Fix Thumbnails in Nautilus with Ffmpegthumbnailer

I had an issue with video thumbnails not created with ffmpegthumbnailer.
Luckily there is a fix :
Create following script :
#!/bin/bash

VIDEO_EXTENSIONS="video@flv video@webm video@mkv video@mp4 video@mpeg \
video@avi video@ogg video@quicktime video@x-avi video@x-flv video@x-mp4 \
video@x-mpeg video@x-webm video@x-mkv application@x-extension-webm \
video@x-matroska video@x-ms-wmv video@x-msvideo video@x-msvideo@avi \
video@x-theora@ogg video@x-theora@ogv video@x-ms-asf video@x-m4v"

THUMBNAIL_COMMAND="/usr/bin/ffmpegthumbnailer -s %s -i %i -o %o -c png -f -t 10"

for i in $VIDEO_EXTENSIONS; do
gconftool-2 -s "/desktop/gnome/thumbnailers/$i/command" -t string "$THUMBNAIL_COMMAND"
gconftool-2 -s "/desktop/gnome/thumbnailers/$i/enable" -t boolean 'true'
done

Delete the failed thumbnail images with:
rm -rf ~/.thumnails/fail/
Open up gconf-editor and take a look at the setting under /desktop/gnome/thumbnailers
After that as root :
killall nautilus

See : https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=804537

VMware Player and 2.6.36 Liquorix Kernel

VMwareplayer is a freeware virtualization software package from VMware.
I downloaded their VMware-Player-3.1.3-324285.x86_64.bundle and installed it :
chmod +x VMware-Player-3.1.3-324285.x86_64.bundle
./ VMware-Player-3.1.3-324285.x86_64.bundle ( as root ). No problems, but when starting for the first time I got this error :

After some Googling failed to compile module vmmon patch vmware player I found the solution at this page :https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/VMware : For 2.6.36 kernel and VMware 7.x.x, there's a script to patch the vmmon .
To be sure I first uninstalled VMware Player :
vmware-installer --uninstall-product vmware-player ( as root ) and installed again.
Then before running for the first time I followed the instructions at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/VMware  :
wget http://files.archlinux.org.il/vmmon_fix_2.6.36.sh
chmod +x vmmon_fix_2.6.36.sh
./vmmon_fix_2.6.36.sh ( as root )

After this VMware Player will run without showing any error ....

To check your version : vmware-installer -l

Product Name              Product Version
================= ====================
vmware-player             3.1.3.324285

What’s Next for Delicious?

Yahoo’s popular social bookmarking service Delicious was believed earlier this week to have its days numbered after the Delicious logo appeared under the mysterious “Sunset” portion of a leaked Yahoo internal presentation slide.
The Delicious blog post was a response to the leaked news and goes on to say that Yahoo is now discussing options for Delicious with a number of different companies.

A list of alternatives is available, which misses one still young project.

Body Browser: Google Maps of the Human Anatomy

Google’s new beta program called Body Browser,  allows users to navigate different parts of the body, both internal and external including the veins, cartilage and muscles.
Body Browser uses WebGL , which is currently under development, and is supported in the latest builds of several browsers. WebGL is supported in Firefox/4.0b1 ( enable WebGL: type about:config into the address bar, search for webgl, and double-click webgl.enabled_for_all_sites to set it to true. ) and Chromium ( Chromium must be launched from the command line in order to enable WebGL  /usr/bin/chromium-browser --enable-webgl ).

Shutter on Debian Squeeze

Shutter is a feature-rich screenshot program. You can take a screenshot of a specific area, window, your whole screen, or even of a website – apply different effects to it, draw on it to highlight points, and then upload to an image hosting site, all within one window.It's in the Debian repositories , but it is buggy !
The one from their site/PPA works fine. You first need to install xulrunner from experimental and gnome-web-photo from Lucid ( you will get a warning about node gettext domain not understood below schema , but that won't spoil the fun ). Now you can download shutter_0.86.4~ppa4_all.deb from this page .

Update Apr 17 2011 : xulrunner-1.9.2 no longer available from Debian, use this package instead : http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/amd64/xulrunner-1.9.2/download

Backup and Synchronize your Bookmarks with Dropbox

Dropbox is a great application for keeping your bookmarks of iceweasel ( or firefox ) at a safe spot.
Type in your URL bar about:config and search for browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML . Doubleclick it so that the Value will become true. Now close iceweasel ( firefox ) and go to your profile folder ( check ~/.mozilla/firefox ). The profile folder xxxxxxxx.default  is the profile folder name for the default profile, where xxxxxxxx represents a random string of characters. There you will find a file bookmarks.html. Move this file to your Dropbox folder and create a softlink back to your profile folder. Everytime iceweasel ( firefox ) is closed the most recent bookmarks.html will be written to your Dropbox folder...

Fractal Backgrounds

Blatte's Backgrounds, a collection of original fractal images free for use as computer backgrounds.

Error: --enable-application=APP was not Specified and is Required

I tried to compile firefox 3.6.13 ( download source from ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.6.13/source/ ) according to a former post . I got this error  --enable-application=APP was not specified and is required. After some Googling and looking at this page I added these two lines to my  .mozconfig :
ac_add_options --enable-application=browser
mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=browser

It will look like this :
.$topsrcdir/browser/config/mozconfig
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/ff-release
ac_add_options --disable-debug
ac_add_options --disable-tests
ac_add_options --enable-optimize
ac_add_options --enable-official-branding
ac_add_options --enable-system-cairo
ac_add_options --enable-application=browser
mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=browser

After that firefox built fine...

Install Google Earth 6 (beta)

Download from http://www.google.com/earth/index.html .
chmod +x GoogleEarthLinux.bin
./GoogleEarthLinux.bin 
Verifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing Google Earth for GNU/Linux 6.0.0.1735..............................................................
setup.data/setup.xml:1: parser error : Document is empty
^
setup.data/setup.xml:1: parser error : Start tag expected, '<' not found
^
Couldn't load 'setup.data/setup.xml'

./GoogleEarthLinux.bin --target /tmp/ge  (extract to /tmp/ge )
You will see same error as above ! Just do :
cd /tmp/ge/setup.data/bin/Linux/x86/  ( both 32 and 64 bit )
mv setup.gtk setup.gtk2
cd /tmp/ge
./setup.sh
Now installation will start....
If you get exec: 50: ./googleearth-bin: not found when trying to start Google Earth 6 you need to :
#apt-get install lsb-core

SMPlayer and Vdpau

SMPlayer is a Qt Mplayer front-end for MPlayer , a free and open source media player.
I always got this error when trying to play a videofile with vdpau  as output driver :

This post suggest to to get rid of the screenshot option in Options>Preferences>General>General Tab. That works for me, but another way I found is to Disable video filters when using vdpau in Options>Preferences>General>Video Tab.

Graphical Key Manager for APT

Package: gui-apt-key provides an easy to use interface to maintain digital keys for APT. They are required to authenticate Debian archives and prevent malicious packages to creep in. .

Failed to Open VDPAU Backend libvdpau_nvidia.so

Vdpau ( Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix ) allows video programs to offload portions of the video decoding process and video post-processing to the GPU video-hardware. It was originally designed by NVIDIA for its GeForce-8-series and laterGPU hardware.
Whenever I tried to play videos with gnome mplayer using vdpau as the video output, I get this error :
“Failed to open VDPAU backend libvdpau_nvidia.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory."
I was sure of its presence, because a locate libvdpau_nvidia.so gave :


/usr/lib/vdpau/libvdpau_nvidia.so.1
/usr/lib/vdpau/libvdpau_nvidia.so.260.19.21
/usr/lib32/libvdpau_nvidia.so
/usr/lib32/vdpau/libvdpau_nvidia.so.1
/usr/lib32/vdpau/libvdpau_nvidia.so.260.19.21

A solution I found after Googling :
#ln -s /usr/lib/vdpau/libvdpau_nvidia.so.1 /usr/lib/libvdpau_nvidia.so

Links :
http://slinkysoftware.com/blog/?p=159
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=54089

Note-Taking with Memonic

Memonic is a free, web based note-taking software. It keeps more than just links. You can save web content and use it on any computer or mobile device. At any time you can edit your items by adding or removing content.

Their Web Clipper is the most efficient way to capture content of webpages. After you install their Add-on or Bookmarklet for your browser, go to any web page. To start capturing content just click on the Memonic link or icon at the top of your browser. This will activate the Web Clipper.

Some features :

• Post to Twitter and Facebook
• One click Word & Open Office integration
• Embed your notes in your blog
• Share your sets with a tiny URL

Noscript users : How to configure NoScript Firefox Plugin for Memonic