Download videos from various sites

I have found two tools that I use to capture/download content from video sites, i.e. Google Video.

The first is clive

sudo aptitude install clive

Super easy to use. Find your movie, copy the URL that you see in your browser, and just run

clive your-copied-URL

in the terminal. Easier than breathing.

The other tool is good old mplayer.

sudo aptitude install mplayer

Several sites serve contents via mms-streams. In my browser, I wait for the movie or TV program to start, then I copy the mms-adress. I find the adress by pressing the small arrow in the lower right corner and choosing "copy".

Mplayer uses this syntax:

mplayer -dumpstream mms://the-mms-adress-you found -dumpfile yourfile.wmv

Also very easy.

BTW! The videos you view in your Firefox browser, gets saved to your /tmp folder. You can just go there and fetch them for later use!
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Rescue and restore damaged photo files from camera

I found this great tool for recovery of damaged files when my D300 turned some nice shots of my kids into an unreadable mess.

sudo aptitude install testdisk

It comes with its own tool for memory cards. Run it via the terminal:

sudo photorec

It is frightening to see what is recoverable!

Link to TestDisk and PhotoRec: http://www.cgsecurity.org/

Remove ATI's proprietary drivers

I've installed Ubuntu 9.04 on my beefed-up Compaq Deskpro EN. I have a Hauppauge TV card in it, and also a ATI card to connect a monitor. My LCD-TV has a monitor connection, so I can use a standard cable to connect it to the TV.

After installing Ubuntu 9.04, everything worked fine (of course, it's Linux after all!). Knowing that I have the ATI card, I thought I would try to configure it. I messed around and I think I also installed some ATI-stuff from the Add/Remove-menu.

Anyways - when restaring the computer the next day, it froze when X started. In order to solve this, I used the recovery/safe-boot option, and booted into a root command line session.

Being logged in as root, I didn't have to use "sudo". So, I just removed the ATI driver like this:

aptitude remove xorg-driver-fglrx

Aptitude suggested a solution, and I went for it (fingers crossed).

Rebooting resurrected my X-session and all is now well.

Lesson learned!

Some notes on SSH

I finally got SSH to work on my home network. Not too difficult - it is just that I have not gotten around to it before.

I have fixed the IP-addresses on my home computers in my router. That makes it easer for me. Then I made sure that both PCs had SSH installed:

sudo aptitude install openssh-client openssh-server

In the terminal, I could log into one machine (here 192.168.0.187) from the other

ssh adder1972@192.168.0.187

I just answered yes to any questions that popped up. When logged in through SSH, it is just like using the terminal window on the other computer. Note that the other computer only needs to be on. There is no need to log into it on the machine itself.

SSH through Nautlius:

A neat trick is to use Nautilus to browse your files. Just enter:

sftp://adder1972@192.168.0.187/home/adder1972/

in the location bar. You will need to authenticate with your password. You can even make a shortcut to your remote machine in Nautilus. Very nice.

Scrolling on the Thinkpad X60 in Ubuntu 8.10

Ubuntu 8.10 needs modifications in it's HAL-settings instead of in the xorg.conf as we used to do. Now you need to create a new file called /etc/hal/fdi/policy/mouse-wheel.fdi with the following contents.

The link brings you to the great blog by Phil Sung. Be sure to check out the rest of Phil's blog as well.