Facebook Chat in Pidgin

Do you like to chat on Facebook Chat but hate doing so inside a browser? Well there is now an alternative. You can now do so in Pidgin. (Available in Windows and Linux)

Facebook Chat in Pidgin

8 Browser Innovations Started by Opera

I found a great website that lists 8 technologies that Opera was the first to innovate before other browsers.

• Speed Dial
• Tabbed Browsing
• Sessions
• Pop-Up Blocking
• Full-page Zoom
• BitTorrent
• Delete Private Data
• Mouse Gestures

Source: 8 Browser Innovations Started By Opera

Ubuntu Sources List Generator

I have found a great replacement for http://www.ubuntu-nl.org/source-o-matic/.

The new and well sort of improved version is here: http://repogen.simplylinux.ch/. It works great! However, I must caution, that it does take a few minutes to go through the entire sources.list file it generates and manually add the gpg keys. It is NOT as simple as just typing sudo apt-get update

Scrobble Pandora Songs on Last.FM

There is an excellent Firefox extension that will scrobble songs you listen to on Pandora over to your Last.FM account. You can also 'love' a song and tag it too!

Scrobble Pandora

Opera 10 Beta 1 and Adobe Flash (64-bit)

Ok I just installed Ubuntu 9.04 (64-bit) edition on my computer and was trying to get Adobe Flash work on Opera 10 Beta 1. After spend a few countless hours searching the Internet I finally found a solution.

Download the 64-bit version of Adobe Flash here: Adobe Flash 10.0.22.87 Alpha

Once you have downloaded the file, extract to your home directory. Now we need to put the file in the appropriate location. The locations are /usr/lib/opera and /usr/lib/opera/plugins/

I found I had to do
sudo cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/opera/
and
sudo cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/opera/plugins/

Hopes this helps anyone that runs into this problem.

Source

RIAA Has Gone Too Far

Originally Jammie Thomas was sue for $9250 per song that she was "suspected" of sharing using the Internet P2P application "Kazza." Now after her retrial her new penalty is $80,000 per song. This brings her total up from $222,000 to $1.92 million. Talk about a fair re-trial.

What really makes this story sad is that it only took the jury but a few hours to deliberate. I thought the point of a retrial is to see if it could make things better, not worse. Aren't there laws against this?

Sources: Jammie Thomas Fined $1.92 Million for Sharing 24 Songs

Music Labels Win $2 Million in Web Case

Opera 10 Beta 1

Opera 10 Alpha is now officially Opera 10 Beta 1.

Here is a list of a few new things!

• Opera Turbo
• Automatic updates
• Crash logging
• Inline spelling checker
• 100/100 and pixel-perfect on the Acid3 test
• Significantly improved performance, particularly on CSS/HTML rendering Opera Mail HTML Compose support

List of full changes

Source

My But Is Sore

The most random "wrong IM" I have ever received.

Alternative for X-Win32

Need to use X-Win32 (XWin32) to connect to a remote server? But for some reason can't install it due to not having administrator privileges, or having other troubles with the software? Xmig is a great alternative.

From the website:
Xming is the leading free unlimited X Window Server for Microsoft Windows® (XP/2003/Vista). It is fully featured, small and fast, simple to install and because it is standalone native Microsoft Windows, easily transported portable as a Pocket PC X server (i.e. no slow Linux API emulation wrappers and mounts).

Xming is totally secure when used with SSH and optionally includes an enhanced PuTTY Link SSH client and a portable PuTTY replacement package. Xming can work completely independent of the Window's registry when used with Xming-portablePuTTY.

Interactive 3D graphics capability is provided compatible with OpenGL/GLX.

Xming is cross-compiled on Linux for Microsoft Windows (32-bit x86), using MinGW, mainly from the canonical X.Org source code with my patches applied. It is kept current and secure with frequent updates from X.Org, XKB, FreeType2, Pthreads-Win32, Mesa, PuTTY and Freedesktop Bugzilla.

When released Public Domain, Xming can be distributed and used without restriction.

Xming

Fox News Calls Mr. Rogers Evil

"Little did I know, Mr. Rogers was an evil man. By telling children they're special just for being who they are, he helped create this generation of worthless, lazy socialists..."Fox News should be renamed to Faux News. Mr. Rogers is a classic TV show.

read more | digg story

Ohio State University Students Against Semesters

Ohio State University students against the transition to semester system from there current system of quarters.

read more | digg story

TSA watching fliers far beyond metal detectors

"Any person who looks like an immigrant, you take for a terrorist," Ally said. "My community normally doesn't come forward, but it happens to my community all the time."

This is the kind of news that makes me sick. First off, the TSA has no right monitoring our behavior as we walk around an airport, purchase items, talk to friends or family, and then interrogate us because we make look different or may have friends that are "foreign."

In my eyes the TSA is a bunch of racists.

Source

Playstation 3 Media Server

I have been fussing around with Fuppes for as long as I can remember. It has worked great on transcoding most of my videos to my TV via my Playstation 3. I have been a supporter of the software and love it. However, one thing I do dread about it is reinstalling it trying to get it to do new formats and update it. Some of the times in the process I mess up a lot of package on my machine (Ubuntu) and get a few broken packages. However, this has all changed I have found a new program that has made this all the easier and without having to manually edit config files or use a web interface to edit the settings, and it transcodes more (or at least formats) that I couldn't get to work on Fuppes. It uses the ffmpeg and mplayer, so there is no need to install codecs to get this to work.

Playstation 3 Media Server (Java Upnp Media Server, dedicated to PS3)

This program works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It provides DLNA and most features Fuppes offers as well. One thing that I find very useful it the ability to change the quality of the video being sent to the PS3 without having to restart the program. It allows one to set which encoder is used and which one has priority. It also allows you to set encoder/decoders for music and images as well. Overall it worked within 2 minutes of compiling, my Playstation 3 detected it immediately, and I'm satisfied.

Current features
Ready to launch and play. No codec packs to install. No folder configuration and pre-parsing or this kind of annoying thing. All your folders are directly browsed by the PS3, there's an automatic refresh also.

• Real-time video transcoding via MEncoder
• DVD ISOs images / VIDEO_TS Folder transcoder
• OGG/FLAC/MPC/APE audio transcoding
• Thumbnail generation for Videos
• You can choose with a virtual folder system your audio/subtitle language on the PS3!
• All formats PS3 natively supports: MP3/JPG/PNG/GIF/TIFF, all kind of videos (AVI, MP4, TS, M2TS, MPEG) the ps3 is willing to play
• Display camera RAWs thumbnails (Canon / Nikon, etc.)
• ZIP/RAR files as browsable folders
• Support for pictures based feeds, such as Flickr and Picasaweb
• Internet TV / Web Radio support with VLC, MEncoder or MPlayer
• Podcasts audio/ Video feeds support
• Basic Xbox360 support

Windows/Linux Only:

• Direct streaming of DTS / DTS-HD core to the receiver
• Remux PS3 compatible H264/MPEG2 video and all audio tracks to AC3/DTS/LPCM in real time with tsMuxer
• FLAC 96kHz/24bits/5.1 support

Windows Only:

DVR-MS remuxer

Here is the Google Code page: ps3mediaserver

Google Chrome Scores 100/100 on Acid 3

Looks like Google Chrome scores a 100/100 however does NOT pass the test. The Google Chrome Browser still fails the linktest. This test was performed using version 2.0.167.0 (10471). After hearing the rumors that Google is getting close to releasing a linux/mac version, it looks like they might just pass the acid 3 before then.

Nintendo 64 Video Cable

I got out my Nintendo 64 the other day and tried to play the darn thing, but apparently over the years I lost the video cable for it. I have the games, one (1) controller, and the unit itself, however no video cable. I went to Gamestop to see if they have any video cables, and fortunately they did. They gave me one that looked like the video cable did for the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System). The one that comes in through the coaxial cable. I tried it on my Samsung HDTV however, it never picked up the signal from it. I returned it and exchanged it for a composite video cable, like the original one that comes with the Nintendo 64. I brought it home and this time it works. So I have theory that the coaxial cable converter doesn't work on new HDTVs, however, I've only tried it on my LN32A450 Samsung TV.

Compiz Complications

I run Ubuntu 8.10 with compiz installed and I have been having trouble getting the CompizConfig Settings Manager to actually take effect on anything. Everytime I went to System > Preference > Appearances > Visual Effects. And selected anything but "None" I would get the following error: The Composite extension is not available.

The way I fixed this was by removing the proprietary drivers for my ATI Radeon x800xl video card. I know use the default fglrx drivers. I also changed one thing in my xorg.conf (/etc/X11/xorg.conf). At the bottom of the file I changed

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "0"
EndSection

to

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection

And this fixed my problems. Hope this helps someone out there!

Opera Web Browser

I would highly recommend switching to the sophisticated web browser, Opera.

A few excellent features Opera offers are:

• Opera Link - Now Opera lets you synchronize every part of your life. Synch your Speed Dial, Bookmarks, Custom Searches, History and Notes between your work and home computer; take your bookmarks with you on your phone.
• Opera Mail - Opera browser offers an email client designed to optimize your daily email handling requirements. It's called Opera M2, and it organizes, indexes and sorts your messages so that you can spend more time doing the real work. Best of all, it's built right into your browser.
• Spead Dial - This feature allows you to set your nine most visited websites or favorites as a start page.
• Tab Browsing
• Fraud Protection
• Trash Can - This feature shows you a list of all tabs you have closed out of during a session, so you can go back to a specific one instead of cycling through all closed tabs.
• And Many More!

Discover Opera

EU says IE violates antitrust

Microsoft unfairly boosts market share of Internet Explorer by tying it to Windows, the European Commission has found in a preliminary conclusion delivered to Microsoft last week.

Looks like Internet Explorer just keeps getting less and less popular.

Source

Product Ideas for Google Mobile

"Whether you've got a great idea about Google Maps for Mobile or there's just one small issue Gmail for Mobile that bugs you, now's your chance to share. See what others have to say and vote up the ideas you like the most. We'll be checking in from time to time to see what you have to say, and will be giving updates on what we see in our Product Ideas Blog."

Ever have a product idea for Google, more specifically Google Mobile? Here's your chance to tell Google what you think!

Source

Avoid Scams

Never pay for any type of work at home website or any website or advertisement for a business that claims you can make an exponential amount of money.

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