DTV released as Democracy (Linux Preview)

The long awaited, open-source Democracy platform is a project of the Participatory Culture Foundation allowing you to subscribe to video RSS feeds (including podcasts, video blogs, and BitTorrent feeds), watch fullscreen and share with friends.

So I checked out Democracy and was impressed at the layout and that I was actually able to download content right away from the predefined feeds. I started watching a recent rocketboom without a hitch. That isn’t to say that there are no bugs. Full screen works, but with multiple monitors it scretches across both screen thus not supporting xinerama. The channel menu does not work for me and when I went to the channel guide and clicked on “more…” for a channel it bombs out. I later found out that I needed to make sure you add the mozilla prefs as specified on the DemoTV wiki. There are alot of options for IPTV and I’m sure it will only grow. Democracy allows one to view all of these options easily and subscribing to feeds is straight forward and the interface seems intuative. It looks very promising and I look forward to a stable build soon. See screenshots inside….

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mtink: Status Monitor for EPSON inkjet printers

mtinkI found a great little print monitor for linux called mtink. It works great for my Epson Stylus Photo 825 printer when hooked up via usb and I can reset, clean, and nozzle check the printer all from this little program. If using my particular printer you will need to select the Stylus Photo printer as the option because the 825 is not specifically handled, but most other models are.

Windows XP Network Problem Solver

I have a client who has 3 Windows XP home computers. They were sharing Quickbooks Pro across these three by using one computer as a “server”. Well this “server” ended up getting multiple trojans, viruses and spyware installed onto it making it non accessible from the other 2 machines. We ended up working a few hours off and on each day for the past week trying to get this thing back on-line. We used HP’s recovery partion, XP’s restore point, and many other winsock and network reset utilities to no-avail. It wasn’t until I broke down and took the computer home did I stumble upon the Windows XP Network Problem Solver page by Hans-Georg Michna tht I was able to crack this problem. This computer was having the infamous “Logon failure: The user has not been granted the requested logon type at this computer.” message when connecting from another PC. It wasn’t until I followed the instructions of the aformentioned page did I fix this problem. Here is the code (note: you must first download the “Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit” to use the ntrights utility. See the link above for instructions)

net user guest /active:yes
ntrights +r SeNetworkLogonRight -u Guest
ntrights -r SeDenyNetworkLogonRight -u Guest

So simple and intuitive right? It had to be done because XP Home as limitations on networking built in that XP Pro does not. The moral of this story has two parts: 1) Always use XP pro in a networked, business, or home office environment and 2) never do work for a client who is having file sharing and networking issues in XP Home MAKE them upgrade or tell them to call someone else!

Sick of all the ads on on websites?

1) Click on the Get Firefox button on the top right.

2) Then get the adblock extension at http://adblock.mozdev.org/dev.html

3) Shutdown and reopen firefox

3) Download this filter list http://www.spuler.us/extensions/adblock.txt

4) Goto Tools->Adblock->Preferences menu item

5) Click on the Adblock Options button and select Import Filters…

6) Find the adblock.txt file you just downloaded and select Open

You should have less ads already even on my page! Now you can right click on an ad and select Adblock Image or Adblock iFrame to get rid of an ad. Now your surfing the web ad free!

VueScan 8.3.05

All I can say is wow. The latest VueScan takes advantage of GTK2 on linux and is an awesome app (also runs on Microsoft Windows and Mac OSX). It makes scanning as easy or advanced as you would like and helps turn old pictures and faded shots into photos like they had just been printed. I had been using the trial version for some time and decided to step up to the Pro version to take advantage of it’s profiling capabilities. It’s a bargain at $49.95 for Standard and $89.95 for Pro and works great on my Epson Perfection 3170 Photo scanner (400 scanners and 185 digital camera raw files. VueScan 8.3.05 was released on October 21, 2005, and you can read about what’s new in this version.

PhotoRec Digital Camera Recovery

I have a Nikon Coolpix 5700 and formatted the CF card before pulling off all the files. Ones that Carla wanted too! PhotoRec got them all back and more. You can find PhotoRec here: http://www.cgsecurity.org/index.html?photorec.html

This program works in windows or in linux!

Here are the steps I used to recover them: (click on Read More to see steps)

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Tired of popups and spyware?

I know everyone I talk to that uses windows for more than 1 week is tired of popups. Those annoying little buggers get into IE and annoy you to the end. Well now you have some help: Spybot-S&D. Spybot searches for over 12,000 spyware programs, popups and any other malware that has infested your windows pc. It can even immunize you from allowing those same greedy little programs from burrowing their way back into your browser. Here is the place to go get spybot: Spybot-S&D – http://www.safer-networking.org/ If you like this program which is free please donate to the author so he can continue to develop the great piece of software. I donated $5 just today!

To see what steps I use when setting up Spybot click on read more…

(note) Having anti-virus software and anti-spyware are an essential part of using windows operating systems. Click on read more to get more info.
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GNUWin II: Open source tools for windows!

GNUWin II is a free compilation CD for windows that is full of open source goodness. I have used it at home to help my wife Carla get used to some linux programs. Once we both can get away from using windows at home I’ll be able to install linux at home and use it as our main OS. Of course I’ll have to keep some form of winblows on there to play the games I like. Of course that situation is changing every day.