I found the following explanation at qubodup’s blog. And he, in turn, found the tutorial from a much larger blog post.

1. Start the game/open the window you want to record (I expect it should be windowed for the following instructions to make sense).
2. In a terminal, enter ‘xwininfo’ and then click on the window you will be recording.
3. You’ll see a bunch of information pop up in the window.
   1. If you want to capture window decorations, also make note of the values in -geometry at the bottom. (width, height, upper-left X, upper-left Y)
   2. If you want to capture only the window contents, make note of Width, Height, Absolute upper-left X, Absolute upper-left Y.
4. In a terminal, type/paste the following

   ffmpeg -f alsa -ac 2 -i pulse -f x11grab -r 30 -s WIDTHxHEIGHT -i :0.0+XPOSITION,YPOSITION -acodec pcm_s16le -vcodec libx264 -vpre lossless_ultrafast -threads 0 output.mkv

5. Replace the capitals with the values you noted previously.
6. Press enter to begin recording. When done, press Ctrl-C in the terminal.
7. In a terminal, type the following to encode the video

   ffmpeg -i output.mkv -acodec libmp3lame -ab 128k -ac 2 -vcodec libx264 -vpre hq -crf 22 -threads 0 our-final-product.mp4

I’ve yet to get the audio to record properly, but at least the video records flawlessly.

Before	After

Inkscape came to my rescue. And it’s free. And now I’ve got a good looking avatar.

Trent covers music but it’s transferrable to, say, books and even games…

It’s nothing new. It works. Why isn’t everyone giving their stuff away?

How is this relevant? I told MCM, the brain behind the project, that I’d get off my butt and finally post the .svg I had created. Being that TorrentBoy is a collaborative project, it helps others if they have a “launching” point to contribute from. From my perspective, I’m hoping that someone can take my image of Crash with Waser Bwaster () and make him awesome.

Back to the point, GoDaddy doesn’t display .svg files by default. When linking to an SVG, the page will just spit out the source code to the image. Not very helpful. A temporary solution would be to change the .svg extension to .xml, which will then correctly display the image. But that’s not how we do it!

The solution is this. Stick the following lines into your websites root .htaccess file (the ~/html directory).

AddType image/svg+xml svg
AddType image/svg+xml svgz
AddEncoding x-gzip .svgz

Give it a try. Much thanks to this article for the solution.

First, add the repository to your software sources file. The repository can be found at Launchpad, I found it by searching for PPA XBMC jaunty from the site’s search function. The two XBMC repositories for Jaunty are

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc/jaunty-ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc/jaunty-ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

But we’re mostly interested in that first one (repository). Highlight and copy the first line so we can add it to our repositories. Open up the Sources manager

System > Administration > Software Sources

Then click the Third-Party Software tab. Click Add at the bottom left of the window and paste in the repository that you copied previously.

Next we need to Authenticate the repository so that it shows up in the system’s list of software that we can install. To do this, click the Authentication tab in that software sources window.

In order to authenticate, we need to import the XBMC key file for Jaunty. The public key, like the link to the repository itself, can be found on Launchpad. You might notice on the XBMC-Jaunty launchpad page the following line:

This repository is signed with 1024R/9317790E OpenPGP key.

The public key is found by first clicking that link. You’ll be presented with another link on a line like the following:

sig  sig3  9317790E 2009-04-04 ...

Click the first link to be taken to the repository’s public key. You need to copy everything below the heading. Everything includes

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

and the block of characters in the middle, all the way to the end of

-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

After that has been copied, create a file and paste the block into it. The name of the file doesn’t matter as you only need the file for another minute.

After the key has been pasted into the file, go back to Authentication tab of the Software Sources window. At the bottom left of the window is the Import Key File… button. Click it. Navigate to and select the key file you just created. Click OK.

You should now see the XBMC key information in the Trusted software providers window. That’s it for setting up the repository. Just click Close and you’ll be prompted to update the system’s available software listing.

To install, just go through the steps you would regularly to install software. Personally, I prefer to run the command from a shell.

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install xbmc

If you haven’t already done so, you can now delete the XBMC launchpad key.

Note: If you are using an ATI video card, you may need to install the ATI video card drivers from the ATI site. This is evident when you go to run XBMC and a window flashes and disappears.
It appears now that, in the updates leading up to but not necessarily including today, ATI video cards will now work properly with XBMC and no longer cause it to crash.

What it does: Allow you to send mail to a specified email address by using the program sendmail.

You do this from the shell in your GoDaddy account. I shouldn’t have to tell you that this tutorial is meant for the shared Linux hosting account.

/usr/sbin/sendmail.real -f myaccount@theurl.com
intendedrecipient@theotherurl.com

Type that all on one line. Of course, change the addresses to suit your needs, then press <enter>. You’ll be greeted with… nothing happening. sendmail is now waiting for further instructions. So type the following.

Subject: whatever your subject is
And now you type your message below that

And you’ll still be left with nothing happening. Now sendmail is waiting for you to tell it that the message is over. So simply type a period on a line by itself.

.

And press <enter>. Your message should now send.

This is handy for a cron job where you want either a receipt that the cron job completed, or perhaps you want a file (backup?) sent to you on a regular basis.

Example:

/usr/sbin/sendmail.real \
-f test@example.com \
recipient@example.com
Subject: Testing for HowTo
This is just a test message.
And this is a new line.
.

The following email is what I received.

from test@example.com
to
date Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 2:22 PM
subject Testing for HowTo
mailed-by bounce.secureserver.net
This is just a test message.
And this is a new line.

Recently, and much to my surprise, MCM, the man behind the site, launched an open source project: TorrentBoy. I felt like this was something I had to take part in. Who wouldn’t love to help drive the evolution of a wise-cracking boy who turns into a super-hero by tapping into the latent power that engulfs all of Earth’s inhabitants? I know I would!

So when MCM asked for the Twitter-Public’s opinion on which CMS (Content Management System) we’d recommend, preferably one built like a wiki, I just had to suggest the use of PmWiki. I like PmWiki. The documentation accompanying it is great. And, Lo! Check out the TorrentBoy site now! I wasn’t expecting to be able to contribute the way that I had, but I did.

So I’m not sure if this is a public awareness call for bored geeks out there who wish to contribute to an open source project (much like TorrentBoy, or any other project). If you want to help contribute to a project, you can. You’re not about to get your head torn off like you might if you play QuakeLive (people who play Quake can be scary mean!).

The “program” is a set of instructions for using “The Gimp” to gray out an image. The usual thing where only a certain portion of the image has any color left in it.

The program is reprinted below:

Instructions for "The Gimp".

File > Open
	select your picture

Click through the following. This will set up the picture
so that you can grey out what you want and leave color
where you want.

Select > All

Edit > Copy

Colors > Desaturate > Ok

Layer > New Layer > Ok

Edit > Paste

Layer > Anchor Layer

Now you can start "deleting the color" from the image.
"Shift-E" will select the "erase tool" but that might take
a while. I suggest you use the "Rectangle Select Tool"
(can get to it by pressing "r" on the keyboard). That will
select big chunks which you can then "Control-X" to delete
out of the picture.

There you have it, a set of instructions that when followed will fancify an image.

SOLUG scratched our back, it’s only fair in return to scratch theirs. So how do you go about creating a blog roll in Drupal? You may think about using an existing module, but that was too much work. Here’s the simple way.

Follow the path:

Home » Administer » Site building » Blocks (Add Block)

And fill in the following fields:

Block description - What the block will be called on the Blocks menu.
Block title - What the block will be called on the actual page.
Block body - The HTML to make up your blog roll.

The block body I used for the NoLUG site was simply an unordered list that makes for easy maintenance.

<ul>
<li><a href="http://clug.ca/" >Calgary LUG</a></li>
<li><a href="http://lug.kamloops.net/" >Kamloops LUG</a></li>
<li><a href="http://solug.org/" >South Okanagan LUG</a></li>
<li><a href="http://vanlug.bc.ca/" >Vancouver LUG</a></li>
</ul>

Now choose whichever configuration options you want to associate with the block. I recommend

Custom visibility settings: Users cannot control whether or not they see this block.
Show block on specific pages: Show on every page except the listed pages. (Leave the listed pages blank)

Make sure you click “Save Block” so your hard work is saved. This will take you back to the Blocks menu.

Scroll to the bottom of the Blocks menu, to the Disabled section. Locate the newly created “Blog Roll” and select either Right or Left Sidebar (or wherever you want to place the block). Click “Save Blocks” and there you have your new Blog Roll.

From within a terminal, copy the DIR_COLORS file into your home directory.

cp /etc/DIR_COLORS ~/.dir_colors

ls will automatically look for the .dir_colors within your home directory. Open that up and look for the section that looks like this:

# Text color codes:
# 30=black 31=red 32=green 33=yellow 34=blue 35=magenta 36=cyan 37=white
FILE 00         # normal file
DIR 01;36       # directory

Adjust the numbers to the appropriately matching color-codes (as defined just above that section). Now ls should display in the assigned colors.