Fortress Forever was started as a way to bring the fast paced action featured in the original Team Fortress together with a few new things and give it a modern look.

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But others want the music player they use to look more modern, or they want a certain feature to be available.
Most people who first start using foobar2000 don’t know that it also provides these options, and that you can have a music player that is able to beat most others when it comes to looks and options.

Foobar2000 has an extension system called components, which come in the form of dll files. These components are easily installed by copying them into the components directory of your Foobar2000 directory, after this you need to start/restart Foobar2000 and you can use them.

Foobar2000 has an extension system called components, which come in the form of dll files.
These components are easily installed by copying them into the components directory of your Foobar2000 directory, after this you need to start/restart Foobar2000 and you can use them.

There are components such as “Decoding speed test” which tests the decoding speed, to “Panels UI” which is able to change the entire look and feel of Foobar2000.

You can find several “configs” for Foobar2000 on the internet, Fooblog has a list of a few of them. They often list the required (and optional) components needed but if this is not the case you can find them in the readme files of the config.

Many of the required components can be found in the Hydrogen audio wiki, they have a list of the components available for the Foobar2000 0.9 release.

After you installed the components you need to follow the instructions on which files to copy and where they should go, then you need to restart Foobar2000 and with a few clicks you have a music player that looks nothing like the one you started with.
As i mentioned before, components are not only used to change the look but they can also do much more, it even has an component for lyrics.

So if you like Foobar2000 be sure to look through the list at the Hydrogen audio wiki for other components that you might like, and be sure to amaze your friends with your music player.

This new regulation means the stations have to pay not 10-12% but as much as 125% of their income in royalties.
So if they don’t have some huge advertisers behind them (which will lead to a music station with a lot of advertisement, thus leading to the opposite they want to the station to be) they will not be able to continue their work and passion.
If you want to read more about this issue visit Save our internet radio which is made by the owners of Radio Paradise and is a good source for more information.

SuperKaramba can also be taken from the package manager, or downloaded from their site. After the download and installation you can start the tool from the terminal with superkaramba. It will probably also be in your start menu, but that wasn’t the case on my Gnome based distro.

After you started SuperKaramba you can click the New Stuff button to get new widgets. There is a nice list of widgets you can choose from in that list. There are also sites like KDE-Look.org and Biodesign that have some widgets on their site that you can install. After an widget is installed you can click the Add to Desktop button after you have selected it, and the widget will appear on you desktop.

I like SuperKaramba more then gDeskets, it has a more modern interface and it has a bigger user base behind it.
But the fact that it isn’t completely native on Gnome makes it a bit “unstable” at times, so if this bothers you i advise to stick with gDesklets.

You can install gDesklets from you package manager or download the binaries. After installation you can start it from your start menu, it was listed under accessories in my case. You can type gdesklets in your terminal alternatively. After you have started the daemon you get the gDesklets shell with a nice number of available widgets.

There are mostly normal widgets availible, like calenders or system information, but also things like verse of the day and dinocam. You can also view a list of availible widgets at the Gdesklets website, the list is located here.

There is also a KDE widget tool called SuperKaramba, but i haven’t had the change to test it yet so i cannot say at this point if it’s better, but i’ll handle SuperKaramba tomorrow and tell which has my preference.

Now i don’t know how many readers work with websites, but maybe some of you can use this link. It’s an article on how to speed up sites using .htaccess file. It is quite a read but it looks promising, and the comment discussion there can also prove to be quite useful.

Democracy Player has a nice video player, that supports different video formats, like MPEG and AVI for example. Democracy Player supports different ways to get videos.

You can add RSS feeds, podcasts and video blogs which are deliverd in the form of channels. You can also search trough a number of different video sites and download the media like you do of a channel. All the media that you download will go to the new videos/collections tab in which you can view them.

Democracy Player is very simple to use, while still delivering a great service. Some people made claims saying this is the Firefox for videos, i can’t say if Democracy Player will be as popular as Firefox, but it does have allot of potential.

You can find the installation file at the donation coders website, and a license code can also be obtained there.
For the license code you can choose between registering at the forum, or get a anonymous serial.

After you installed the program you can activate it with ctrl+spacebar.
Then at the end of the searchbar you can click the gear for the option screen.
In here you can specify that the programs has that start when windows loads, Change the hotkey information in the interface tab, And change the search folders in the search folders tab.
I advice to remove the scanning of the program files directory in the search folder tab as that made the program a lot slower (but then again, that depends on how much you have in there)

A nice way to make shortcuts to directory’s is to make a directory called shortcuts and place a shortcut to the directory in that directory.
Then in the search folders tab you enter a new entry (right mouse click) and point toward the shortcut directory.
This way those shortcuts are also included in the search results and you only have to double click, or select them and press enter, to go there.

The simple option uses the greasemonkey extension. The advantages of greasemonkey is that you don’t have to deal with installing an extension and restarting Firefox over and over again. Also you only need to care about your script. Greasemonkey allows you to install javascript files which you can apply to all sites, or only certain site. You can check out how to make scripts for greasemonkey or browse an collection of greasemonkey scripts.

The hard option is making an extension directly. This involves making scripts like with greasemonkey, but also adding files which tell Firefox the details about the script. Downsides are that you have to repack and restart every time you modified your script (i believe there was a solution to this, but i don’t know for sure)

Upsides are that you can do a lot more then you can with greasemonkey and you can distribute your extension a bit easier.
You can find a nice tutorial about creating extension at roachfriend.com.

Also check out the links at the bottom of the tutorial if you get stuck, the forum he links to for example can be a big help.

Update: The tutorial website is no longer available. You can alternative check out the how to develop a Firefox extension at the Mozilla blog to get some pointers to get started developing extensions for the Firefox web browser. The detailed tutorial offers preparation suggestions and code examples, basically everything to get started right away.

X-NetStat is a application that lists all the connections that your pc has as well as the program that has the connection. So you can see a lot of instances of your web browser for example when you just visited some sites. But you can also see other connections that you didn’t start. This can be an program like your anti virus that is updating, but it can also be the windows remote software connecting to an irc channel for example. When you see that happening you can make an rule with the right mouse button that will always kill that connection when it’s made.

The only downside to this program is that you have to look at the connections yourself, but it is an help if you have the feeling your pc has been hacked. Also i have switched to Linux (Kubuntu distro) as my main OS today as i was completely fed up with Windows, so if you have questions etc. about Linux you can ask them.

I know Martin will also switch to Linux in the future, so i won’t make very detailed reports of my Linux experience but i will answer some questions and maybe try out some software if you want

Removing an shortcut works the same, just drag it off the dock and it’s gone. Clicking with the right mouse button on the dock brings up an menu in which you have some more options for adding shortcuts and to add a separator. You can also activate some other options for the dock like an auto hide function.

Personally i find that rocketdock is too big like this, and you can change this by going to the settings button. Then in the icons field you can select the size of the icons in normal state and when you hover over them. In the position field you can enter where the dock is positioned and on which screen if you have more then one. And on the style field you can select the style of the dock and control the text under the text of the icons.

Creating you own style isn’t very hard either. You can look into the styles map and take a look at the .ini files that are listed there. You can also follow this tutorial which provides a good start if you want to know more.

The extension is called Errorzilla, and it replaces your standard error screen with a much more useful one. After getting a 404 for example, you now have 7 options. The first option is the old refresh one, it’s called “Retry this, which reloads the page to see if it suddenly appeared.

Then there are 3 option to view the webpage on other sites, there is “Google Cache which try’s Google’s cache if there is a cached version of the site there. Then you have “Coralize, they have a nice explanation what it exactly is on their website.
And last we have “Wayback, which has a list of saved version of the website, normally you use it to view how webpages were “in the old days” (their oldest copy of ghacks comes from Oct 27, 2005) but it’s also very useful for this purpose.

And then there are the last 3 options, “Ping” which “pings” the site, “Trace” which traces the way from your pc to the website and “Whois” which lists information on the owner of the domain, and these 3 options are done through dnsstuff.com and whois.net
I hope this extension has made your (computer) life a bit easier, or showed you some interesting sites (like Wayback) and you can always leave comments if you have something on your mind.

Update: Please note that the extension has been uploaded to the Mozilla add-on repository in the meantime. Please check out Error Zilla Firefox Extension for a review and link.

The beginning is simple, you just download the latest version of Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer. But once you have these three installed you still have two to go, which isn’t as simple as it seems.

For Firefox you can simply get the Firefox Portable version, which can be found here (if that links stops working you can go directly to the project following this link)
Once you have unpacked the file you can then navigate to the map, and open the FirefoxPortable file (make sure you don’t have 2.x open tho)

Internet Explorer is a different story. Once you have installed Internet Explorer you’ll have to search for a Internet Explorer “portable” version. Thanks to the people at evolt.org there is an Internet Explorer 6 standalone version.

The downside to this is that (unlike with the Firefox portable version) the system still thinks the browser is Internet Explorer 7, so if you are using Conditional comments you’ll temporarly have to change the comment to Internet Explorer 7 instead of 6.

I hope this is useful to some of you, seeing how web design can already be a nightmare with all the different browsers (more specific, the mess that is called IE ;))

This is exactly what Bugmenot is made for. You can search per url and the site will give you logins (if there are any) for that website. Of course you can also submit your dummy accounts to this site so other people can use.

Even better is the fact that for all the Firefox users there is an Bugmenot Extension which is really easy to use.
You just right click on an login form and then select “Login with Bugmenot” and the extension automatically looks for login data on the bugmenot website.
And if an account doesn’t work the extension will try out the next account until you are logged in or until there are no more accounts. This site and the extension saved me allot of hassle on different occasions, and hopefully it will also be the same for you.