Adobe Flash Player 10 for Linux 64-bit
Finally got around to downloading the Alpha of Adobe Flash Player 64-bit for Linux to try it out, and I have to say it feels good. My desktop box at home is no slouch, but clearly the old 32-bit wrapper and plugin combo was holding back Firefox badly – I notice it loads a little more snappily and heavy Flash-laden pages load much more smoothly and quickly.
Normally I wouldn’t endorse an Alpha to anyone but cutting-edge users, but I have to make an exception here. I’m going to keep using it until I come across a major show-stopper such as Firefox lockups or what-not.
If you’d like to try out the 64-bit plugin for yourself, here’s what you have to do.
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HowTo: Setup your Nokia N95 mobile phone as a Mobile Broadband Device via USB in Ubuntu Intrepid
As most of you are aware now, Ubuntu Intrepid sports a funky new Network Connections manager that allows you to easily and effortlessly setup new ethernet devices, VPN connections and as a boon for laptop users, Mobile Broadband. The idea behind Mobile Broadband is to take advantage of cheap 3G or HSDPA Broadband adapters so you can connect to the Internet while on the move.
Less widely known is that you don’t actually have to use these devices to get Mobile Broadband on the go. You can use your own 3G or HSDPA mobile phone if packet data is enabled on your phone plan. I have previously covered how to do this via Bluetooth and fiddling around with RFComm configuration and PPP chat scripts, but NONE of this is needed any longer under Ubuntu Intrepid.
HowTo: Create your own subtitles to display on video in Totem
Subtitles – a simple, but effective means of communication for speakers of non native languages and the hard-of-hearing. We see subtitles in DVD’s and on TV in various forms.
It would be good to utilise subtitles for a home video that you have encoded to give to your parents or grandparents, both of whom are a little hard-of-hearing, but it’s an effort to add subtitles to a video, encode it again and it will ultimately bother those people who don’t need to view the subtitles.
You don’t have to encode the subtitles as part of the physical video, however. Most media players, including Ubuntu’s Totem have the ability to overlay subtitles on top of the video being played back. This allows you to create your own custom subtitles and be able to modify them as required without any need to re-encode the video.
Mini-Review: The Fujitsu Dynadisq III 320GB USB Portable External HDD
Actually, I tell a lie – the full title for this product is the “Dynadisq III High Speed USB 2.0 Portable Storage & Backup Solution for Fujitsu 2.5″ SATA Disk Drives” (say that in one breath 5 times)!
Title aside, this is one of yet another series of pre-packaged drive & enclosure solutions being bandied about the market today. These solutions are gaining interest with a lot of consumers because they generally manage to undercut the combined cost of buying the same hard-drive and enclosure separately, so much in fact that many users who only need the drive, buy the solution package, rip out the drive and discard the case because in some cases (pun not intended), it can be cheaper this way.
Cost aside, what if you simply need to have a cost-effective external portable backup solution with minimal hassles? That immediately calls for a notebook hard-drive that can be powered by the USB data cable.
Whoops…
Made a configuration change to my DNS last night and inadvertantly made my site unavailable with a single typo and didn’t notice until lunchtime today! That’ll teach me for not testing my changes…
Anyway, it’s all good – back on the air. Sorry about that folks! 
HowTo: Fix strange font appearance in Vuze (Azureus)
For those of you who use the Vuze BitTorrent client (formerly known as Azureus), you may have come across this interesting quirk whereby most of the menus, tabs and other key texts within the client window change to an unintelligible font as follows:
This is caused by the client losing its language settings. You’re looking at the Armenian language. To fix this, simply:
- Go to the fifth menu (which is the Tools menu).
- Select Configuration Wizard from the menu and a window appears.
- Change the language to the language you prefer, eg: English, and all of a sudden all windows will suddenly appear correctly again.
- Click Cancel to close the window (there’s no need to go through the entire configuration wizard).
Problem solved!
HowTo: Get spell-check working in Evolution again after upgrading to Intrepid
I finally got around to installing the final release version of Ubuntu Intrepid on my main desktop with only minimal issues that were not show-stoppers. One in particular was that Evolution was now marking every single word I wrote as being a spelling error when there were no errors at all.
Luckily, this one is easily fixed.
- Go to Edit->Preferences, and the Preferences window appears.
- Now click on the Composer Preferences icon on the left and then click on the Spell Checking tab at the top. You will now see the available languages to do spell checking with. At least one of them will already be checked.
- The issue is that despite the option being checked, it’s not actually checked internally within Evolution. All you have to do is un-check your language and re-check it, then click Close which will re-write the preferences.
You might need to restart Evolution again (I needed to after re-installing SpamAssassin), but you will now find that Evolution is now correctly doing its spell checking again.
HowTo: Image your hard-drive for transfer or backup using dd
Imaging, also known as Ghosting in the Windows world, is the act of creating a sector-by-sector copy of a hard-drive and saving it to a file, or transferring it to another hard-drive. Such uses for imaging include:
- Backup to an image file
- Clone to another hard-drive (eg: building multiple identical workstations) either directly or via an image file
- Data recovery (it’s safer and easier to examine an image file than risk further damage to the hard-drive itself)
Linux has a neat little command that can do this for us called simply “dd”. It is completely filesystem independent, so you can backup any hard-drive regardless of whether it was Linux formatted, Mac formatted or Windows formatted. It copies the drive bit by bit, sector by sector, not file by file.
