debrass.net

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 love Break.com, much better than other video clip sites, although not that many clips get posted, but damn they are funny. However in Firefox on Linux/Ubuntu is loads bloody slow. Mainly because of Flash issue, but what is Firefox could open more pipeline to a website??

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I like Ubuntu.. much better than XP, Vista and 7… it is much more clean OS. But, lets face it, I need it for everyday use, I do not need some features and I would like it to be a little faster.

So, how do we make this happen? I Google’d and found Ubuntu Hack – How to Make Ubuntu run Super Fast! and the tips are really good. However, I still need some of basic things there, like the network manager. I read the article, did a bit of research and came to the conslusion, that the following would be the best choices for me.

1. Disable Compiz

Yes, it is very nice, but do I really need a fancy cube to switch my desktops and flashy effects. No, not really, if I did, I would run Vista. (NOTE: I decided to keep Compiz anyway, just because it is nice to have some flashy effects)

2. Enable Concurrency

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I needed some data from my other harddrive in my laptop, my work harddrive, but the harddrive is NTFS formatted and this is something that again is not natively supported.

I Google’d and found that NTFS-3G offers the best NTFS support, both for read and write. However, I am not planning to do any writing to my work harddrive, since NTFS has always been an issue in Linux and one write might break the entire partition.

Looking at the NTFS-3G website, there was too many instructions for my taste, so I thought of the easiest way, just using features already available in Ubuntu.

Here is how to get it working….

1. Go to Add/Remove

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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