infotage.net

Compiz is really cool stuff but I’ve been struggling to find the best way to play video such that it can play well at actual size, maximized, and full screen. This proved to be more difficult than it should have been. It should be noted that this system has an nvidia geforce video [...]

Just follow the directions at Quinn’s Compiz Packages. Very impressive stuff.

I always disliked that the desktop version of Ubuntu would try and start PCMCIA services and report that they failed. I don’t have any PCMCIA services so I’d prefer it not waste the time. Ideally there should be a PCMCIA entry under in the Administration – Services section but for now the change [...]

I agree with some that have suggested that this feature should be built into Ubuntu as it has been integrated into KDE. On Windows systems I always find myself installing PDFCreator to get the same functionality. I don’t actually need paper copies very often and by printing to PDF there is always a [...]

A lot of people are concerned about web cookies, identifying information set by websites and left on a person’s computer. Unfortunately many websites will simply refuse to work if cookies are blocked leading people to have to have a list of sites to allow cookies for, often defeating the purpose of protecting privacy while [...]

I added the following to /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://mirror.noreply.org/pub/tor experimental-0.1.1.x-breezy main
More details can be found on the tor wiki page TorOnDebian.

I’ve been needing a new digital camera for a while and have been checking into the market every now and then. So the camera that has some appeal to me is the Canon PowerShow A630 which has a retail price of $300 (about as much as I’d want to pay for a camera). [...]

So when you run Ubuntu’s Update Manager in the lower left there’s a triangle next to “Show details”. When you click on that it will show a panel with the changes in the package to be updated, and can also show a description of the package (presumably so you can learn what a package [...]

I wanted to get ferret running for a ruby on rails project. It had a few dependencies that were needed to get it working with cferret (the fast c port of parts of lucene).

This has caused me problems for sometime as the gaim-silc-plugin is not available in Ubuntu (or Debian). Finally I found a way to get it to work

These extensions will speed up Firefox by blocking ads and flash content and by tweaking internal Firefox settings.

While investigating personal finance software for GNU/Linux in general and Ubuntu in particular I installed the demo version of the commercial software Moneydance.

I’ve had to get java applets working in Firefox when using Ubuntu a couple of times recently; it’s easy to do but worth noting.

A basic yet essential skill to have when using Ubuntu is how to install packages. Here are a couple of ways to do this.