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Howdy folks! Been a loong time since I last posted isn’t it? Just been busy with work & travel (won’t bore you with the details, just check my personal blog). I’ve been looking forward to the upcoming openSUSE 11.2 version ( it’s no secret that I’m a fan of openSUSE), but the main problem for me was that I don’t like holding onto optical media, and have a 8gig USB flash disk, especially for these things.

I was catching up on some feeds yesterday, and this piece of news caught my eye -Amarok 2.1 released. Being a long time Amarok fan ( heck Amarok itself was catalyst to make me use my SUSE 10.0 use full) time - I read the article with great interest. Amarok 2 users would know that Amarok 2 series is a shadow of its old Amarok 1.4(“Amarok Classic” self) - and quite a few people still prefer Amarok classic to Amarok 2 - primararily because of Amarok’s missing support for visualizations, equalizer amongst others.

I’ve been using Dropbox pretty extensively ever since its private beta days and just love its simplicity and ease with which I can keep all my files in sync across multiple computers. Even more awesome is its simple web interface - just upload a file and boom, the file you uploaded gets sync’d across all your computers. This coupled with Transmission‘s ability to start downloading torrents automatically when a torrent file is available in a folder means you can start torrent downloads from anywhere, even if your computer is not accessible.

Ever wondered if there’s a quick and easy way to write an iso file to a CD-R/DVD-R ? Don’t want to open K3B or Brasero ? Here’s a handy way of writing the iso file. First, switch to root using su su Next, type cdrecord -scanbus You’ll get something like this: scsibus0:<br /> 0,0,0 0) 'TSSTcorp' 'DVD+-RW TS-L632H' 'D200' Removable CD-ROM<br /> 0,1,0 1) * Note the first 3 numbers corresponding to your CD/DVD writer.

Not many know of this, but as of KDE 4.2, Kwin, the window manager has a nifty little feature - it can grab videos of desktop much like a screencasting tool such as Camtasia. This functionality requires Kwin’s composition mode to be enabled (ie, you must be using Kwin’s desktop effects). Below video shows where and how you can enable the video recording feature. Note this video was recorded using KWin.

Well I was browsing through some Kannada sites the other day and all I got was big blocks. Turned out that Gentoo and Sabayon didn’t have support for displaying Kannada characters, though, I had no such problems with Hindi & Bengali characters [amongst others]. Changing the Character encoding in Firefox to Auto-detect or Unicode didn’t work either. After doing a bit of searching, found the solution. So open the terminal, switch to root user and type

Here’s a short tip: If Amarok 2.0 doesn’t add any songs to your playlist or collection, or the collection scan is getting hung at up 47% or 79% try installing mysql. Since Amarok 2 now makes use of mysql as its backend, it expects mysql to be installed(nope, mysql-client won’t do either). As a result, after scanning, it cannot add the songs to the collection database and the process just stops.

While going through some of KDE settings I found this simple way to enable Anti Aliasing for Fonts (also known as ClearType in Windows). This will definitely make your fonts more pleasing to look at. For this, just launch KDE settings - this is generally known as Configure Desktop in openSUSE or System Settings in Kubuntu. From there, Under Look & Feel, Click on Appearance. Navigate to Fonts, and under use Anti-Aliasing, choose Enabled from Dropdown box

Well recently I’d bought an external 750GB USB hard disk, as I was running out of space on my laptop. Now this drive requires an external power source, so I just cant lug it everywhere with my laptop in my room so I thought I’ll connect this to my other laptop, and share the drive (the other laptop is my office one, runs on Windows) and I could access this drive over WiFi.

PeerGuardian 2, is an awesome IP filtering software. Though its FOSS, it there isn’t a Linux port of it yet. But don’t worry, if you’re using KTorrent, you can make use of PeerGuardian’s filters. Let me show how you can do so. Launch KTorrent. Click on On Settings -> Configure KTorrent . Click on Plugins and ensure that IP FIlter is checked Now Click on Apply. Next on the sidebar, scroll down and click on IP Filter.