[HOWTO] Open PDF files within Chrome

One of the pet peeves for users of Google’s Chrome and the Chromium browser is that you can’t open PDF files within the browser. No matter what the source, as soon as the browser detects a PDF file it asks where you want to save it. It didn’t help matters earlier this year when Chrome devs bundled PDF support in the browser itself and began ignoring PDF-capable plugins.

Today I finally found a solution for the matter. In the Google Chrome Pdf plug-in is missing thread on the Ubuntu Forums kalyp provided a solution for us:

Actually I don’t know about the plugin, but I just googled again this issue this morning and found http://www.google.com/support/forum/…bace6c42&hl=en

I tried the “popular answer” and it works!!

I checked it out, and with one minor change (that could either be due to the fact that I’m using Linux Mint rather than Ubuntu or the fact that I’m running KDE rather than GNOME) I am finally able to open a PDF file right in Chromium rather than having to download the bugger and specifically open it in my PDF viewer. Here are the steps I followed, with the one I didn’t need struck through.

• Using your preferred package manager install acroread
• Install mozplugger
• Rename /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/plugins/npwrapper.nppdf.so to something like OLD_npwrapper.dppdf.so (It seems to have something to do with Chrome not recognizing my PDF plugin but my system doesn’t have that file)
• Edit /etc/mozpluggerrc (around line 78) to change
  define(ACROREAD, [repeat swallow(acroread) fill : acroread -openInNewWindow /a "$fragment" "$file"]) to define(ACROREAD, [repeat needs_xembed swallow(acroread) fill : acroread -openInNewWindow /a "$fragment" "$file"])

Restart Chrome and when you go to about:plugins you should see the Mozplugger plugin. To check it go to a website with PDF files you like (I love getting the PDFs of the current issue of a local paper at http://www.mysouthend.com/) and click on a link to a PDF file. It should open the PDF file right within your browser.

Does it work? If so mark it SOLVED on your personal bug tracking list.

Many thanks to kalyp on the Ubuntu Forums. It may have come on Boxing Day but it’s one sweet belated Chrismukkuh present!

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[MODIFIED] A nice Christmas video playlist

[I really meant to post this much earlier today but it took a lot longer than I expected to find the right videos for these songs. Nor did I realize I was looking for vids to 21 songs when I got started but I don't want to pull any of these from the playlist. I love them all too much. -Peng]

Updated 2 January: Holy crap! The load time for all of these videos is a killer! Unfortunately WordPress doesn’t support embedding a YouTube playlist so you’ll have to go to YouTube to see the videos from here out. Sorry about trying to make your computers run home to mama.

I’ve been enjoying Christmas songs on my media player since the day after Thanksgiving and I’ve been toying with the idea of posting a list of my favorite Christmas songs. I’ve found a couple of great Christmas song videos the last few days so I decided I’d take some time this Christmas morning to put together a Christmas video playlist. I’ll also make it available on YouTube for those who want to let their computer provide some entertainment today and haven’t found a good audio stream. Some may not be proper music videos because they simply don’t exist. Yet.

You can see my entire Chrismukkuh 2010 playlist on YouTube here. Here’s the info on the videos I selected:

The Waitresses – Christmas Wrapping

This is my all-time fav Chrismukkuh song. For me it isn’t the holiday season until I hear it, and this year I threw it on my media player to make sure I could hear it early and often. Unfortunately there’s no video of The Waitresses doing this song because they didn’t make one when the band was together. There’s a nice story on American Public Media’s Marketplace about the song from their Christmas Eve show.

Trans-Siberian Orchestra – Christmas Cannon Rock

I’m not big on the TSO’s newest couple of releases, but this song from their 2004 release The Lost Christmas Eve is probably the best version of Pachelbel’s Canon that has ever been recorded.

Pomplamoose – Deck The Halls

I love Pomplamoose. They do an amazing job on both their own songs as well as covers of other people’s songs. Hyundai hired them to create some new holiday commercials for them, giving the duo complete artistic control, and I think the results are amazing. You’ll have to forgive the vlog post at the end of the song, but you can always skip to the next vid if you’d rather not sit through it.

Relient K – Sleigh Ride

The video is even more fun than the song itself, and definitely belongs on any Christmas video playlist. Granted, I don’t think Santa Claus would conjure a Snow Monster to get back at some pesky kids who borrowed his sleigh for a joy ride, but it’s still a very cute video.

The Royal Guardsmen – Snoopy’s Christmas

And old favorite, this song is a follow-up to the Guardsmen’s original song about Snoops and the dreaded Red Baron. Once again I haven’t found an official video but this is the best vid I could find.

Trio West – O Tannenbaum

I’m not sure where I came across this song but I suspect it was in a new/free MP3 email from Amazon. It quickly became one of my favs and I bet even people who aren’t that big on jazz will love it.

The City of New Orleans – O Holy Night

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip only lasted a single season but Aaron Sorkin didn’t let that stop him from bringing us some damned fine hours of television. This is from the show’s Christmas episode, set right after Hurricane Katrina did a number on the real city of New Orleans. I had really hoped to find a video I had found a number of years back that used audio from this video came from an MP3 that NBC was kind enough to make available to viewers, but it seems that it’s no longer online.

Slade – Merry Christmas Everybody

This song appeared in the first two Doctor Who Christmas special (since the Beeb brought back the series in 2005) and has become somewhat of a tradition for us. You can also find a video of Slade performing the song here.

Benny Grunch and the Bunch – The 12 Yats of Christmas

You don’t have to be from N’awlins to love this song, but it’s a great trip down Memory Lane for me between crawdads, Mr. Bingle, McKenzie’s, K&B, Schwegmans, and the best tamales anywhere. There’s just one big problem with this bid. Now I really want some crawfish.

Ray Stevens – Santa Claus is Watching You

This isn’t the version of the song I have on Christmas in Dementia but you have to love Ray Stevens and Clyde for Christmas.

Bruce Springsteen – Santa Claus is Coming To Town

The Boss and a Christmas classic. I call that a double WIN.

Cheech & Chong – Santa Claus and his Old Lady

I dare anyone to not smile as they hear this song, no matter how bad the video may be. It’s another song I’ve loved for eons and I wish I could find a proper version of it but this vid will have to do.

Rebecca St. James – Emmanuel

You may not like Rebecca St. James’ music but I don’t think I’ve ever found a better version of O Come, O Come Emmanuel.

Trans-Siberian Orchestra – Good King Joy

I first saw this song on the TSO’s 1999 The Ghosts of Christmas Eve and immediately loved it. This video isn’t from that release but it’s an official video from TSO.

Bob Rivers – The 12 Pains of Christmas

Another song I’d love to find an official video for but it doesn’t seem to exist. Pity. For the longest time it was my favorite version of the holiday classic, until I discovered Benny Gunch’s version.

Barenaked Ladies – Elf’s Lament

This is a song I discovered when Amazon offered a free download for it. I think it’s a great song from the perspective of Santa’s helpers.

Louis Armstrong – Christmas in New Orleans

Hats off to Music of Treme on Facebook for bringing this and many other great videos to my attention. You can’t do a N’awlins video playlist without this number from Sachmo.

Bob & Doug McKenzie – The 12 Days of Christmas

One of my favorite versions of 12 Days ever, I managed to find a video without the promotional spot for the McKenzie’s animated tv show. You can see the entire video on Animax’s YouTube channel.

Weird Al Yankovic – Christmas at Ground Zero

This is another Christmas tune that has become a nice little tradition for us. Written way before September 11th it’s a nice nostalgic parody. Please forgive me if an ad pops up first, I tried to get a direct link for y’all.

James & Kling – A Terrorist Christmas

Before anyone flames me for this video, it’s a parody that I heard many moons ago on the Dr. Demento Show. It’s supposed to be funny, not taken seriously, and anyone who likes to blow things up in video games will love this song. Everyone else, please just chill and move on to the next vid.

Trans-Siberian Orchestra – Christmas Eve – Sarajevo 12-24

Another song I love in The Ghosts of Christmas Eve but rather than a performance by the TSO I’ll share a video someone made of their automated Christmas lights. It’s so beautiful I wish I could do something like this, in SecondLife if not in RL.

That’s all the videos I have, although there are songs I would have loved to find videos for songs like Carol of the Bells by The Proclivities, John Mehler’s rocking good Little Drummer Boy, and Bela Fleck & The Flecktones’ Medley from their Jingle All the Way album.

Merry Christmas!

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Peng’s Chrismukkuh Desk

After going month after month with little or no changes to my computer’s desktop except for the wallpapers I have in rotation I have made several major changes to how my desktop looks. I’ve posted screenshots to the (monthly) desktop screenshot threads on the Linux Mint Forums and the Ubuntu Forums, as well as to my Facebook albums but I’ve heard people are having problems seeing them there so I am posting them here as well to let people see them more easily. I also made a small change in my icon theme this morning after the developer added an icon for my default browser.

First of all my “clean” desktop, with no apps running other than what’s running once I’ve started my computer.

And now a “dirty” shot with a few apps open to let you see how things look in use.

Here are the specs on my system:

• Linux Distro: Linux Mint 9 KDE (based on Kubuntu 10.04, if I remember correctly)
• Desktop Environment: KDE 4.5.3
• Window Decorations: Bespin
• Desktop Theme: AG-Plasma
• Widget Style: Oxygen
• Color Theme: cathbard-debian-galaxies
• Icons: OxyXmas – OxySeasons Xmas-Theme

The wallpaper on my “clean” desktop is a custom image I made with Gimp based on my sister’s brand new (and first) grandchild. The plasmoids running clockwise from the upper right corner are:

• Timer
• Analog Clock
• WeatherBug Sidebar Gadget (a Google Gadget running as a plasma widget)
• Uptime Display
• Notes
• Photo of the Day

With the year coming to a close Nanci and I are planning a couple of year-end posts about things around the blog. Nanci’s writing one of them so if you follow my posts via a planet you’ll want to check the blog directly to see what she writes. But then you should do that anyway to read her posts. She doesn’t write that often but when she does her posts aren’t syndicated via a planet so the blog and our RSS feeds are the only way to see her posts.

Have a very merry and splendiferous Chrismukkuh!

We changed the blog’s theme again

While we liked the Motion theme when we first changed to it back in May, Peng has commented that he was falling out of love with it, and as I saw how it was loading I realized he was right. Granted part of the load time may be due to the custom fonts we use, and we’re probably changing them before long, but the more I saw the theme the less I liked it.

This morning Peng and I agreed it was time to change the theme to something without the business in the background. We definitely want to go with a theme that uses a flexible width because Peng’s pretty fussy about blogs that make you scroll back and forth just to read the content. Motion doesn’t use a flexible width but even Peng said it was okay since he didn’t have to scroll to read our posts. We considered going back to Andreas09, the theme we were using for so long before, but we decided to give the Garland theme a try. It uses a flexible width to make Peng happy, and it also allows custom colors like Andreas09. In fact instead of giving us a selection of colors like Andreas09 the Garland theme uses a color picker to give us even more flexibility in what colors to choose from.

We’ve already changed the theme for the blog and we’ll be checking the widgets in use so things may change a little more as we get things set. We will be giving another look at the fonts we use because some of the fonts don’t look quite right with the new theme, and of course every custom font adds to the load time, so don’t be surprised if things continue to change for the rest of the week. Please let us know what you think of the new look.

Get new apps from the Chrom Web Store

I love using Chromium, the open source variant of Chrome, Google’s web browser based on the WebKit engine. Google is also working on the Chrome OS, a new operating system based on GNU/Linux, and as I’ve been checking the updates coming down the pike for the developer builds of Chromium I’ve seen a number of fixes for the operating system.

Why did I say all that? Because this past week Google launched the Chrome Web Store, a great way to get applications you love running right within your web browser. I found a story on OMG! Ubuntu! about enabling web apps in the Chrome browser on Ubuntu and went to the store and looked around. Before I get into some of the apps I found take a look at this video about Chrome’s web apps.

The Chrome Web Store is actually a one-stop shop for finding not just web apps but also extensions and themes for Chrome and Chromium. I already have a number of extensions installed on Chromium (of course) I started looking through the web apps available, but the first app I had to look for is TweetDeck. (I had seen mention of TweetDeck in the Web Store on Facebook but for the life of me I can’t find it now.) TweetDeck is the app I use to post links on my blog to both Facebook and Twitter, although I started using it when I first got on Twitter. My biggest complaint with TweetDeck is that it requires Adobe Air, and the combination seems to be a bit of a resource hog, so I hoped having it in Chromium would be a little easier on the appetite.

Installing it was a breeze, and as you can see from the screenshot your web apps show up on your New Tab page. I had already created an account with TweetDeck, although it isn’t needed to use the software. The plus for having an account with them is that you can log in with your TweetDeck account and whether you’re using the app itself or the Chrome app it will automatically get your settings so you don’t have to setting things up all over again.

And yes, TweetDeck as a web app is nowhere near as ravenous as it is on Air. You also don’t have to worry about having to reinstall anything when updates come out because the Chrome Web Store automatically applies any updates without your having to do anything, although I’d really prefer it if Chrome would at least let me know an update for add-on software is available before it installs it.

What things are in the Chrome Web Store that you’d like to use? We’d love to hear what they are, and you never know. We may not even have seen them yet and end up loving them as well.