Mark's Notebook

The new video sharing websites like Youtube, Google Video have wealth information such as tutorials, but saving them to your hard drive can be a time consuming. While there are lots of tools for downloading videos from video sharing websites, clive is probably the most useful of them.

Forget the museum websites. Use flickr to find your favorite pieces of art. There are a few tricks to doing this:

MMS (My Media System) is a is an open source media center application for Linux. With MMS you can playback videos, brows digital photos, listen to music, or even get the local weather report. Best of all, you can run all this with a remote control.

mms running on a 22 inch monitor

Caveat: I do 95% of my Nordic Walking on dirt trails, so I have not extensively tested these modified poles on paved streets. What I have found it the little rubber feet do slip off on occasion when walking on paved roads, but are still quite usable.

Given the current state of the US economy, it's pretty hard to justify spending $100+ on a pair of Nordic Walking poles. Cross Country ski poles are nearly the same thing, and they usually cost about half as much. Fortunately, with a hack saw and a little adhesive you can convert Cross Country ski poles into Nordic Walking ones pretty easily.

One of the things Micro$oft actually did a nice job on was the file search capability that came with their file browser Windows Explorer. You could simply right click on any folder to search. As handy as this was, the same feature does not come with Ubuntu or Xubuntu. Sure there is the "find" command, but having a way to search using the GUI is handy too.

Fortunately there is an easy way to add this feature using a free Linux tool called Catfish. This article will go into how to install and configure Catfish, and integrate it's search capabilities into the Thunar file browser. When finished, you will be able to right click on a folder in Thunar and get an option to recursively search that folder.

UPDATE 05-30-08: The issue with Mousepad and similar applications not printing in Xubuntu has been fixed since Gutsy. So this post is no longer not needed by anyone with an recent version of Xubuntu. I'll leave it up just in case someone finds the technique useful in another OS.

Xubuntu is a fantastic OS, but it does have one persistent annoyance -- you can not print from Mousepad. That's kind of a problem if you are like me and always writing short little how to notes in Mousepad.

This was pretty nifty, and it worked on the first try on my home network where each computer has a static IP. Presumably, you already know about VLC -- a very cooperative media player that is available on Linux, Windoz and Mac.

I started by logging into one of my linux boxes over ssh and ran the following command:

vlc video.avi -I dummy --sout udp://XX.XX.XX.XX:8080 --loop

note you need to replace "XX.XX.XX.XX" with the IP address of the machine you want to receive the video

The Hauppauge PVR150 is an inexpensive analog TV capture card that works well in Linux. Of course there is no official Linux support from Hauppauge, but it's relatively easy to use the card nonetheless. If you are running a newer install of Linux (Kernal 2.6.22 or greater) you don't even need to bother with installing drivers since IVTV has been added to the Kernel!

Step 1:Installing ivtv-utils