I’ve been using KDE4 in Ubuntu, and I really like it – it’s slick, has everything I need, and it all seems to gel together pretty well. Yet, the power management is really starting to make me angry. I’ve turned all of it off, checked ps and other tools for any signs that it’s still [...]

I was having the hardest time getting various programs to echo the runtime of m2ts files in Linux, and it turns out someone wrote a parser for the files in the BDMV/PLAYLIST directory, which have all of this information. Get bdtools. I got Version 1.4. You can find it here. ./configure && make && sudo [...]

I have no idea why this package isn’t in the default community repositories. I highly recommend they add it. Use the following commands to add the repository and install the package: sudo zypper ar ftp://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/opensuse/repositories/home:/mkng:/science/openSUSE_11.1/ PARI sudo zypper in pari-gp

Calibre is about the best thing since sliced bread. It is able to convert basically any type of Ebook format into EPUB, which is what my Nook reads natively. It seamlessly syncs with the Nook as well, which is a huge plus, and all of this happens in Linux. I highly recommend this software. Just [...]

I converted an ebook from TXT to EPUB today using Calibre, and found that the italics (which in the TXT file are annotated /like this/) are not converted into the HTML equivalent.  I did the following to fix this: unzip ebook.epub -d tmpbook cd tmpbook perl -i.bak -pe ‘s/([\s-,.;\'?:]+)\/(.+?)\/([\s-,.;\'?:]+)/$1<i>$2<\/i>$3/sg;’ *html That will create.bak files just [...]

So, ConvertLit seems to be a good solution for those looking to convert LIT ebooks into EPUB (well, into HTML, but then into EPUB…).  Unfortunately, the developers seem to be unable to properly make a good source tarball for version 1.8.  Here’s what I did: Download Version 1.8 source from here. unzip clit18src.zip -d convertlit [...]

I’ve been using Kopete on my quest to convert to KDE, and I’ve been extremely annoyed by previous conversions showing up in my chat windows. The option to disable it didn’t seem to be anywhere, but I found a forum post that pointed me to the Plugins section of the configuration. Just disable the plugin [...]

So, recently, I installed Ubuntu karmic cleanly on my main desktop machine here at home, and I have really liked it. I even switched to KDE, and everything has been working better than it had been in GNOME. I tried setting up Skype the other day, and ran into an issue with the microphone. It [...]

I used to use lirc with mplayer to allow my Packard Bell crappy remote to work awesomely, but I have since lost that configuration and switched to smplayer, since it’s awesome.  Today, I figured out how to control smplayer using similar means.

I was having a bunch of trouble today importing my old MySQL amarok database into the new nightly version of amarok I installed.  The Amarok Wiki had a great section on how to convert a MySQL Amarok collection into an SQLlite one.  This was the key to importing my old 1.4 collection into the new [...]