Those who have had very long jiberish file extensions attached to the files downloaded from libsyn my be interested in this information. Recently libsyn added some extra information to their files to control how the downloads are handled.I found that the conflict is with “wget” which is used by many of the linux/unix podcast clients from what I understand.  I communicated with libsyn via email a few times and they were very helpful in trying to find a solution to the problem. The program I use is Bashpodder which of course uses wget. I have found it to be an amazing utility for downloading my list of many podcasts until recently. I am not interested in trying several different podcast clients. I just want Bashpodder to work again.

  I have been hearing about people having trouble with the intel GMA965 graphics card being blacklisted in gutsy gibbon 7.10 and not being able to get compiz to work.  This was very common in gutsy but now in the relese of hardy heron 8.04 the card has been removed from the blacklist.  I have this card in my toshiba laptop and it worked fine in gutsy as well as in hardy.  The key in gutsy was to install linux-backports-modules and xserver-xgl. This may also work in hardy heron as well but I have not needed to do this as mine is working fine with compiz right out of the box.

  For those of you who are still having trouble with compiz and the GMA965, go to a terminal and type

  I have heard a lot of people complaining about firefox 3 being the default installation in the latest release of Ubuntu. I have been happily using firefox 2 with all of my extensions still functioning as they had before the upgrade to Hardy Heron 8.04.  I concider myself a heavy firefox extension user with 10 MUST HAVE extensions and a few that I could live with or without.  With that many dependancies and firefox 3 being so far from it's official release, I have no choise but to keep using firefox 2.

  I have found that when I try to uninstall firefox 3 it will also uninstall liferea feed reader and songbird so I need to have both firefox 3 and firefox 2 installed together. Having both installed at the same time causes some conflicts, so I have found a way to have the two co-exist on my installation of hardy heron.

This article is for demonstration purposes only. If you decide to follow these instructions you should only do so on a network that you own.

There is one trick that will definately speed up your internet browsing in ubuntu, and not just firefox.

This trick should work with all versions of ubuntu. What you want to do is change your dns server to a faster one. I have tried opendns and it does work pretty good, but I think this one works better.

The first thing you want to do is change the dns settings in the network manager. Open up a terminal and type

   Here is a script to convert video avi files to dvd. I wrote this script to convert some videos that I downloaded from the internet into dvd format. As with other scripts I have written, I only write the video to an iso file so that I can test the final product before burning and somtimes wasting a dvd. If you disect this script you will find that it is very simillar to my other scripts.

   First the script makes temperary working directories for the video conversion to an mpeg2 format. Then it will split the audio and video into seperate files. I am still not sure why this is done but it is the procedure I found on a few different websites and it seems to do the job quite nicely.

  Last night I took the plunge into Hardy Heron. I was able to do the upgrade on my Toshiba laptop by issuing the command ' sudo update-manager -D'. This command checks to see if there is a development release. The update took a couple of hours to finish. Once it was done, I had the 2.6.24-16 kernel, firefox 3 [let the frustrations begin(more on that later)] and a whole bunch of little goodies that just make things so much better.

  I am trying very hard not to use windows but lately I was forced to. I am the proud owner of a laptop without a floppy drive, and no bios updatter for linux. I thought I would bite the bullet and install windows to update my bios. Not quite so easy.  My windows install cd did not recognize my hard drive and when I used the F6 option to install my SATA/RAID drivers from another source, windows could not see my usb drives iether.  I searched high and low and could not find a clear answer to my problem. I found several forum posts of people having the same problem as me and no solutions. Just a lot of people saying 'never mind'.

  I don't plan on blogging much about windows stuff but I am all about hacking and this is a hack/solution that I had to do to make something work. I will include a list of some of the struggles I had to go through later on in this article.

I have been playing with some better ways to execute my scripts that I use alot.

I have found a solution that works well for me and I hope you can make use of this too.  I have a couple of dozen scripts that I use and about half of them I use all of the time.  The first thing I did was made a bash script directory in my home folder.  I named it 'bash'.  Next I edited my home/<user>/.bashrc file and added these lines to the bottom of the file.

PATH=$PATH:~/bin    
export PATH

What this does is includes the directory you put here in the list of executables.

I have a dreambox satellite receiver and it records to a transport stream (TS) mpeg2 form. Since dvd's are also in mpeg2 format there is no need to transcode the TS files. I have put together a script that will do the job very quickly. I borrowed some code that I found in forums and on some websites. I also had a little help from the ubuntu forums to get some of the zenity options working correctly.

This script only requires that you have previously installed dvdauthor, mkisofs, and mencoder.  Some distrobutions may not already have these packages installed.

The TS2ISO script will also require that you have some extra room on your hard disk for the new iso file and also the temp files. Generally at least double the size of the original TS file.

When you run the script you will be asked what file you would like to convert.  Then you will be asked what you would like to name the output file.