Steffen's Tech Blog

Yesterday I updated to the new Ubuntu 9.10 . The update was as usual very smoothly (I accepted the default values when ask something). After restarting, the following error message appeared: Starting Google Desktop manually via the application menu did work. Still, I had to reinstall Google Desktop  via Synaptic in order to avoid this error message during startup. The next message I got was: I clicked on "Run this action now", followed the instructions and the missing language components got installed. I used the following language settings: Afterwards I enabled the third party repositories again (in "Software Sources"): deb http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/ stable non-free deb http://linux.getdropbox.com/ubuntu karmic main deb-src http://linux.getdropbox.com/ubuntu karmic/ deb http://packages.medibuntu.org/ karmic free non-free deb-src http://packages.medibuntu.org/ karmic free non-free deb http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/pculture.org/miro

After I decided to scrap my more than 4 years old laptop, because it repeatedly failed after working some minutes after booting (when it fails, nothing worked usually any more than the mouse movement, sometimes even the screen display starts to blur; even booting from Live-CDs Ubuntu 8.10, etc. showed the same effect), I was looking for a secure way to delete all data. I settled with: shred -vfz -n 10 /dev/hda" from stackoverflow.com , I had to use a very small Linux distribution ( DSL ), that was running completely in the RAM in order to be able to start the shred command (with other Live-CD's the laptop was failing already before I was able to start the command via a shell). Update: This command was running nearly one week. At the end I tried to verify the success by removing the Live-CD and start to boot again. To my surprise, Ubuntu was still booting. I am still not sure, how to explain this. Anyway, I decided to remove the HD and destroy it mechanically. That shoul

As my 500GB Time Capsule has reached the limits (my Macbook and the iMac of my wife used it as backup destination for Time Machine ), I decided to buy another backup drive and settled with the Western Digital WDH1NC10000E My Book World Edition 1TB NAS external drive. The main advantage (besides the price: I bought it fo r EUR 146,95 (incl. VAT and free transportation) for me was that I could easily connect it to a free Ethernet port of my Time Capsule - at least that was what I did expected. But after I connected the My Book to my network as discribed in the My Book manual, I had to discover that although it was available in the finder and I could manually copy files to it, it wasn't available in Time Machine as a back up destination. Furtunately obvioulsly others experienced this problem before and after some googling I came to the solution described in the post "Time Machine backups on network shares in Leopard" from Florian Kruse. Following the steps described the

I just followed the network upgrade instructions for Ubuntu Desktops (Recommended) and accepted the default values for the questions I was asked by the update tool (e.g. disable the proprietary display driver and use the default open source driver instead). Everything went smoothly. Afterwards I enabled the third party repositories again: http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/ stable non-free http://linux.getdropbox.com/ubuntu jaunty main http://packages.medibuntu.org/ jaunty free non-free The dropbox demon wasn't running, I had to install it again with dropbox start -i I realized that my backup python script using rsync didn't work any more, so that I had to install it again with: ~/Documents/Programming/Python_scripts/backup_daily$ sudo python setup.py install Afterwards, I could enjoy the improvements and new features of Ubuntu 9.04

I tried Dropbox - a cool file-synchronization service for Windows, Mac, Linux and the Web - after hearing about it on the Macworld Video Podcast Episode from Jason Snell from Feb 13, 2009 and loved it since. Dropbox allows you to sync (and - if you want share) up to 2GB of your files and folders automatically (and for free!) simply by dragging and dropping them into the Dropbox folder that will be created by the application (by default under your home directory). If you need more space you can buy 50GB of storage for currently US$99/year. I'm impressed how easy and fast the web-based synchronization works and was amazed that it works cross-platform - even an Ubuntu repository is available. I use it now to synchronize a few files I often need on my Ubuntu desktop, my macbook and my wife's iMac. If it works as reliable as it has done in the first days I am using it and if there will be a more cheaper storage plan version (e.g. 25GB for US$49/year), I might use it even to back

In the last months I have spent some time trying out different GUI toolkits for Python that are cross-platform (Linux, Mac OS X and Windows). I settled with PyQt . It combines Nokia's Qt cross-platform application framework with Python so you get all the power of Qt with the simplicity of Python. Other Desktop GUI frameworks I have tried are: the Tk GUI development library included in most Python distributions wxpython a blending of the wxWidgets C++ class library with Python PyGTK to use the GTK+ library Others (such as .NET using IronPython ) are not running equally good on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows as they favour Windows. From the frameworks above, PyQt  seemed the one with the most active development, the most easy usage and the best documentation. Like Qt, PyQt V4 (its newest version) is available under a variety of licenses including GNU GPL (V2 and V3; today Qt Software announced that Qt V4.5 will also be available under LGPL). If you want to write commercial applicat

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Did you ever want to download Web videos from sites such as YouTube or others (such as http://www.vidohe.com/sites.php )? Firefox 3.0 together with the free Firefox extension DownloadHelper makes this very easy (see the DownloadHelper homepage for more details). DownloadHelper even provides a Video Conversion feature to allow background conversion of the downloaded video to the format that you like (e.g. from FLV to a format that can be used by iTunes e.g. to load on your iPod or iPhone). This feature relies on FFMPEG available on your system (for Linux or Mac), which can lead to conversion failures as the version of FFMPEG may not have been compiled with the features required by the chosen conversion parameters. You can therefore recompile FFMPEG by yourself with the required features. Note: With Ubuntu 9.10 - the Karmic Koala - there is no need to recompile FFMEG. It just works fine. As an alternative, you can use an external application such as MPEG Streamclip video converte