Peng’s links for Saturday, 30 May

I bet you guys (and gals) thought I wasn’t doing these links posts anymore. Things have been crazy on my end of things but I’ve still been making notes of things I wanted to share with y’all. I won’t post all of them (some are well over a week old) but I do have a dozen or so that I think you’ll like.

• Leo Iannacone: A simple plugin for Sonata… If you love the Sonata GUI for MPD Leo has a plugin that you may love as well. What does it do? Read his post for all the good news.
• Martin Owens: Who Needs Flash, I Don’t, SVG For Me. Martin has found a great way to use rich graphics for the web without having to go the proprietary route with Flash.
• Josselin Mouette: Reporting userful bugs. One of the biggest issues for any software tester is the need to file a bug report with the information that will help the devs identify the problem enough so they can see about fixing it. If you even help test a single prerelease software application you should bookmark Josselin’s post.
• Kartik Mistry: artha. Ubuntu ships with a dictionary application, but every now and then you need a thesaurus. Artha may be just what the doctor ordered.
• John Stowers: Playing With Clutter. Last October I started a links post with some news about Gloobus, a nice open source way to bring the MacOS coverflow feature to GNU/Linux, and John has some nice info on getting it to play well with Nautilus, one of the biggest issues with Gloobus, which isn’t any fault of the Gloobus dev.
• David Thomas: Preston Gralla: Why you Shouldn’t Care. David read an article in Computerworld that tries to minimize the benefits of Linux. David writes a very well thought out response that shows why Mr. Gralla’s article doesn’t seem to have all that much to do with a little something we like to call facts.
• Matthew Revell: Launchpad’s YouTube channel. Matthew has created a channel on YouTube where you can find demos on how to use all the benefits of the Launchpad code hosting service.
• Paul Cutler: Meet Snowy, Tomboy’s best friend. Tomboy, the note-taking applet from the good people at GNOME, has gotten a web app that will make your Tomboy notes even more uesful.
• Lior Kaplan: “Get Openoffice.org” icon on a new laptop. What would you say if you bought a new laptop and found an icon to get the most popular open source office productivity suite on your desktop? No, I don’t mean like you get when you install a GNU/Linux distribution on your computer, because they tend to have the actual apps installed rather than simply providing you with a “get me” icon. What if that new laptop came from Toshiba? And had Microsoft Vista and MS Office 2007 installed? That’s right, that’s the very thing Lior found on his brand-spanking-new, fresh out of the box Toshiba laptop.
• Stefano Forenza: GiftWrap helps you create .debs. Every now and then a GNU/Linux user needs to install an application that doesn’t have a pre-compiled package. Now people who run Debian-based Linux distros have a nice little helper, except rather than using the link to the debs that Stefano provides for installing GiftWrap you should use the GiftWrap devs’ PPA so you make sure you have all the dependencies satisfied when you install it. I’ll see if I can use it to create a .deb of Mac4Lin to make the install process even easier.
• Paul Tagliamonte: Making a bootable USB drive. Have you tried creating a bootable USB drive so you can have your favorite operating system on just about any computer? I have, and I’ve run into some issues, although I’m thinking it may be due to a BIOS setting I need to tweak. Anywho, Paul has a great tutorial to walk you through the process of making a bootable USB drive.
• Andrew SB: “Because humans need Oxygen.” You may know Andrew from his andrewsomething PPA on Launchpad (which has a ton of software you should check out if you run a Debian-based Linux distro), brings a little Sweet to his news about a new icon set. Or am I the only one that thinks of that band when you read his article?
• Dave Richards: Evolution Picture Gallery Under Development. Dave tells us about a way to bring a popular OpenOffice.org feature to the GNOME email client.

Happy Towel Day, you hoopy frood!

Eight years and two weeks ago, the planet lost on of it’s most well known hitchhikers, Mr. Douglas Adams. In honor of him, don’t forget to bring your towel with you when you leave home. Then people can refer to you in the same way they referred to Ford Prefect.

Hey you, sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is!
-The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy entry on Towels.

And of course Happy Memorial Day to everyone in the States. If you’ve ever been a member of the armed forces, whether for the United States or any of our allies, thank you.

Thanks to Holger Levsen over on Planet Debian for the reminder about today.

Comments are now getting moderated

Lately Peng and I have been noticing that some comment spam has been slipping past our spam detector lately. Unfortunately the only solution we can find is to require all comments be moderated before getting published, so that’s what we’re going to have to do.

We apologize for any inconvenience this causes. We’ll keep looking for a better solution, and as soon as we find it we’ll be more than happy to use it.

HOWTO: Grab your favorite YouTube vids in Epiphany

It’s bound to happen every now and then. Your surfing through the videos on YouTube, marking some of them as Favorites and putting some on playlists to share with others. But every one in a while (or more often), you find a vid that you absolutely love and wish you could snag for your hard drive so you can always have it handy for when you want to watch it again.

Firefox users have the VideoDownload Helper extension to save and even convert your favorite vids. But perhaps you’re like me and prefer to use GNOME’s Epiphany web browser. Except although Epiphany is based on Mozilla’ s Geko rendering engine,  you can’t simply install Firefox extensions into Epiphany. Luckily there are quite a few extensions for Epiphany (as well as third-party extensions, as well as unofficial extensions) and one of them is Adam Schmalhofer’s Video Downloader extension.

While it isn’t as flexible as the Firefox extension, Adam’s extension brings a much needed ability to Epiphany. The first thing you will need to do is make sure you have Clive installed (install via apturl), as Clive does the heavy lifting of downloading and converting the video for you. Once Clive is installed snag the files for the Video Downloader from Adam’s brzr repository (yes, you can simply grab the files from the page I linked to). The main files you need are video-downloader.ephy-extension and video-downloader.py, but you can grab the other files if you want. I strongly suggest grabbing the README file (or README.it if you speak Italian).

Once you have the files downloaded, move (or copy) the files to ~/.gnome2/epiphany/extensions and launch Epiphany. You can move the files into that folder while Epiphany is running, but I recommend at least closing and relaunching Epiphany when installing any extensions. Now, before we enable the extension there is one thing that absolutely has to be done. Get into your Preferences window by running Edit > Preferences from within Epiphany. Even if you want Epiphany to ask you where to save your downloads each time, this extension requires that you have a location specified. Click the box for Automatically download and open files and select the location where you want Video Downloader to save the videos for you. If you want to be prompted where to save your other downloads then simply clear the checkbox once you make your selection. I decided to use the same folder that the Firefox extension uses, simply to keep things simpler. Unfortunately Video Downloader is unable to ask you where to save each video you download with it, so you have to set this preference via the Preferences dialog, but hopefully it will come in a later version of the extension.

Once you have the files in the proper folder (~/.gnome2/epiphany/extensions), you have Clive installed, and you have selected where the downloaded videos should go, it’s time to enable the extension itself. Simply go to Tools > Extensions and check the box for the Video Downloader extension. Once it’s checked you’re ready to start downloading.

Go to the page for your favorite YouTube video, and once the page is finished loading you will see a film icon in your status bar. (My screenshot shows the icon from the Mac4Lin theme. You can see the default icon on the extension’s page.) Simply click on the icon and the video(s) on the page will be downloaded as MP4 video files to the location you specified.

One very nice feature I found about from Adam this morning is available if you do a middle-click on the icon. In Firefox and Epiphany middle-clicking a link will open it in a new tab, and if middle-clicking the icon will attempt to load the video file into a new tab. What I discovered today, however, is that when I middle-clicked the icon I got an offer to either open the video or simply save it for me. As you can see from the screenshot, RealPlayer 11 is installed on my system and registered as the default MP4 player, and I’m asked if I want to open the file in RealPlayer 11 or save the file. Selecting Save As… will give you the file picker window so you can save the video file wherever you want it, and you will also have an opportunity to rename the file however you want.

For a list of all of the sites that Adam’s Video Downloader extension will work on, simply check out the README file.

I want to send a yooouge THANK YOU! to Adam Schmalhofer for all his help as he helped me resolve some issues I was having. That dude totally rocks, and I owe him several brews.

My birthday was an experience

As Nanci already posted, Monday was my birthday (as Jack Benny would put it, I’m <JackB_imitation>39</JackB_imitation>), and a good friend of mine took me to see the new Star Trek movie on the IMAX screen at Jordan’s Furniture in Reading, MA. Little did I realize, the furniture store that I’ve longed to shop at for the last 20 or so years has quite a bit more than furniture and IMAX movies. There’s naturally a concession area for the theatre, but there’s another entertainment area right as you enter the store.

The first thing you see is the Jelly Belly Beantown area, complete with a Sweet Shop where you can buy all of your favorite Jelly Belly candies.  But there’s more than a store for JB at Jordan’s Reading. Beantown also has a number of sites finished in jelly beans that you can see. Think the Tournament of Roses Parade but with jelly beans instead of flowers and you’ll have the general idea. There’s a Massachusetts State House, as well as a tasty rendition of the famous Make Way for Ducklings statues from the Boston Common.

But wait, there’s more! They also have a shop for Richardson’s Ice Cream (the site is down as of this writing but I’ll provide the link for your use later) for days like today when it’s approaching 90 when your bod is crying out for either iced coffee (although I did find it a tad weak) or some ice cream. There’s also the Trapeze School of New York for those who have always dreamt of life flying under the big top.

For those who just want to sit a spell before you make your way to the theater (or before shopping for great furniture deals) you can watch their Liquid Fireworks display. Just about all of us have seed a fireworks show synchronized to music, and Jordan’s has done the same thing, only with water. I was glad just to sit there and take picture after picture of the “show”, thinking it was too bad I didn’t have a video camera to shoot the show with. Luckily someone else did and posted it to YouTube for us to enjoy.

Of course Jordan’s Furniture is best known as a place to find some very good furniture, although at a rather high price tag. I found one chair that was so comfy I didn’t want to get out of it to go see the movie. The price? $500. Ouch! But it was so comfy I bet it’s worth every penny.

And for those times when you want more than just movie fare or ice cream, either before or after the show, there’s a Fuddrucker’s restaurant right off Beantown. They bake their bread daily, and when I arrived for the first show of the day I could smell the baking. If you can manage to make the schedule I recommend their lunch special, a 1/3 pound hamburger, fries, and a bottomless soda all for $4.99.

I know what some of you are thinking. “That’s great Peng, but what did you think of the movie?” Before I tell you that I want to make something clear. I was in no way excited to see the movie. I’m one of those annoying people who see Hollywood reach back into the celluloid (or television) archives to bring back an old favorite to make it and make more money off people who may or may not have seen it before and immediately groan. Hollywood has developed (IMO) a very bad habit of rehashing old material rather than actually coming up with a fresh idea, and the “reboot” model has become one of the newest and best things. Sorry, to this movie viewer I tend to wait until one of those movies hits cable so I can see it for free. I really do hate rewarding the studios with my limited money for taking the (rather) cheap and easy path rather than simply making something we’ve never seen before.

Why did I go see Trek then? A good friend and his wife went to see it a week earlier and said I had to see it on the IMAX screen, and he’d take me for my birthday. I tried to talk him out of it, but ended up saying yes. In the end I have to say it isn’t bad. I can see why younger folks like it, especially since it is good as a popcorn flick. For those of us who have grown up with Trek (in any of it’s seven television incarnations and ten previous theatrical films), some of you will like it, some of you may not.

I don’t want to get too much into why I didn’t like it for the benefit of those who are still waiting to see it, but I will specify one thing that kept rubbing me the wrong way.The actors picked to play Bones, Scotty, Sulu and Chekov were spot on, and the actors who played Kirk and Uhuru were pretty good as well. I didn’t even mind Bruce Greenwood as Capt. Pike, and I was able to forget all of the asshole roles he’s played so well. But they cast Zachary Quinto to play Spock, and on those rare occasions where he was believable as Spock he had to go and open his mouth, and every time he did my brain immediately shouted, “It’s Syler. It’s fricking Syler.” And every time it did I found myself enjoying the movie less.

All in all the movie was okay, and I really liked the IMAX theater (their use of the ButtKicker brought a smile to my face since I’ve known about them for about a decade thanks to my work in live sound), but I enjoyed the Liquid Fireworks and Beantown more than the movie itself. And yes, I still kind of wish my friends had saved the $11 for another movie, even if I didn’t get to see it on my birthday, and let me see Trek on cable. I liked it that much.

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See all 23 pictures in my Birdie Experience 2009 Picasa album

I’ve got 23 pictures that I took at Jordan’s in a Picasa album, and there are a number of pics of the Liquid Fireworks show. Feel free to check them out and leave a comment if you’d like.

Sorry it took so long to get this posted. Every time this week that I thought I had a chance to finish it some other task insisted on pushing it to the back burner.

Installing files on a PDA in Ubuntu 9.04

One of the issues that has arisen in Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope is the fact that the panel icon for the gpiloted panel applet has gone from a visible icon to a simple dot. The problem is that there’s no longer any way to drag and drop files onto the icon to get installed on your PDA, a problem that has become a very big deal to many of us who still use PDAs and no longer have a way to move files onto it. I ran into the problem mostly because I am no longer able to take images that I find online (such as at ICHC) and drop them onto my Sony CLIÉ to share with others.

The bug does have a fix committed, but Alexander Gieg has been kind enough to create a pair of .deb files you can use. Simply download the two files he links to and follow his instructions for installing them and then add the applet back to the panel. Voilà! You have a working gnome-pilot applet again.

If you find that you’d rather not install files that haven’t been officially released yet I found a very handy way to get files installed on your PDA via the command line (CLI).

First you want to get the files you want installed placed in a specific folder. I use the folder that was set up by the Windows installer for my CLIÉ when I ran it under CrossOver (the folder is also available if you simply run the Windows installer under WINE), and once I install files from it onto my PDA I delete them so I keep the folder cleared out except for the new files that I have to transfer over. Once the file(s) you want to transfer are in that folder, open your Terminal and use a change directory command to move into that folder. You can also use the very handy terminal-here script (available here and here) to simply right click within a Nautilus window opened to the desired folder and select the script. On my system the terminal command is

cd <path-to-directory>

Once you’re in the folder with the CLI, you can move either a single file or all of the files in the directory to your PDA with a simple command.

Single file: gpilot-install-file <filename>

All files in the directory: gpilot-install-file *

Once the command has gotten the files ready to upload them you will be asked to connect your PDA to your computer and press the sync button. You will see your PDA connect with the computer and the files will be transferred, complete with a report of the success of the operation.

If you want to transfer some of the files in the directory to your PDA but not all of them you can use wildcards to select the files such as I did to move all of the files over. Just modify the command to select the appropriate files.

If you need to update any of the files synchronized, either for your calendar, address book, AvantGo or anything else you have on your PDA you will need to do another sync to get the files updated as the sync for moving the files to your PDA only performs that specific upload.

Yooouge thanks to Alexander for creating the .deb files. Hopefully they will make their way to jaunty-backports before long.

Happy Day, Peng!

I know my big brother’s going to be mad at me for this, but I wanted to wish him a very happy birthday. In fact, as the guys at TWoP would say…

Hippo birdie two ewe
Hippo birdie two ewe
Hippo birdie dear Peng
Hippo birdie two ewe

Thanks for helping me set up this blog, and thanks for giving us all such great information. You rock, big bro.

Nominate Mac4Lin, and Gmail stupidity

One of the pleasant surprises I’ve seen while perusing our stats is the amount of traffic we’ve gotten from people looking for info on the Mac4Lin Transformation Kit. (Yes, we’re still in Release candidate status for version 1.0, but we’re hoping we can get it out before summer ends.) The good people at SourceForge are taking nominations for the 2009 Community Choice Awards. Please help us by nominating the Mac4Lin for Best Visual Design.

Mac4Lin

Did Google’s servers suffer a concussion?

Now for the not so great news. As the tech news media is reporting, yesterday Google had a network glitch that made many parts of their sites unavailable for about an hour. But as many Gmail users will tell you, they’ve been having a pretty major issue with showing images for a couple weeks now. The problem is that when Gmail shows you an image that includes images they ask you if you want to see them, but their servers have suffered amnesia as to whether you have said to always show the images or not. It’s getting to the point that I’m having to say “always show the damned images from this sender” on a daily basis for many of the same senders, and some users are reporting that they’re doing it multiple times in a single day. Just today I had to tell Google that I always want to see the images from a good 90% of the senders that I have email subscriptions with for news, shopping info (such as sale flyers) and entertainment (such as ICHC and Comics.com). Sarah, one fo Google’s employees, said that the devs are aware of the issue and are working on it, but she posted that on 30 April and we don’t seem to be any closer to a resolution than we were when she posted the response and their blog has been strangely silent on the matter. Unfortunately it’s making some of us question whether we were smart when we elected to rely on Google for many of their services, such as email, online documents and site search.

So if you’re thinking about signing up with Google for something, you may want to hold off on it or go with someone else until they get their act together better.

A backlog of links

I think I finally have enough time to do a links post. Some of these will be a tad old-ish, but they’re things I’ve seen while I was dealing with getting Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope properly installed (and getting Evolution set back up since I forgot to do a proper backup and was pretty much back at square one of importing data from Thunderbird).

• Edward A. Robinson: Limited Edition Jaunty Jackalope T-shirts. While not as cute as the Intrepid tees, Ubuntu has come out with a limited edition tee that I may have to see if I can coax Nanci (or another family member) might get me for my (upcoming) birthday.
• Andrew Zajac: Version 9.04. Andrew has info on the latest version of Ubuntu Rescue Remix, which includes the “best free-libre, open source data recovery and forensic tools available”. I may have to throw it on either a CD-RW or a flash drive, and keep it updated, just in case I end up needing it. I could have really used it back when I kicked Windows off my comp and accidentally blew away a few thousand audio files that I hadn’t backed up yet. (Yeah, you’d think I’d have learned to back up my data by now. Me too.)
• Emma Jane Hogbin: Presenting online. Emma has some really nice tips for you if you ever find yourself having to create a presentation to give online.
• Lior Kaplan: OpenOffice.org 3.1 New Features. The latest update to the very popular open source productivity suite came out the other day and Lior has links to a nice listing of what the new features are.
• Paolo Sammicheli: Jaunty under Android. This Planet Ubuntu member got the latest version of Ubuntu working on his G1 phone. And as far as I know he’s still able to make calls with it.
• DesktopLinux.com: Anti-malware software upgraded for Linux. AVG Technologies has an update for GNU/Linux users who want to scan their systems for malicious code.
• Mighel de Icaza: Smooth Streaming with Moonlight. Miguel has good news for those who want to be able to enjoy Microsoft’s Silverlight technology on their Linux boxes.
• Jaldhar Vyas: Shaka, When the Firewall Fell. Some of you will recognize that title as a modified version of a line from a very well done episode of a sci-fi television show. If you liked the original, and you like GNU/Linux, you’ll love Jaldhar’s version.

For those who haven’t gotten their free Ubuntu 9.04 disks yet, I have links to posts from Søren Bredlund Caspersen, Hollman Enciso, and David Thomas showing the new circle-of-friends-free (and IMO nice looking) packaging for the LiveCDs for Jaunty.

I’m going to call it a lid, and I hope everyone who is able will contact their mom and wish them a happy day for tomorrow. Just remember, not all gifts will bring the intended result.

[UPDATED] [OT] The Dodgers make history

Before I post the promised links, which will hopefully come this afternoon, I had to extend my congratulations to the Los Angeles Dodgers who have a broken modern day record with their 13th consecutive win at home with their 10-3 win over the Nationals from Washinton, D.C. (LA Times story)

As Ken Gurnick from MLB News points out the actual Major League  record is quite a way’s off at 21 wins, but last night’s win tops the former modern day record for consecutive at home wins to start a season, a mark that was last set by the Detroit Tigers with 12 consecutive at home wins to start the 1911 season.

Granted, the now 7-18 Nats own the worst record in baseball, and the Dodgers have yet to face a team with a winning record, but hopefully we can keep winning through the games in Philadelphia and New York (Mets) next week, as well as to the at home Interleague games against the Angels right over Memorial Day weekend.

Congrats to winning pitcher Clayton Kershaw and to the rest of the team. Hopefully we’ll have a number of other milestones to celebrate as we wind our way to October and the postseason.

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Updated 2:30 pm: Alas, the news from Chavez Ravine isn’t all good today. It turns out that Manny Ramirez has been suspended for 50 games due to a positive test for performance enhancing drugs. Manny says it was due to a medication a doctor gave him for a “personal health issue”, although I don’t quite believe him when he says he thought it was okay to take since it wasn’t a steroid. Sorry, Manny, at this level we not only play with sleeves and caps, you’re also responsible for knowing if a medication prescribed by a doctor is okay to take.

Somehow this doesn’t surprise me, though, especially since Manny has already shown me that we can’t take his statements at face value. After all, last year he was all about loving playing in LA this season but when it came time to sign on the dotted line he had his agent make things hard on the Parking Lot Attendant and the Dodgers. He’ll be eligible to play again on 3 July. Hopefully the Dodgers will show that we have a pretty damned good team without him for the next 50 games.