Tag: open source

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ImageMagick thumbnailer scripts for blog

Hey there, I’d like to share my dirt-easy script for creating thumbnail in blog post. The script will scale any image to the width of 456pixels which I find acceptable by most blog theme (actually the limit is around 460-465 pixel, but better be safe).

Why I wrote yet another script for scaling images? because I find blogger.com and WordPress system of uploading images and photo annoys me, and I rather upload my pictures/photos on my own private server and create thumbnails on my own.

I licensed the download under WTFPL , don’t worry its a free software license.

Download : thumbnailer.sh

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Enable Network Printer Sharing with Ubuntu Linux computers

Having a shared printer within a computer network is a nice thing to have. Since all computers within the network can access a remote printer to print documents. Maintenance cost is much more cheaper and easier since you only need to service only a single printer within a network.

Here’s how to enable Printer sharing with Ubuntu (or other Linux based computers) through GNOME :

At the computer with the printer

Administer Printers Ubuntu
  • First at the Desktop, go to System->Administration->Printing. A dialog will appear
  • Go to Server Settings, and check the “Share published printers connected to this system” checkbox

    Administer Printers Ubuntu

  • You may, optionally select “Allow users to cancel any job”
  • Click Apply, and close the dialog

At the client computer(s)

Network Printer Sharing Ubuntu, using Samba

  • From the Desktop, go to System->Administration->Printing. A dialog will appear
  • Check “Show shared printers from other systems” checkbox. Click Apply
  • Repeat the first step, this time click “Refresh Printer Queues” button. You shall see the list of shared printer from the server computer
  • Repeat this on other computers on the network to share the printer

That is all to it! Now you can print documents across your computer network.

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OpenOffice- Howto Print Multiple Slides (Handout) in One page

There are times when you want to print multiple presentation slides in one page, especially when you are making handouts to give away to your audiences. Here’s how you can do that easily using OpenOffice.org Impress.

First click at the “Handouts” tab.

Printing Multiple slides on a single page in OpenOffice.org

Then you will see the slides arranged on a single page. Typical number of slides is usually between 4-6 on a single page. You can select layouts option to determined the number of slides.

OpenOffice Handouts

Alternatively, you can change the page layout to to Landspace to give it a “wider” feeling to your handouts. Just right click and select Page Layout.

OpenOffice Handouts

OpenOffice Handouts

Finally you can print your handouts by selecting File->Print, and clicking Options at the bottom of the Print Dialog. Select Handouts, and print the documents as usual.

How to print OpenOffice Handouts Slides

That’s all, hope it will help you in your daily works.

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FunPidgin – a fork of Pidgin Instant Messenger

I found out today that Pidgin project has been forked, using the name FunPidgin. In addition of the stock Pidgin features, FunPidgin offers :

  • “Text area manual sizing” a plugin by Artemy Kapitula that allows manual resizing of the entry area
  • An option to set the size of the buddy icons displayed in the chat window.
  • An option to let the window manager place new windows.
  • Two different ways of seeing that your buddies are typing.
  • An optional send button for Tablet PC users

I’m not going to elaborate the reason behind the fork as you can read it on the internet. But personally I think FunPidgin wouldn’t last long if they continue to make major changes from its parent project.

Currently FunPidgin is available from FunPidgin Sourceforge Project Website

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Bloat alarm : We need a another “Firefox” to Mozilla Firefox

Back few years ago, there are a bunch of dude released a lightweight browser named Phoenix (way back in 2001-2002) as an alternative to the current Mozilla browser release.

This lightweight browser which contains no more than bare component (Gecko) to enable web browsing was a major attraction by itself. Then they changed the name to Firebird and finally to Mozilla Firefox because of legal issues. Its not about the naming problem though, a rose by another name is still a rose.

Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox gain the fame of being a lean and mean web browser, as in its original vision. But then things started to change. As the user grew, they started to add features that make the browser become more complicated. Bugs and usability problem begins to rear its ugly head. One of the things people might notice is it began to eat up much of valueable resources. CPU usage starts to shoot up, memory leaks being the norm since 1.5.x release. It does not feel like a “lean and mean” browser anymore.

What matter most is not the bell and whistle, if people want that, they would just download Seamonkey, because why else it is being offered in the first place? Fix memory and CPU resource problem because it is so damn obvious it failed to act as lightweight browser there. We dont need all the bell and whistle, a “simple lightweight” browser would suffice.

Perhaps we need another “Firefox” to Mozilla Firefox, this time for real…

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FLV2MPEG4 : Convert FLV to MPEG4

Here is an easy way to convert Adobe Flash Video files (FLV) to MPEG-4 using a tool called flv2mpeg4.

  1. First you need to download flv2mpeg4 using svn from its project websites

    svn co https://vixynet.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/vixynet/trunk vixynet

    .

  2. Install ffmpeg, libavcodec-dev, libavformat-dev and libavutil-dev package
  3. read the docs and compile flv2mpeg4

You can convert flash video file to mpeg4 by executing :
flv2mpeg4 youtube.flv youtube.mpeg4

Alternatively you can install flv2mpeg4 from GetDeb.net website.