debrass.net

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

For quite some time, I have been taking panorama pictures and I have mainly been posting them to my Picasa gallery.

But some of the pictures are quite large and you don’t really get the full experience of them on Picasa, so I created a page for my panorama pictures on the site.

You can find it here or via the menu, look for Panoramas

I love Gmail… I have been using Gmail since before it went public (thanks to a good old friend for the invite).

However, I often need to find an email fast, and often I forget to star emails, or I just can’t find it among my huge amounts of starred emails.

The basics for easy Gmail searching is using “from:PERSONS_NAME”, i.e. from:debrass, or using the plain email address, i.e. from:myfriend@hisdomain.com.

But, being able to use more search options is an advantage. Google’s own help found here already provides a wealth of helpful information.

Though the list is long, here are the most basic ones you need.
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I watch a lot of movies and in general VLC is one of my most used and favorite applications on both Windows, Linux / Ubuntu and OSX.

But, on Linux / Ubuntu when I open a new video is doesn’t open in the same VLC instance as it does in Windows or OSX, which can be extremely annoying.

I Googled and searched the VLC and Ubuntu forums, but didn’t really find anything, except a not so easy solution: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=692139

There must be an easier solution… and there is and way simpler….

1. Open VLC (Applications > Sound & Video > VLC Media Player)

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So, a good friend of mine told me that his ISP Stofa / StofaNet in Denmark has blocked off the The Pirate Bay (http://thepiratebay.org/)

Easy way to get around this is either using other tracker sites, or just just Hide My Ass, since StofaNet only blocked off the site itself, not the BitTorrent network itself or other torrent sites.

Truly a say day, when someone – no matter who – starts to censor the Internet….

I was trying to delete a remnant folder from trying to mount my work harddrive using NTFS-3G, but the folder it left behind in /media/System caused me to not to be able to re-mount the harddrive later on.

So, I tried to delete it, but got the first error “Permission Denied”, then I tried with SUDO, but even just when trying to change to directory, I got the error “SUDO: CD: Command not found”.. Now how come SUDO can’t find CD, a basic bash command. Don’t ask me, but here it the workaround.

While in the Terminal, type “SUDO SH”, this opens a new shell at administrator level and now you can access highlevel protected folders and delete them using normal bash commands.

I use rar-files pretty frequently, and I found that the built in Archive Manager in Ubuntu does not support rar-files (both creation and extraction) out of the box.

For the more experienced, here is the quick guide to make is work: Open a Terminal > Enter the command “sudo apt-get install rar unrar”

For the more inexperienced, here is a screenshot guide.

This would be the usual error message you receive when trying to extract a file.

When try to create a rar archive, you will also have noticed, that rar is not selectable from the archive options.

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Found a very nice wiki for Thinkpad users wanting to do the big switch to Linux. Okay, Ubuntu almost works like a charm, but there are still things that need fixing and other distros that need more support: ThinkWiki.com and here it the dedicated page for the T60

Preface:

So, now after having install Ubuntu 9.04 and seeing how great this release is, I still run into the issue, that some of my preferred apps are Windows only. Therefor I decided to setup a virtual machine running XP

When wanting to run VM’s (virtual machines) on Linux, there is not much other choice than VirtualBox. However, it is a good solid choice and open source…

How to install it in Ubuntu, well, that is quite simple: Go to the Application menu, select the last option “Add/Remove”, the simply search for VirtualBox, place the checkmark and click Apply .. Ubuntu does the rest and after completed installation you can find VirtualBox under Accessories.

Issue

I setup the virtualmachine with Windows XP, everything was running smooth and I updated XP with all the latest service packs and hotfixes, but filesharing was not working. Thereby meaning, even though I had entered the correct workgroup name, the VM was not seeing the other computer.

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So… with Ubuntu 9.04 out, I really wanted to make the switch-over. I already been running Ubuntu, the old Red Hat, Fedora Core, SuSE, Debian and various other distros in the past, but I really like Ubuntu.

I got hold of a IBM T60 ThinkPad Serial ATA Hard Drive Bay Adapter, so I could easily add a second harddrive in my laptop leaving the primary harddrive untouched and the partitions intact. Much easier, when the primary harddrive is my work-harddrive. Although, eventually, I would like to do the full switch-over, both for home use and work use, but this is going to take some time, as I have too many things I need do on a clean Windows XP or Vista system.

So, as the UltraBay adaptor would replace the cd-rom drive in the laptop and I didn’t want to make the whole installation process to complex, I swapped around the blank harddrive with my workharddrive, so I could easily install Ubuntu from CD. (I already downloaded the ISO and burnt it on a CD)

Swapped the harddrives, popped in the CD, booted and started installing. Easy as pie….within 20 minutes, I was up and running.

But.. there were a few issues.

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I tried Artisteer a fully wysiwyg template maker, not only for WordPress, but other CRM’s too, like Joomla.

The current theme, is made using Artisteer and only in 10 minutes. SUPER easy…

Check it out here: http://www.artisteer.com/