A flash player is a must have plugin for browsers. Without it you cannot acess a lot of video sharing sites such as YouTube. By default, Ubuntu doesn’t come with a flash player because the Adobe flash player is proprietary. The solution is to manually install the flash player.
# get the flash player from the macromedia website (above) or by using wget
wget http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz
# extract the tar file
tar xvf install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz
# run the installer – You will asked to close all the browser windows during this.
cd install_flash_player_9_linux
./flashplayer-installer
# specify the firefox folder during installation
/usr/lib/firefox
And that is it. Restart your browser and you can watch flash videos on Ubuntu! (This also shows why it may be better for your grandma to stick with Windows).
An interesting side effect of Google Notebook’s integration with Google Bookmarks is that you can now bookmark search results without having to install plug-ins or use bookmarklets. If you search using google, while logged in to a Google Account, a new option appears next to each search result: “note this”. If you click on “note this”, Google will open a small version of Google Notebook and add a link to the search result, the title and its snippet as a note. Google’s service has a predefined notebook that stores bookmarks (Unfiled bookmarks), so Google also creates a bookmark from your link.
The only thing you need to do before clicking on “note this” is to make sure that the active notebook is “Unfiled bookmarks”. You can click on the “My Notebooks” link from the top of Google’s search results page to activate that notebook.
After bookmarking a page, you can add labels and comments. The bookmarks can be accessed from Google Notebook’s mini-window,
Google Bookmarks or from
an iGoogle gadget, but also from plug-ins like Google Toolbar.
The purpose of Instapaper is simple direct and to the point. Save to read later.
Here’s the basic premise:
* You come across substantial news or blog articles that you want to read, but don’t have time at the moment.
* You need something to read while sitting on a bus, waiting in a line, or bored in front of a computer.
Instapaper solves both of those problems. Written by Marco Arment, …
…its design is simple (only 61 words — including credits — on the front page!)
according to an Instapaper review by Andrew Weissman .
Amazon currently offers DRM-free MP3 tracks from all four major music labels, something no other digital music store can boast. That’s 3.3 million songs from over 270,000 artists. But if you live outside of the US, good luck actually purchasing any of that music.
However, Amazon has announced plans to take its Amazon MP3 store global sometime in 2008. No word on whether that means February or December, but we’ll keep you posted.
Aaron Tiensivu has posted the commands you need to know to shut off the Windows speaker beep temporarily or for all time.
To temporarily disable the PC Speaker beep:
net stop beep
To disable the PC Speaker beep for good (until you undo this setting):
sc config beep start= disabled
Now you don’t need to run out of the room screaming next time you make a mistake at the Command Prompt that would normally make the hills come alive with BEEP BEEP BEE BEEEP BEEEEP.
So it gets cold in Chicago, Illinois. So cold, in fact,that “the asphalt strips of US30 and Union Grove and Byron are covered in five foot drifts” of snow. So what did the desperate street racers of early ’60s Chicago do ?
Head indoors for some Drag Racing. Photos as well.
The System Stability Tester is a freeware download for Linux, Unix, and Windows, that claims to test the stability of your system by calculating millions of digits of Pi in different threads, and comparing the threads for any disparities. You can also run the test on a single thread for benchmarking purposes.
It was originally developed as a system stressing and benchmarking tool for hardware overclockers, the System Stability Tester has since gone open source (licensed under the GNU public license) and more mainstream (e.g., by giving Windows users an easy executable install file).
WMWifiRouter can turn your WiFi-capable WM6 device into a GPRS-uplinked WiFi router. When activated, it will set up your WiFi link in ad-hoc mode and start a DHCP server. Laptops in the vicinty will see a new network called WMWifiRouter, and connecting to it will funnel all of their network traffic through your phone and its GPRS connection.
It used to be that you had to use a separate laptop connected to your phone to do the routing and network address translation side of things. This tool allows you to connect multiple (WiFi enabled) laptops anywhere where you can get a cell connection, and all you need is your phone.
Now, despite the promises, WMWifiRouter is still under heavy development. The best place to find up to date information is in the Internet Sharing over WiFi – WMWifiRouter topic at XDA-Developers. The first posts tell you how to use it, the last few posts will likely be dealing with current issues
From the sydney morning herald Technology section:
British civil servants have been banned from removing laptops containing sensitive information from their offices today, after a computer with the personal details of 600,000 people was stolen.
Gotta wonder how much of this is a knee jerk reaction, and how much (or litle) it has been thought through 
