Steffen's Tech Blog

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...

You can use the Blogger Post Gadget for your iGoogle homepage. You can use HTML in the text box. If you want more rich text editing click “Save Draft” and you’ll get a link to edit the post in the full Blogger post editor.

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 ...

Two weeks ago I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex). The upgrade went nice and smoothly and I really like the new version (especially the improvments made in KDE). The only problem I realized afterwards was that the Skype audio settings wasn't working correctly by default. Some manual adjustments were necessary. After I have done these adjustments already several times (two PC's, GNOME and KDE), I thought it might make sense to write them down. Maybe these settings that worked for my PC's will be helpful somebody else. adjust the skype sound device options as shown in the following screenshot: adjust the Ubuntu audio settings (Volume control) according to the next 4 screenshots:

The newest version of my favorite Linux distribution ...

Following the instructions on KDE 4.1.1 Release News I updated to KDE 4.1.1 on my Kubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron PC. Some of the instructions were a little confusing: enable "Recommended Updates (backports)" in "Software Sources" --> as "backports" are also used to describe "Unsupported updates" (--> which is not recommended for a productive system), it must be a mistake There is no authentication key for the repository containing the updated packages deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu hardy main . This results in warnings when updating packages from this repository which leave some kind of uneasiness as using authentication keys seem an useful security measure. Besides this, the update worked well and I found now KDE 4.1.1 much more stable than KDE 4.0. In addition, most of the functionality that I used in the GNOME desktop is available. Furthermore  I like the new KDE look as well as some of its new applications (as alrea...