Yesterday my brother posted some great Chrismukkuh videos that he’s found, and of course there are other holiday videos that are worth making sure you know about.

We’ll probably be adding more vids as we find them or remember them (yes, you should post some more vids here too, Peng) so I’m going to make this post sticky until Twelfth Night.

Peng has a great idea.  The videos do shove the other posts down pretty far. Rather than have to decide which videos to keep on the main page and which to make you have to go to the entire post to see I’m just going to add a break here. As the guys at SciFi Wire say, the videos are after the jump.

Relient K – Sleigh Ride

The City of New Orleans – O Holy Night

from the Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip episode The Christmas Show

Bruce Springsteen – Santa Claus is Coming to Town – London

And of course you can’t have a page of Chrismukkuh videos without a little TSO.

Christmas Lights Gone Wild

The music is Wizards of Winter from the TSO album The Lost Christmas Eve

Sarajevo 2008 Symphony in Lights Contest Finalist! Marshalltown

Trans-Siberian Orchestra – Christmas Cannon Rock

More videos from Peng:

“Weird Al” Yankovic – Christmas At Ground Zero

New 16 Dec: Bob & Doug McKenzie – The 12 Days of Christmas

In less than two weeks the jolly fat man will be loading up his sled and visiting all the good cats and kittehs. A good friend of mine showed me a video that we simply must share with y’all to help celebrate the season. Make sure you also visit the page Nanci started with even more fun holiday videos.

BBC America will be sharing a trio of Doctor Who specials this season. They’ll start with The Waters of Mars on Saturday, 19 December, and continue it with The End of Time, Part One on Saturday, 26 December. You won’t have to wait long to see the conclusion of not just the story but also David Tennant’s time as our favorite Gallifreyan one week later on 2 January. If you love The Doctor you should make a point of visiting the BBC’s Doctor Who Adventure Calendar every day. You can’t see the vids if you’re not in the UK but you can enjoy the stories, wallpapers and other goodies they post. There is a way to enjoy the vids on our side of the Pond thanks to the YouTube channels for Planet Who News and the Doctor Who Time Vortex.

The Doctor isn’t quite your cuppa? How about the latest video from those crazy cats and kittehs at JibJab?

Perhaps your idea of celebrating the season is just some holiday tunage. You may remember back in October my writing about an incredible concert DVD. (The DVD is still at the top of my wish list in case anyone wants to send it as a thank you for being helped through my articles here.) I found a pair of video clips from the disk that may be just what you’re looking for, but the person that posted it to YouTube has disabled embedding so you’ll have to head over to YouTube to see it for yourself.

No matter what holiday you celebrate (or don’t celebrate) Nanci and I want to wish everyone a happy and safe Chrismukkuh. We really appreciate everyone coming to our blog.

I know I promised to try to do a links post each week but last week I was only able to post a few specific articles so since I actually have a little time this afternoon (I will not ask how that happened) and thought I’d post some of the links I’ve found in the last couple of weeks.

• Melissa Draper: How people get involved. A great little piece on getting involved in the Linux and open source community.
• Bodi.Zazen: Firewall Ubuntu Desktops. Windows users have gotten use to the idea that they should always use a firewall on their system (at least I hope they have). While it isn’t quite as vital on a GNU/Linux system due to the better inherent security some users still want to use a firewall, but it can be a bit of a pain in the posterior. Bodi has a nice, easy to follow article on using a firewall on Ubuntu.
• Danny Piccirillo: Can Ubuntu reach over 16,000 anime lovers in April? Danny and the Ubuntu Massachusetts LoCo Team have been busy getting ready to make sure people at next April’s Anime Boston know not only about Ubuntu but also about the Ubunchu! manga. If you haven’t been enjoying Ubunchu! yet the third episode has just come out so it’s a great time to get caught up. You can also check out Martin Owens’ interview on BBC Radio for info on Ubuntu, Ubunchu mange and Anime Boston.
• Roderick B. Greening: Copy playlist files to your Media player in Amarok. How is it that Amarok 2 doesn’t have a way to create a playlist and move it to your favorite digital media player? Actually that’s not true anymore, because Roderick has found a way to do it via Amarok scripting. I do believe Amarok may have just gotten even better, but I haven’t been able to get it running on my Ubuntu box since I moved to 9.10. I may have to look to see if the issue preventing me from using Amarok 2 has been resolved yet.
• Panji Nushantara: Guide to Karmic Koala (PDF). Panji has yet another great post for us as he tells us about a free PDF book with “almost everything you should know about Ubuntu, from partitioning to tweaking Ubuntu.” He’s right, it is a must have, and you don’t even need to shell out hard-earned money to get a dead tree edition of this great resource.
• Julian Andres Klode: Ubuntu Software Center coming to Debian. While it’s not universally loved, enough people love the graphical Software Center that it has been added to Debian unstable. I have to admit that while I usually use Synaptic for adding new apps I do use the USC now and then. I use it often enough, in fact,that I set up an alias for it in Gnome Do so I can launch it even more easily.
• Christopher Blizzard: why open video? Some people wonder what the big deal is about open video and why it’s important. Christopher has found a video that answers these questions quite nicely.
• Artem Nosulchik: 13 Linux lethal commands. There are commands that you should never, ever run in GNU/Linux. Artiomix has compiled a list of what they are and why you should avoid them like the plague. This article deserves to be added to your bookmarks so you can include them in your permanent reference collection.

Before I close out this post I have one more thing to share with you. A number of users of GNOME’s Evolution email client have been bitten by Launchpad Bug 27014: Summary and folder mismatch, even after a sync. You know you’re affected by it if you switch folders and get an error saying something like

Error while Storing folder ‘Inbox’.

Summary and folder mismatch, even after a sync

Zoran Mijanovic posted a possible fix for the problem.

Just delete file “folders.db” from ~/.evolution/mail/local and start “evolution”. In the first time the evolution needs more time to rebuild folders.db. After that, everything works fine.

If you have this problem you should try his solution to see if it resolves the issue for you.

Sunday’s link post included a link to Stefano Forenza’s post about the Gimp being removed from plans for Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Linx. I was checking out a video posted by Alan Pope that was on Planet Ubuntu last week and now I have a better understanding of why they made the choice.

Alan posted some videos from the Ubuntu/Lucid Developer Summit, and he also posted a separate video about application selection in the default install. After watching the video I feel a lot better about Gimp being pulled. It also makes me want to check out Eye of Gnome again, and they even mentioned my favorite image viewer, gThumb.

The video also has a discussion about the rather Jabba-sized list of games that are in the default install, and it looks like not only will we be able to cherry-pick what we want but also be able to ditch games we don’t want. As late as Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala has a base package of games and if you want to ditch one you have to lose them all. They also looked at including gbrainy, a game that I’ve mentioned in the past.

If you’re interested in not only what decisions are being made for the next version of Ubuntu you should check out all of the videos on the Ubuntu Developers’ YouTube channel. It will take some time to watch them all, but it’s definitely worth checking out.

One of the RSS feeds I subscribe to is for the Ubuntu Geek site. They publish some great tutorials and news, and I keep learning new things from them. (They’ve been in our sidebar links for some time.) Friday they had an article about a great way to watch YouTube videos that I flagged to look at more when I had the time. Yesterday I got time to check it out and found what could be one of my new MustHave apps.

Minitube is a killer app for enjoying YouTube vids that not only doesn’t have anything to do with your web browser, but it also doesn’t require Adobe Flash. Instead you simply enter a keyword and Minitube creates a video stream for you. Of course you don’t have to watch the whole stream, you can cherry pick the video or videos that you want to watch and just sit back and enjoy the videos. There isn’t a way to save any of the vids you find to enjoy on your Digital media player (like my beloved E100), but you can open a video in your web browser.

One of the best features of Minitube is that it isn’t a GNU/Linux-only app. You can also run it on the MacOS, but there hasn’t been success building it for Windows yet.

The Minitube website has great installation instructions, complete with links to a PPA, and you can even get a Debian-style package from GetDeb. Just remember that a package on GetDeb may not be completely compatible with other Debian-based distributions. But you can also snag the source code, as well as a universal for OSX.

Thanks to the good folks over at Ubuntu Geek for turning me on to this amazing app. If you end up loving Minitube as much as I do please feel free to use his donate buttons. It’s definitely worth contributing some of your disposable income to.

Updated 26 November: Thanks to comments from Eric and Pat I have seen that Ubuntu Geek isn’t quite as good a resource as I thought. I’ve removed the links to their article about Minitube and removed them from our sidebar links. Thanks for the advice, Eric & Pat. I owe you two a brew.

I hate boring screensavers, and while I used to use the Skyrocket screensaver it from the GLX port of Really Slick Screensavers (so non-GNU/Linux users can enjoy the cool graphics as well) didn’t always play well on my system. When I upgraded my video card a while back I was able to rub it much more easily, but I was getting tired of it by then.

As I was looking for a new screensaver I came across the ElectricSheep screensaver. It’s in the Ubuntu universe repo but there’s a newer version available in Khashayar Naderehvandi’s PPA (karmic only). Once you have it installed you can select it from your list of available screensavers as your computer joins with others around the world to create some really beautiful electronic art. (And no, it’s not spyware and their server is regularly checked for spam and virii.) Here’s a sample of ElectricSheep that they posted to YouTube.

The only problem I had was that I couldn’t get the screensaver to make use of my entire screen. I tried the advice on their FAQ but it didn’t work for me. Today I tried another search to see if I can find a solution and I managed to find one one on their Linux Client Instructions page. Way down the page I found some instructions using the electricsheep-preferences app. Simply call it from the terminal (or with Alt-F2) and look where it says Video Driver. Mine said x11 so I tried changing it to gl. Once I made the change I closed the preferences window and launched the standalone Electric Sheep app by simply running electricsheep and voilà! I had a screen with nothing but the ElectricSheep animation, with no border, so I got out of that and opened my screensaver settings (System > Preferences > Screensaver). I selected the ElectricSheep screensaver and clicked the Preview button and confirmed that it used the entire screen as a screensaver as well.

Your mileage may vary, of course, and if neither x11 or gl work you may want to try using the xv video driver.

[Updated to include some great news on the evolution-rss bug. -Peng]

The Ubuntu devs released the beta of Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” back on the first of the month (now available as a Release Candidate), and while I snagged the disk image pretty quickly it wasn’t until Friday a week ago that I was able to actually get a chance to fire up the LiveCD long enough to see how well it played with my system. I couldn’t find any major glitches in it other than a problem with my USB WiFi adapter, and I had already seen that people were having enough major issues with the combination that there was a request to change the status on the support for the adapter from some support to absolutely no support. Luckily I was already having enough connectivity issues with our Linksys WiFi router that I has already gone back to using the good, old-fashioned CAT 5 cable to connect to it.

After looking at a number of other items that are important to me I went to the page on the Ubuntu website about the 9.10 beta to check for any known issues that I needed to be aware of and decided it was an upgrade I could probably do safely. I ran command sudo do-release-upgrade -d with the Run Application (Alt-F2) tool, although you could also run it in the terminal, and waited the two hours plus while my system got upgraded. Your system may take the upgrade more quickly or more slowly than mine, but having done a clean installation for version 9.04 I decided I didn’t want to go through the hassle of having to reinstall every bloody app and tool I use this time around. I did notice a number of dbus errors during the upgrade and unfortunately I didn’t think to document what they were about. They may have had something to do with how long my upgrade took, but I hadn’t found any dbus issues connected with the upgrade so I have absolutely no clue what the errors should have told me.

Now that I’ve used and updating Karmic for just over a week I found some things that I want to point out, some good, some not so good.

Overall Thoughts

I kept seeing people say that the boot times for Ubuntu 9.10 are shorter and sure enough my boot time is shorter. Of course since the Ubuntu devs decided to switch from using Usplash for the initial boot splash to XSplash any Mac4Lin boot splashes would have been broken anyway (I never did get a Usplash working for Mac4Lin 1.0, much to may chagrin) but I have to say that I really do like the look of the new splash screens. The boot splash is a simple Ubuntu logo on a dark background, but I have to say the new XSplash is a thing of beauty. As you can see in a YouTube video posted on Softpedia’s article on the newly released Ubuntu 9.10 beta, it’s no longer a simple case of the Ubuntu logo and a progress bar. The Ubuntu logo is now suspended and lit by an overhead spotlight and the animated bar now scrolls up rather than going from left to right.

In addition, they’ve added the Ubuntu Software Center (USC) as a new tool for adding software to the usual collection of Synaptic and Add/Remove Software. When I first looked at it I thought, “So what? I can do the same thing with existing tools.” Except the UI for the USC makes it a lot handier than Add/Remove Software. You can either search for a specific app or browse through the library and when you find what you’re looking for you’re provided with a much nicer information screen complete with buttons to wither install the software as well as to go to the app’s website where you can get even more information. The information screen even lets you know the version that’s available, something that Add/Remove Software never had. Have software you installed from a Debian package (.deb)? The USC knows about the app (at least what the package told the system) and gives you a button to remove it. It may not always have the application’s icon, but that may be more of a limitation in the package itself. Yes, you can do all this via Synaptic, but not everyone’s all that comfortable with it.

The Good

For the most part I’m pretty happy with the upgrade. I won’t bore you with a ton of specifics or screenies (I’ll include a link to some screenshots I made at the end) but there are a few things that I noticed are definite improvements in the user experience for me. The first thing I noticed was a dialog that popped up on my first reboot after the upgrade was done. I knew my hard drives were getting a bit old in the tooth, but now I could see just how bad things are getting. I dismissed the dialog, but now when I boot up I get an icon in my notification area and when I click on it I get a helpful message. I can click on the message and get more information, and I know I need to replace that drive one of these days but now I know I need to do it sooner than later (picture). I can disable the message if I want, as I can for the warnings that I’m getting low on disk space on my partitions. Those warnings come up each boot, as well as when I’m working with videos and the available space gets too small. Yes, they can be a little annoying, but I haven’t decided to silence them just yet.

An even nicer improvement comes in the Update Manager. Now it lets you know the source for the particular updates, plus it flat-out gives you more information on the update, such as the version number. This is information that’s been missing from the Update Manager for as long as I’ve used Ubuntu.

Another small, yet a very nice set of improvements came in Evolution. The first is a better visual notification of new messages coming in. In the past when you fired up Evo you simply saw the folder names bold when you had unread messages, which is okay, unless you left some messages marked unread to follow-up on as I do. Now you’ll see that there’s a star on the folder that has brand new unread messages.

The other improvements come to those who use Evo as their RSS reader. Not only does Evo show the site icons for the folders with feeds where available (the other folders use the stock RSS feed icon), but on many sites you can now see the comments when you look at the article summaries. I’m not sure why they show up on some feeds and not others, but I have noticed that some feeds still show a count for the number of comments without actually showing the comments themselves. But it’s not all good news with Evo though.

There’s one more fan-damn-tastic improvement in Ubuntu 9.10 that I just discovered trying to get caught up on my RSS feeds: It’s a piece of baklava to enable using Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to force a new X session. Just go to System > Preferences > Keyboard > Layouts > Layout Options. Then select Key Sequence to kill the X server and check Control + Alt + Backspace. That’s all it takes. Yooouge thanks to Panji Nushantara for pointing it out on his blog.

The Not So Good

First off all let me warn you about a potential deal breaker in the updated Evolution. If you’re like me and you use Evo for your RSS/ATOM feed reader you won’t want to grab the new Evo. The reason for this warning is the fact that for some unknown (to me) reason the evolution-rss plugin no longer works and no feeds are updated (filed as Bug #460462 with fixed link). Luckily you can export your feed list (Edit > Preferences > News and Blogs > Export) so you can migrate your subscribed feeds to another app like Liferea and hopefully not miss too many days’ posts. There’s also an advantage that Liferea has over Evolution’s RSS plugin: You can sort and rename your feed folders to your heart’s content without borking the feed settings, something that you can’t say about evolution-rss. Updated 26 October 4:00 pm: Thanks to some very quick work by Andrew Starr-Bochicchio the evolution-rss bug is already fixed. There’s a .deb package on comment #6 on the bug, or you can wait for it to be available through the Update Manager as it’s already been accepted for distribution.

There are more upgrades in Ubuntu 9.10 that aren’t such good news, and one that sticks out like a sore thumb on my system is the GNOME web browser, Epiphany. As I mentioned back in December I finally got tired of the decisions Firefox devs were making and switched to using Epiphany for my web surfing. There were two flavors of Epiphany, one using the Mozilla Gecko rendering engine and one using Webkit, but the Webkit version didn’t quite seem ready for prime time so I was using the Gecko version. It was great that I had the option and it allowed me the option of using a Gecko-based browser without dealing with what I thought were boneheaded UI decisions from Firefox devs. Unfortunately the Epiphany devs have stopped supporting the Gecko engine and since with the release of Epiphany 2.26.3 Epiphany/Gecko no longer exists, Epiphany/Gecko is simply not available in Ubuntu 9.10. You may think that’s not a big problem, except there are some basic behavior issues that no longer available.

There’s finally a semi-usable spell checker in Epiphany now. I saw semi-usable because if I select a correct spelling the misspelled word is deleted but not replaced with the correct spelling (filed as Bug #460450).

The biggest issue is that you can no longer right-click a link and select Open in New Tab from the context menu. You also can’t middle-click a link on every site and open it in a new tab, especially when the links are on a Google site like Gmail.

Another serious usability issue for me is that the extensions that I used don’t seem to work quite properly anymore. The biggest issue for me is the fact that my beloved New Blank Tab extension no longer seems to be working. I’m hoping someone will come along and fix it because while the Tab Foreground extension works it doesn’t let me open a new tab and go straight to the location bar so I can type (or paste) in a URI. This is a rather big pain in the arse, although not quite as big as the no middle-click issue.

Wallpaper Tray is another app that has broken in the upgrade. For some reason it flat out won’t launch on booting for some reason. I ended up switching to Desktop Drapes, which is a nice app that I can put right on my upper panel, but doesn’t have the hover feature of showing the path and filename for the current wallpaper like Wallpaper Tray does. Hopefully we can get that fixed before too long.

On the Whole

One the whole there are some nice benefits to the upgrade, as long as you don’t depend on the features I mentioned above. As I finally finish this post we have a mere four days before Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” is released, now may be a great time to snag the ISO for the Release Candidate and try it out on your own system. Remember, try the LiveCD before you make the upgrade, and look at every app that you use now to make sure the upgrade won’t bring bad news as I found. make sure you also read the overview before you make the upgrade for more information on what’s coming in the upgrade as well as the known issues.

Check out all of my Ubuntu 9.10 screenshots in my Picasa Web Album.

Karmic Upgrade screenies

Way back when on an old blog of mine (it definitely wasn’t last year) the LA Dodgers swept a very important series and I referred to the naval tradition of submarines lashing a broom to their mast to signify that they have returned to port having defeated every enemy vessel they encountered. (I have to agree with a blogger who feels that a sub’s completion of their first sea trials isn’t the same thing defeating enemy vessels.) I wasn’t able to find a link to the old post of mine, but I did save the image I posted with that article so I could include it in this post. (Click to see the image full size, which will open in a new tab/window.)

While nobody died in the National League Division Series (NLCS) battles between the Dodgers and the Cardinals, the Dodgers the what probably nobody, including this writer, thought was possible, especially since the Cardinals so easily won the season series against the boys from the Ravine, regardless what stadium they played in. After taking both NLDS Game 1 and Game 2 at home, which wasn’t all that surprising, Dodgers skipper Joe Torre gave the ball to Vincente Padilla to start the game. Before the Red Birds could even come to bat Manny Ramirez plated Matt Kemp with an RBI double, and Mr. Walk-off, Andre Ethier, pretty much put the game away with a two-run jack to right field in the third. Only an RBI single by Albert Pujols in the 8th avoided the shutout, and a perfect game was avoided in the bottom of the first on a single by Ryan Ludwick. When all was said and done, the Dodgers won 5-1.

Why didn’t I post after the first two wins?

I didn’t blog the last two wins for two main reason. The first is that this blog is primarily a tech blog, and Dodgers baseball doesn’t really fit that classification, although I do post from time to time about what the Boys from Chavez Ravine do. But there’s also a very good reason I didn’t get to post about the wins, namely that I flat out didn’t have the time to write the posts. As I mentioned in passing twice before, I got an iriver E100 digital media player (DMP) as a belated birthday present from my mom and thanks to the wonderful open source app iriverter I am able to convert any video I can download to enjoy on my DMP. While I can enjoy some of the games on TBS, I end up missing some pretty sweet play so I either head over to the MLB.com Media Center page and use the Highlight links from the particular game or I go to the MLB.com Video Highlights page and catch the videos from there. The beauty of the Video Highlights page is that I am able to see not only highlights from a specific game, but also video content such as their FastCast of a day’s games, the Top 5 Plays from a specific day, as well as some content from the new MLB Network. On most occasions if I can see the video in my browser I can also snag the file in MP4 format and convert it to view on my E100, which makes a subway ride more enjoyable.

I had to say “on most occasions” because Friday I discovered a clip that I can see in my browser but for some unknown reason I’m unable to get it to download. If you saw the end of Game 2 of the NLDS, or at least heard about it, the Dodgers made an incredible comeback  with two outs in the bottom of the ninth to win the game. I was able to snag a video clip that includes Vin Scully on the Dodgers radio broadcast, as well as Mike Shannon on KTRS’s St. Louis radio broadcast and Dick Stockton on TBS, all calling the bottom of the ninth from Matt Holiday lost James Loney’s line drive in the lights all the way to Mark Loretta’s walk-off single. What I can’t seem to snag, even today, is the clip of just Scully calling the last five batters. I’d kill to be able to save that particular bit of multimedia to my hard drive, but for some reason the MP4 file isn’t coming up properly for saving off the MLB.com servers, so if anyone has a link that will help me snag this much desired MP4 please post it in the comments.

As it is, I was able to get 40 or so clips from the game, which took a good bit of time to download and then convert with iriverter. Game 1 of the NLDS only had a dozen clips I wanted to put on my E100, but last night’s game has another 40 clips (including postgame coverage) for me to see what I want to put on my DMP. Luckily I can snag the 38-second clip of Scully calling the final out and the Dodgers’ sweep of the 2009 NLDS.

What about the other teams still playing?

Yesterday’s NLDS Game 3 between the Rockies and Phillies was snowed out yesterday in Denver so it will have to be played tonight with the first pitch scheduled for 10:07 pm Eastern Time. That series is tied at a game a piece, but it won’t matter that much to the Dodgers who already know that there next game, Game 1 of the National League Championship Series (NLCS), will be on Thursday, with a start time to be announced. As with the NLDS, TBS will be carrying every game of the NLCS while the ALCS will head over to FOX. FOX will also be carrying the World Series when it starts on Wednesday, 28 October. You can see the entire postseason schedule on MLB.com.

Who would I like to see the Dodgers face in the NLCS? The Dodgers lost only four games out of 18 to the Rox, and against the Phillies they went 4-out-of-7, taking one series in May in Philly and splitting their series at home in June. Of course the Dodgers also met the Phillies in last year’s NLCS, with the Phillies beating the boys in Dodger Blue four games to one enroute to beating Tampa’s Rays four games to one to win the ‘08 World Series, and this past season doesn’t mean much of anything, let alone last year’s results, so I’m going to have to go with my gut on this one. I’m hoping for a Dodgers-Phillies NLCS, followed by a Freeway Series to start three days before All Hallow’s Eve. The rest of the country may not like an All-California Series, but I’d love to see the Dodgers beat the team that is so bad at geography that they doesn’t even know what city, let alone which county they play in (another item on my old blog that I’m not able to find archived to share).

[Updated Monday 5 October to include the time for the first game of the Dodgers/Cardinals series and provide a link to the MLB.com site for this year's postseason play. -Peng]

A week ago I had the pleasure of writing that the Los Angeles Dodgers had clinched their place in the postseason. For the past week Dodger fans around the world have waited for one more win by the boys in Dodger Blue or one more loss by the guys from the mountains to be able to celebrate Joe Torre’s boys being the National League West Champions for the second year in a row.

The game went way past my bedtime last night so one of the first things I did this morning was to grab my cell phone and get the results from last night. Dodgers 5, Rockies Zip.

Of course that’s not all the good news Dodgers fans get this morning, as they also have home field advantage through the National League Division Series. While we know the schedule starts Wednesday in Chavez Ravine against the Cardinals, we don’t have times yet nor which network is carrying the games.

We do know that TBS will carry the last game of the regular season with the Dodgers trying to beat the NL Wild Card team one more time before the postseason kicks off. The coverage will begin at 4 PM Eastern Time.

Update 5 October: The first game will be on Wednesday, 7 October at 9:37pm Eastern Time on TBS. You can get info on all of his year’s postseason games on Major League Baseball’s newly refreshed WorldSeries.com site. Dodger fans will also want to make sure you check out the latest Inside Dodgertown video on the Dodgers Media Network. If you haven’t been to the DMN lately there are some great videos that you’re missing.

Last year when the Dodgers clinched the NL West title on the road I posted a video of what has to be one of the favorite songs, although I see now that the video has been removed from YouTube. I found an “official” version of the video and fixed that post, and in honor of the Boys from Chavez Ravine I’m going to post it here as well because the song is so fitting on this last morning of the 2009 regular season.

I look forward to having three more rounds of good news to post as the Dodgers hopefully will go all the way to be not only the NL West champs, or even the National League champions, but the winners of the 2009 World Series.

Last year I finally got tired of the Firefox bloatware and made the switch to the GNOME project’s Epiphany web browser, although I kept the Fox around for those rare times that I simply couldn’t do in Epiphany, or at least couldn’t do that easily. One of the tasks that I kept Firefox for was downloading videos. While Epiphany does have a very nice extension for downloading videos it simply isn’t as robust as the Video DownloadHelper extension for the Fox. Not only does the Firefox extension let you prefer high quality YouTube videos and even pick which high quality vid you want to use if there are more than one available, it is also smart enough to use the video name from YouTube.

Disclaimer: This tutorial is solely intended to help you enjoy Flash videos when your system runs slowly enough to make you want to view it in a desktop video player like Totem. It is written purely for your own personal entertainment and not to help you download videos for the purpose of sharing them with others. Remember, if you find a video that you just have to share with someone you should send them the URI. That way the hosting web site gets to see how popular their video is.

My problem is that while I can enjoy videos in Epiphany the Flash plugin ends up making the video stutter, which can be a royal pain in the arse. This is especially annoying when I’m trying to enjoy highlight videos from Dodgers games so I tend to save those to my hard drive and simply fire them up in Totem. Unfortunately Epiphany’s extension doesn’t know how to snag videos from mlb.com, or the videos from my local CBS affiliate (I tend to snag video weather reports for my E100 so I can watch them when I’m away from my comp) so getting vids from either site sends me to Firefox. For some reason the Video DownloadHelper knows how to grab vids from both of those sites so until I can help port that info to the Epiphany extension I’ll have to turn to the Fox to help me watch them.

The problem comes when you try to download a video from these sites because there’s no descriptive name affiliated with the video’s filename, so even if you have that option selected for YouTube videos when you try to download the video you get what is shown on the right. (All images on this post will open in a new tab/window so you won’t keep having to use the Back button to get back to this post.) If you only want to snag a single vid it’s no problem but if you want to get at least a pair of vids you end up having to rename the vids yourself.

Today I found a way to get the name set for sites that don’t have a setting for knowing where the video name is located. The very first thing you will need to do, once you have the extension installed, is to enable the option in the preferences. If you have an icon visible simply right click the icon and select Preferences. Now go to Capture > Smart Naming and check the box for Enable Smart Naming.

Close out the Preferences window and select the name of the video as it’s shown on the webpage. Right click the selected text and select Smart naming > Define media title location. You’ll see a dialog pop up where you simply need to confirm that the text listed as the Value for this page is the same as the title you want to assign to the video. This is perfect for those times when you inadvertently select the entire text, and you need to add a letter or so to the beginning or end to the Value. Once you have it matching the text on the web page simply click on OK.

Now when you use the icon to select which video you want to save you get a much more informative filename.

The best part is that every time you visit the page the extension now knows where to look to get the video name, and if you look at multiple videos before deciding to grab one it’s a piece of cake to tell exactly which video you want.

Unfortunately this won’t work on all sites, as I found when I tried to get the latest weather forecast. The bottom line is that if you can’t select the text it won’t work since the function relies on having HTML code to look at rather than text with a Flash application as my local CBS affil uses.