local and streaming playback of multiple formats in disparate environements“.

Ubuntu work-around

Many people forget their user-name and passwords. By the time you are reading this you have realized that the help menu is of no help in this situation, so here is what you need to do.

re-posting courtesy of HJMills
Color coding by me, to help you keep track of where you are at in the instruction process.

When you turn your computer on and it comes up with the message about pressing Esc to see the boot options, press the Esc key and it will give you a list of choices. By default your computer boots the first in the list which you now cannot log in to.

You need to boot the first recovery option (as I think you have in the past) by moving the cursor over it with the arrow keys and then pressing enter.

Part way through the boot process a message will come up saying something about dropping to a root shell for maintenance. From here you can run a command to reset your password. Type in (exactly as shown, changing <username> for the user name you log in with)
passwd <username>

Press enter and it should ask you to type in a new unix password. Type one in (nothing will appear on screen) and then press enter. It will ask you to confirm it so do the same again. If it tells you it hasn’t changed the password then find out why, If it mentions anything about your password being a dictionary word then thats ok - it will still be changed and it should say so.

Once you have successfully changed your password press Ctrl+D to exit the root shell and it should finish booting as normal (if not you may need to reboot if the computer doesn’t do this for you).

When you get to the login screen login using the username you changed the password for and your password that you set for it and all should be hunky dory.

Trends

Markets rise and fall, it is nature of the beast. We went through a recession back in 91 and came out the other side just fine, just as we will come out the other side of this one. So please, everyone, stop running around shouting the sky is falling, it is far from it.

The only positive coming out of all this blaze’ scare garbage is the big push towards solar+wind power. Now why this didn’t happen sooner is no mystery as people being predictable get complacent and just don’t think of such things until the next down-trend in the market.

Obviously

Sometimes you just have to just have to laugh, and it is a bonus when your laughter is aimed at satire of the most deserving.

The Onion strikes again

O/S change-over

Alredy maintaing one desktop with a non-MSO/S (microsoft operating system,) I finally changed my laptop to an O/S which was not an MS product. The O/S of choice was Ubuntu: http://www.ubuntu.com/
I have used their O/S products in the past, (Xubuntu,) and enjoyed a level of stability which MS has never offered; though there is a tradeoff, as with everything.

A Linux version of Winamp is available at WinampLinux

The Blog Is Up

I finally decided to take the plunge and develop my own blog. It required the better part of a year, (with those I served with,) to talk me into generating my own MySpace account; which I finally did, and now under my own influence I am generating this blog: The goal is to generate enough grand enui in the readers to put them in a neural coma, but enough of that nonsense for the moment.

Let the experience begin!