Tag Archives: HOWTO

How to get brightkite photos into an RSS feed (to post to a blog)

I started another blog so I have a place to rant about comics or movies or whatever else I need to get off my chest, and I needed an excuse to play with wordpress (something I’ve been wanting to do for a while). I plan on posting how I did certain things on that blog on gPowered.

One of the things I really wanted to do was have my twitter photos show up as posts on that blog. For a while I have been using twitpic, but have recently changed over to brightkite. Brightkite provides an rss feed of all your activity, but I was only interested in the photos. Looked like a job for Yahoo! Pipes.

I imported the bkite feed into pipes, filtered on the items that were photo posts, and renamed the title so it would have the title of the photo instead of the bkite location (by default bkite photo titles are the location where you most recently checked in). I also did some URL generation so anyone could use the pipe

The next step was to get this into wordpress. I Installed the FeedWordPress plugin and set it up to import the pipe’s RSS feed. You can tweak the the settings on what user should be used to write the posts, categories, tags, permalinks (I set mine to point directly back to brightkite).

Hope this helps someone out there, enjoy

Finding unread gmails (or: the best gmail filter ever)

As the year starts to wind down, I figure I should start the year off with a clean inbox.  I try to keep no unread messages in my inbox, instead I tag and archive.  These past few weeks however, my inbox has gotten a little crazy. 

I found this filter to show me all my unread mail that is still in my inbox, hope it helps someone organize like it did me

is:inbox is:unread

Happy Holidays all

Set / Change / Reset the MySQL root password on Ubuntu Linux (Ubuntu)

This came in veeeerrryyy handy just now…

  1. Stop the MySQL Server

    sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop
     

  2. Start the mysqld config

    sudo mysqld –skip-grant-tables &

  3. Login to the server as root

    mysql -u root mysql

  4. Ser your NEWPASSWORD

    UPDATE user SET Password=PASSWORD(‘NEWPASSWORD’) WHERE User=’root’; FLUSH PRIVILEGES; exit;

How to turn any webpage into an RSS feed

Using a tool called Dapper and Yahoo Pipes, its fairly easy to turn any webpage into an RSS feed. Dapper is a powerful HTML scrapping system and Pipes is a handy data remixing tool.  Head on over to dapper.net and check to make sure someone hasn’t already done what you are planning on doing (Do this by using dapper’s search function.)  If you can’t find any, you are ready to go.

For this example, I’m going to scrape http://ifanboy.com/users/broderboy/comics which shows the comic books I’m interested in this week.  Click “create new dapp” (located under the search bar). Once inside the Dapp Factory, input the url of the page you want to scrape.  Then, change the format to RSS Feed.  You can leave the format is Dapp XML if you want much more control over the data, as well as more options for output, but its harder to turn this into an RSS feed.  I’ll cover how to do this in a later article.

At this point I would recomend watching the Demo that will pop up.  After the demo you should see a rendering of the page you were looking at.  Click add to basket.  Then, try to add more pages that are similar, but might have different data.  For my example this would be other people’s comics.  Add these to the basket as well (you should try to have at least 4)

 

Click next step, and the system will analyze your pages.  You can watch another demo at this point.  Now you can start selecting page elements.  The more example pages you gave dapper, the smarter the element selecting will be.  All I’m interested in is the title of the comic, which I’m going to use for the title of the RSS article, and the number of pulls it had, which I will use for the body of the article.

 
 

After I have these selected, I move on to the next step. Here you can preview or save you dapp.  It should have already grouped your 2 items into an RSS group for you.  Exit the wizard to get the RSS feed and options.

At this point, you have the RSS feed and are done with that portion.  If you only need the address of the feed for yourself, there is no need to go any furthur.  I wanted to make the input very easy for anyone to use the feed for any user on iFanboy.  Enter Yahoo Pipes.  I used a text input, string builder, and URL builder to create the URL I would need.  Then sent this url into the dapp, and pulled back the RSS.  The orriginal URL for the dapp was http://www.dapper.net/transform.php?dappName=iFanboyComicsfortheWeekRSS&transformer=RSS&extraArg_title=comic_title&extraArg_description[]=pulls&applyToUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ifanboy.com%2Fusers%2Fbroderboy%2Fcomics.  While the ‘broderboy’ could have been replaced directly in this url, it might not have been clear.  The new Pipes URL makes it a little easier to see http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=GjdOGm9_3RGeKVooPxJ3AQ&_render=rss&username=broderboy.

You can also merge multiple RSS feeds in the pipe using the Union node.

Enjoy!

How to stream video to an Xbox 360 from linux

There are a couple of different methods floating around to do this, but I think this is the quickest and easiest to get set up. So far, I like this better then FTP’ing files over to my old modded xbox. Some notes about further investigating will be at the bottom. Note: this was tested on an Ubuntu machine.

  • Make sure your 360 has all the current updates
  • Install ushare

    “sudo apt-get install ushare”

  • if ushare complains about a missing libdlna dependency, get it from here: “wget http://www.geexbox.org/debian/pool/main/libdlna/libdlna0_0.2.3-0ubuntu1_i386.deb”

  • Edit the ushare configuration

    “sudo vim /etc/ushare.conf”

    update any ports or network devices you need to (I changed mine to eth1 so it would just use the wireless) as well as what folder to scan

  • There is a mime-type you need to update

    “sudo vim /usr/share/mime/packages/freedesktop.org.xml”

    change mime-type type=”video/x-msvideo” to mime-type type=”video/x-ms-wmv”

  • restart gnome (ctrl + alt + backspace)
  • start ushare with “ushare -x”
  • Go to the media blade on your 360 dashboard
  • Press ‘X’ to change the source
  • You should see uShare (or whatever you named the share to in the configuration)
  • play videos!
  • note: to play a .mkv file, rename it to .m4v
  • To Do:

    • get uShare to automatically rescan the directory (currently if I add a video to the folder, the 360 will not see it until i restart uShare)
    • get 1080p HD content to stream. I have tried a few re-encapsulation methods so far, nothing working yet
    • this is an xbox thing, that hopefully will be fixed in the fall update, but navigating large folder trees can get annoying

Limit Google Search Results by Date

Tech Recipes goes into how how to restrict Google search results by date: Appending “&as_qdr=d” to a search will display a drop down that lets you choose how far back in time to search.

A Greasemonkey script will also do this for you. Pretty useful if you are searching about a brand new issue. This would have helped me a lot when I was having a problem with Hardy

Fixing Nvidia 8600 GT on Hardy Heron

After updating to Hardy I got a white screen of death upon rebooting. After some research it turned out that this was more of an Nvidia driver issue rather then Ubuntu. This may not have been the most correct way to fix it, but it worked for me.

  1. Completely remove nvidia-glx-new
  2. Remove nvidia-kernel-common (this also removes linux-restricted-modules), (I am not sure if step 2 is required)
  3. install build-essentials
  4. Download the Nvidia beta driver that came out on April 10. You can get it here
  5. hit ctrl + alt + f1 to break out of gnome
  6. “sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop” to shutdown the X server
  7. sudo sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-173.08-pkg1.run to install the driver. If it asks you to update you’re xorg.conf file, let it.
  8. Reboot. (“sudo reboot”) You should now be able to enable Desktop effects. YAY FISH!

This issue has also been addressed on the Ubuntu Forums and on launchpad

Note: I have a Dell XPS M1530

Upgrade Ubuntu to 8.04 Hardy Heron

Hardy Heron came out this morning and ubuntu.com is very much down for the count

You can Still update though, click here for the Google Cache version.

Happy Updating!

New Features in this release:

Install on an existing filesystem without overwriting /home
When I moved from feisty to gutsy, I decided to do a fresh install. One of the things I had to do was back up my home folder, and when I finished installing gutsy I just copied it back onto my computer. This new feature will allow people to install the new version of Ubuntu without it overwriting their home folder.I’m sure this will come in very handy for people who like trying out different distro’s.

Hardy Hardware Detection
This is more of a bug fix than a new feature. Gutsy already has excellent hardware support and the plan for hardy is even better and more robust detection of hardware. Sounds good to me.

GDM Face Browser
One of the changes I made to my gutsy is the GDM. I replaced the old one with something that allows me to just click on a picture of my username and login. This will hopefully be the default for hardy.

Auto Detection of Monitor Frequency
While I was testing gutsy beta I had to manually configure xorg.conf to get it to the right resolution. It wasn’t fun. This should be a thing of the past with hardy as it will automatically detect everything for you. Huzzah!

Apt Authentication Reliability
Have you ever had an update fail for no reason? Well it actually fails because of ‘transient network failures’. The aim is to make hardy more robust against these errors.

Redesign Restricted-Manager Code
They want to expand the role of the restricted manager and change it so that other distro’s can share the joy.

Handling Full Disks

I’ve never had this problem with Ubuntu, but if your disk gets full, things can get quite ugly. They plan to add a notification and disk clean-up tool when your running low on space.

Desktop Effects
Make compiz fusion more robust and easier to use.

New Theme
Hardy Heron will be getting a shiny new theme, I hope they move away from the brown theme and choose something lighter and more fresh.

Easy File Sharing
To allow people to easily share files over a network. Not more I can say about this.

Dual/Multi Monitor Support
Currently you have to manually tweak Ubuntu if you want to use more than one monitor. They want to fix this for hardy.

Integrate Prefetch into Ubuntu
I noticed a slightly increased start up time in gutsy compared to feisty. Hardy will use file prefetch and other optimisations to speed up boot time.

Automatix-Ubuntu Team Collaboration
Automatix was extremely helpful for me in feisty. Although I don’t use it in gutsy, its good that they are collaborating with the automatix team.

Single Click Install
Installing software is already pretty straightforward in Ubuntu. They want to make it even easier to install third party applications. I’m not complaining.

Apparmor Integration
This is already a part of gutsy, the plan is to increase integration to make Ubuntu even safer.

Firewall
Make it easier for users to configure their firewall.

Third Party Apt
Now when you install third party apps, you have to manually add the software repository to the sources.list. This spec makes it easy for users to install third party software and have it update automatically.

Revamped Logout Screen
They want to streamline the options you have when you click that big red button, to make things less confusing.

Better Integrated Wine
Better Wine will make it easier for Windows users to convert, thus helping to solve bug #1.

Xorg 7.3
This is one of the features that missed the gutsy deadline. This should make manual configuration of xorg.conf obsolete. Another much anticipated feature is Bullet Proof X, which will go into a graphical safe mode if anything goes wrong with X.

Slick Boot
To improve the boot and shutdown process and also make the things look nicer.

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