Karmic Compiz Koala! Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop Effects
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Very glad to report the flicker is gone when I capture video! w00t!

HOW TO GET COMPIZ DESKTOP EFFECTS RUNNING IN UBUNTU:

1.) Make sure you have a 3-D driver enabled, if you use ATI or Nvidia go into System > Administration > Hardware Drivers to detect your graphic/video card and install the driver.

2.) Once that's done you need to install CompizConfig Settings Manager and some plugins. To do so open a terminal and enter in:

sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager compiz-fusion-plugins-extra compiz-fusion-plugins-main compiz-plugins emerald

Close the terminal when that's done.

3.) To enable Visual Effects go to System > Preferences > Appearance > Visual Effects and select Extra.

(It is not required, but I recommend rebooting at this point, especially if something isn't working yet)

4.) To select which effects to use, go into System > Preferences > CompizConfig Settings Manager and check the boxed for what you want to use, you can't just click everything, there would be incompatibilities if you did that. For the famous Desktop Cube, you have to enable Desktop Cube AND Cube Rotation as well as 3D Windows to get the usual desired effect. Selecting Cube Reflection and Deformation will give you the cylindrical shape instead of the cube.


Keyboard Shortcuts are available here:
http://wiki.compiz.org/CommonKeyboardShortcuts

Karmic Compiz Christmas with Snow Plugin for Ubuntu 9.10
Uploaded by WebThingy. - Videos of the latest science discoveries and tech.

I added the snow plugin for Compiz in Ubuntu 9.10 (64bit), then changed my background, skydome and caps for the desktop cube. I feel all festive now. woo hoo, nog!

No, I don't see that flicker on my screen, the screen capture program just has a few hiccups when I capture.

There is a perfectly good how-to for the snow plugin online HERE

And I have a how-to on installing and enabling compiz here

This example is specifically for Debian based distros (Debian, Ubuntu, gNewSense, etc.), however, if you install or already have curl installed on your distro, then the Twitter update command below (second one down) will work for you too.

Ok ready? Here goes...

Open a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and enter:

sudo apt-get install curl

Verify you want to install.

Then enter in:

curl -u user:pass -d status="put update in here, only commas and periods in here" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml

Note Of course in the command, replace user with your Twitter username, and replace pass with your Twitter password. In the quotes, put your status update. Do no use ! ? : ; or "" within those quotes in the command or it won't work.

Once you have curl installed, to make future updates you can just hit Alt F2 on the keyboard and check Run In Terminal and enter the command into the Run Application command line.

Useful? Meh. Interesting, Yes!

I'm sure by now you either noticed or heard about the Denial Of Service attack on Twitter. Well, since the fail whale wasn't even working I think Twitter should post the...



In case you missed what happened, here's an article that describes it well.

Recently I posted how to update your Twitter status via the command line in Linux, but now there is an even easier way!

In Ubuntu/Debian based distros, install curl in the terminal with the command:

sudo apt-get install curl

(for other distros find curl in your package manager and install it)

Then create a file, name it twitter (with no extension, no .txt or anything, just name it: twitter) and save it to your Desktop.

Paste the line below into it, modify the username and password strings to reflect your info:

curl --basic --user "username:password" --data-ascii "status=`echo $@|tr ' ' '+'`" "http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json"

Now using your root file manager (open terminal and enter: gksu nautilus) move the file into /usr/bin right click it, set permission to allow it to execute, save, done.

Now you can open the terminal and type in: twitter I am tweeting via the command line in Linux

Enter it, and you'll see a bunch of garble in the terminal, but look at your Twitter page, your message is there!

This makes it muuuuuuch easier to command line Twitter update!

Kipdola Twitter Sync (Kipdosync) is a beta Facebook app that works well and does what many have been searching for. It takes your status updates on Twitter and posts them to your Facebook Fan Page Wall! And no, you do NOT have to add #fb like other apps require. If that weren't enough, you can convert Twitter tags (@username) to Facebook tags, the ability to use inclusion & exclusion keyword and tweet-chaining!

To add it to your Fan Page click here, click the Add To Page link, choose your Fan Page (not your regular profile), then in your applications edit the settings to put in your Twitter username, and make sure you give the app permissions otherwise it won't work. Done!

I went and installed voice and video chat in Firefox the other day, and when it's done the browser restarts and it's as though nothing happened. I go to check and it tells me to install it just like it did the first time. Repeat process until hair loss ensues.

I can only speak for Firefox 3.6 on Windows 7 (not compatible w/ Ubuntu unfortunately), but after installing voice and video chat, go into:

Tools > Add-ons > Plugins then enable the Google Talk Plugin which for some reason is disabled upon install. After you enable it, go ahead and restart the browser then video chat should be working for you.

Linux Journal has a great bit about how to reset GNOME specific settings in Ubuntu when things go wrong.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/resetting-gnomes-settings-ubuntu

Basically, if you've been customizing and tweaking and somehow end up completely borking things this can undo all changes (like a nucelar option) and set it back to it's default state. This is just for GNOME settings, it won't help you repair damage you did to graphics drivers, x-server, etc. Just GNOME.

I'm a dual booter, Ubuntu 10.04 and Windows 7 (64 bit), and yesterday I was greeted with an irritating problem that was making me pull my hair out (I know, with Windows, huge shock right? :p )

When the computer was booting up Windows, I kept getting a message that my C drive needed to be checked for consistency, for no apparent reason. So the message states to press any key to skip the check or let it finish the countdown and the check will begin, well, after multiple attempts either way I can assure you neither happened, all I got was a countdown timer frozen at 1 second remaining.
I will not bore you with all the crap I tried to remedy the situation.

What did finally work for me was this hotfix from Microsoft.

Once that was applied, I still got the Chkdsk message one more time after I rebooted, but this time it didn't freeze, it completed the check, and booted up Windows as it should. All reboots after went without a hitch and the message was gone, all is well. (this lasted a week)

UPDATE:

Ok, the problem eventually came back, why I don't know, but this is how I ended up resolving it as the flag had not been cleared before it seems. To get rid of this issue, just do this:

Click on Start

Then in the Search programs and files box type cmd (do not press Enter)

When cmd appears in a list of results under Programs, right click it and select Run as Administrator. (unless you're already running as Administrator)

Now type fsutil dirty query c: (this tells you if the drive is flagged as dirty)

Then type chkntfs /x c: .

The X in that command will tell Windows not to check the C: drive when it next reboots. Once you reboot the computer manually, it shouldn't do a chkdsk scan, it should just go to the normal Windows login screen.

When Windows has completely finished loading, open another Command Prompt as Adminsitrator (like you did before) and you'll want to enter chkdsk c: /r

When asked if you want this to happen on the next boot of the system reply with Y. Now reboot again and what should happen is you'll be taken through all 5 stages of the chkdsk scan and if all goes well it will reset the flag from dirty to clean. I have a 750GB drive on my computer and it took a few hours to complete, so be patient, it will all depend on many variables, but it could take a very long time. At first it didn't seem like it was doing anything, I thought it had locked up but decided to give it time and sure enough it was fine and completed all 5 stages of the chkdsk scan.

Once the scan has completed and you're back and logged in to Windows again, open another Command Prompt and enter fsutil dirty query c: to make sure the drive now reads as clean when you query it.


Hopefully this can save someone some hair loss

In Unix, Linux and BSD renaming file extensions is easy. In Windows, it can be a bit trickier depending on what you're working with. If you need to rename a file extension in Windows but it won't let you, just get any ftp program (I use Filezilla and FireFTP) and open it up, navigate to the file you want to work with, and rename it. That easy.

I had an .img file I needed to rename as .iso to work in Virtualbox and Windows wasn't thrilled about this, so I popped open Filezilla, renamed the file extension, and all is well now.

I recently got sent a zip file for a project I was working on, I saved it to a thumb drive, and later extracted it and opened it up. As luck would have it, there were some files in there with insanely long names, invalid characters, and dozens of other no-no's that Windows 7 didn't care for. No matter what I tried, even the command line wouldn't delete all of them (that's a first)! I still had a couple remaining.
Then I remembered that Linux doesn't have the same issue with long file names or with the funky characters. Since I couldn't move the file off the thumb drive, I instead booted into Ubuntu with the thumb drive plugged in and was able to easily remove the files, and all was well.

So say you don't have a dual boot setup, just Windows, what then?

You can just install Linux on a thumb drive (I recommend Lubuntu for this as it's lightweight and easy to use), and when you start up the computer go into your boot options and choose to boot from the thumb drive. Once Lubuntu is loaded you can use the file manager to go onto other drives and delete files with bad/invalid names that you had trouble removing in Windows.

If you haven't tried Lubuntu, it's a great spin on Ubuntu but using LXDE, which is a lightweight desktop environment. I've been really happy with it so far in all my tests.

Anyway, just another couple of ways you can get rid of files that won't delete in Windows 7 if all else has failed you. Having a Linux distro on a thumb drive is never a bad idea as it can come in handy for a lot of things.