flv2mpg

I regularly download movies from YouTube but they are always in Flash format which is no good for most people I want to email funny bits.

After some searching on the web I found that ffmpeg will be able to convert all my .flv files to .mpg files. I also found a nice script to do the job.

With some modifications to those scripts I created two scripts that will allow you to right click any .flv file in Nautilus and convert it to a .mpg file. The new .mpg file will have to same name than the .flv file and will be in the same directory.

Also it is possible to select multiple .flv files and convert all of them. The script will also check for a valid .flv file before converting it so to convert a lot of .flv files is a simple as Ctrl+A and then flv2mpg.

The attached flv2mp3.tar.gz contains both scripts and it should be as simple as just extracting the tar file into your home directory.

Ubuntu 6.10 Installed

Finally I installed Edgy Eft on my laptop. I had an unfortunate bug with my ATI FireGL drivers but the Ubuntu help sorted it out.

All I need to do now is install Automatix and all my other nice tools I am used to, will have to wait for Monday though, no broadband at home.

rDesktop 1.4 that comes with Edgy rocks, had some issues while my FireGL was still detected as Mesa compatible and not as fglrx compatible, but after the ATI fix my rDesktop is fast and very efficient.

Ubuntu 6.10 Released

At long last last Edgy Eft is available for download, unfortunately staying in South Africa with the Telscum (Telkom) monopoly it means my download will be done by sometime tomorrow if I am lucky.

So this weekend seems to be the Edgy Eft weekend I've been waiting for.

rDesktop

It seems I do not need to try and make Remote Desktop work on my Linux machine via Wine anymore. Apparently I can use rDesktop to connect to my Windows boxes via the RDP protocol, if this works well it will be brilliant.

Will try rDesktop as soon as I installed Ubuntu 6.10 on my Laptop.

Ubuntu 6.10

I can not wait for Ubuntu 6.10 to be released. I almost forgot how much Windows XP sucked. The last week of using XP again brought all my bad memories back. One more week and then I have my Ubuntu back again. Brilliant.

I broke Ubuntu

I recently reconfigured my partitions on my notebook and I broke Ubuntu in the process. My bootup process gets stuck at Mount root filesystem..., I tried all the fixes I could lay my hands on but to no avail, so now I will just wait for the new 6.10 release and reinstall which should be by the end of October.

So for now I will use Windows XP again.

VM Keyboard Problem

I always had a nagging issue with my Windows 2000 vm whenever my laptop is not docked into my docking station, for some reason the keyboard would have a lag, so I would press a key and the character will only appear a second or two later.

I sort of found a hack for the problem over at the VMWare knowledge base, it is not pretty but it seems to work, so now my clock is very fast when I am docked into my docking station but at least my clock is running at an acceptable speed when I am not docked.

Firefox has sound!

My Firefox on Ubuntu 6.06 never had sound, not when watching YouTube videos and not when using Meebo, but today I realized with a shock that YouTube and Meebo has sound all of the sudden.

All I can think of why it is suddenly working is that I upgraded to Firefox 1.5.0.7 recently and my Ubuntu installed approx. 70 updates in the last week. Whatever it was, it is great to have sound in my browser.