What is Fortune?

If you are new to Ubuntu and Linux you probably have not heard of “Fortune”. If not, the Fortune application (It’s usually referred to as a game for some odd reason) uses flat text files to issue random sayings to various subsystems or applications. It is commonly used to append signatures in email clients (See my article “Add uptime and/or a daily fortune to your email signature“).

Installation

In order to install the Ubuntu Tips Applet, you will first have to install the application fortunes-ubuntu-server. Since the Ubuntu Tip Applet is not found in the repositories (it’s an installable .deb file you download), you will first need to install fortunes-ubuntu-server. To do that, follow these steps:

1. Open up a terminal window.
2. Issue the command sudo apt-get install fortunes-ubuntu-server.
3. Type your sudo password and hit Enter.
4. Accept any dependencies.
5. Allow the installation to complete.

With this dependency installed, you can move onto the installation of the tips applet. First download the .deb file from the GTK-Apps web site. Save that file in the ~/Downloads directory. Now, follow these steps to install:

Open up a terminal window.

1. Change to the ~/Downloads directory with the command cd ~/Downloads.
2. Issue the command sudo dpkg -i ubuntu-tips-applet_XXX.deb Where XXX is the release number.
3. Type your sudo password and hit Enter.
4. Allow the installation to complete.

Usage

Figure 1

After the install, you will not see any tips start up. That is because you actually  must start the app before it can serve up those handy tips. To start it click Applications > Accessories > Ubuntu Tips Applet. What you will notice immediately is a small icon in your notification area (see Figure 1).  The icon is the swirling line between the network applet and the sound applet. If you left-click that icon you can do the following:

• Set the interval for tips (by default the interval is one minute).
• Show a single tip.
• Disable auto refresh.
• Find out information about the applet.
• Quit the applet.

Really the only configuration option you have is the interval. As I said, the default is one minute. This can get a bit annoying, so I wold suggest setting it to something more like five or ten minutes.

Figure 2

When a tip appears it looks just like a standard Ubuntu notification (See Figure 2).

The tips you are shown range in level of difficulty. You will see some fairly easy tips all the way up to some significantly challenging tips. You might well be surprised at how helpful this tool will be to your Ubuntu education.

Final thoughts

Having a handy tip system at your fingertips will go a long way to aiding you in your quest to learn more about Ubuntu Linux. It’s non-intrusive, can be stopped, and offers up some fairly handy advice. What more do you want in a tip system?

Users who want to change the language of their Windows Vista operating system will soon realize that it is not as easy as they thought it would be. Especially Vista Home users are left standing in the rain because there is no official way of changing the language of the operating system.

The Windows Vista Multi-language User Interface Hacker (via Raymond)is a third party software that was specifically designed for the purpose of changing the language of a Windows Vista operating system. It works by downloading the program files, the selected MUI language pack and a lengthy conversion in the software application that can take between 5 and 60 minutes depending on the computer’s performance.

After that is is simply a matter of selecting the installed language in the program’s interface and restarting the computer.

Download links to all available language packs are provided in the software program so that the user can simply download it right away. Switching back to the original language is not a big problem either. It is simply a matter of downloading the right MUI and applying the same procedure to the file.

Take Back Control Over Your Right Click Menus

An article over on Make Use Of which I particularly  liked as I’ve been looking around for a application to do this for a while.

Philipp Lenssen’s Top Google Apps Tips

Some great tips for using Google’s applications and services like Google Docs, Gmail and search. 

7 Beautiful Themes (Visual Styles) to Customize Windows Vista

As Long Zheng was saying yesterday, “Personally, the idea of using a third party visual style in Vista has never even crossed the mind and I’m someone who wouldn’t think twice about using a custom style in XP.” Even so, there are plenty of nice themes you can try, and Life Rocks has put together a list of what they feel are the 7 best visual styles for Vista. It’s a good list, I wouldn’t really disagree with any of the items on it.

Newsgator – The Most Complete RSS Solution

And some shameless self-promotion from me, this is my article, again on MUO, I spent a fair bit of time researching and writing this one so check it out!

What is rundll32.exe And Why Is It Running?

The How-to-Geek had a great post as always on troubleshooting a runaway .dll through the task manager. He also did a very useful post about useless Vista tweaks on Lifehacker.

How One Would-be Web Friend Turned Into a Stalker In Months

Louis Gray outlines a creepy experience with what seems to be a whacked-out entrepreneur. While reading it you’ll probably find yourself asking the same thing I did; Why the hell did Louis put up with this guy for so long?

The most underhyped Silicon Valley success: Meebo

In perhaps one of the best posts I’ve seen Robert Scoble write, he descends from his normal early-adopting, Friendfeed loving position and takes a very real look at an extremely successful service we never hear anything about; Meebo. Did you know they had 20 million monthly users? I sure didn’t.

Why don’t we hear anything about such a runaway web 2.0 success story?

“That A-list bloggers don’t use IM or chat much, so don’t get passionate about it the way they do about, say, Twitter (although Twitter has about 1/10th as much traffic [as Meebo]).”

…

“If you are an entrepreneur and you want to reach a mainstream audience, you should hang out on Meebo more to do your research, not on Twitter or FriendFeed.”

Some good advice there.

So I decided something along the lines of what Martin does each week with his Software Updates, a compilation of the best tips I see around the blogosphere and some links to the original sources.

Make SP1 Permanent

I never knew of this till I found out on Life Rocks! 2.0 that there’s a file which you can use to make the Vista Service Pack 1 permanent. It’s useful once you’re confident everything it working fine as it cleans up the installation folders and files.

Restore ‘Search’ to Folder Context Menus

Thanks to some badgering from Google Microsoft removed the direct access to Search from the start menu and context menus. If you used these then the How-to Geek provides a registry hack to get it back.

5 Google Reader tips for Bloggers

gHacks author Daniel’s personal productivity blog, Hack Your Day, had a great article on how to use Google Reader efficiently. Always interesting and useful I recommend giving him a read.

FireFTP

As I have just re-installed Vista and my net is crippled to less then dial-up speed at the moment I haven’t been able to download FileZilla. After seeing it featured on the FF extensions page I decided to give FireFTP a try and have been impressed so far.

I will pay those that get accepted $1 for every tip that I use to write an article about. What I want are users like me, who know the Internet, who know where to get the latest information as the first and who can judge between top news and old news. This is not for someone who wants to post articles found at popular sites like Lifehacker, Gizmodo or Digg for instance but for those who are deep users who know the sources.

Here is a short description of possible topics:

• Software: A vast area. I only write about free software which means that your tips should point to free software only. Tips or tweaks for commercial softwares are fine though. I accept links to softwares that have not been written about at ghacks yet, software tips like performance tweaks or hacks.
• Gadgets, Hardware: If it has not been on the big Gadget sites it is good. Someone from Asia who is sitting right at the source would be awesome. If you could do pictures it would even be better. (I would pay more for that)
• Services: Links to new cool services. Does not really matter what they do as long as they provide something useful. Examples are mp3 searches, community sites, file hosts, privacy services aso. Should be free of course.
• Extensions, Add-ons, Plugins:Links to new extensions for firefox, add-ons for Internet Explorer, widgets for Opera, plugins for softwares like Winamp. Everything is fine unless it is old news.
• Security, Spam, Privacy: A big sector. I’m not that interested in the latest exploits but in the following. Ways to bypass web service protections, for instance how to view hidden comments on myspace, bypass rapidshare timelimits. That kind of stuff. New spam techniques, spam services are nice as well as are privacy related issues.
• Mobile Phones: New applications for mobile phones for instance
• MP3 Player: Tips for iPods, iPhones, Zune and the like.
• P2P:Latest P2P trends, new programs
• Games:Links to free games that I have not introduced yet.
• Advertisement, Commercial: News about advertisement opportunities, new Adsense ads for instance, tips and tricks, new programs.
• Everything else:Feel free to send me links about anything that could fit but that you are unsure about. As a rule of thumb: If it is new, which means that it has not made its way on the big news sites, digg, reddit or del.icio.us for instance it is fine.

Please use the contact form above if you want to apply for this position. I need some basic information about you, your age, a working email, your paypal email for the payments and if you are an expert in any of the topics mentioned.

Payments will be made weekly using Paypal.

]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/09/09/join-my-tips-for-cash-program/feed/ 4 http://www.ghacks.net/2007/01/06/remove-ntfs-timestamps-to-speed-up-vista/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/01/06/remove-ntfs-timestamps-to-speed-up-vista/#comments Sat, 06 Jan 2007 07:36:06 +0000 Martin Brinkmann http://www.ghacks.net/2007/01/06/remove-ntfs-timestamps-to-speed-up-vista/ If you are using the nfts filesystem in windows xp you might know this registry hack to speed things up a little bit. The default mode is that every time you alter a file a timestamp will be saved which is for most users completely useless. Some backup programs or synchronizers use this feature but most others don’t.

If you are not using a program that needs the timestamp you can easily edit the registry key in vista to speed up your system. Hit Windows + R, type regedit and press enter.  Navigate to the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem

Right-click the key NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate and change the value of it to 1. While you are there you could also disable the creation of files in Dos format (8+3) by altering the value of the key NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation to 1 as well.

]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/01/06/remove-ntfs-timestamps-to-speed-up-vista/feed/ 7 http://www.ghacks.net/2006/11/11/join-multiple-video-files-into-one/ http://www.ghacks.net/2006/11/11/join-multiple-video-files-into-one/#comments Sat, 11 Nov 2006 10:36:14 +0000 Martin Brinkmann http://www.ghacks.net/2006/11/11/join-multiple-video-files-into-one/ Websites sometimes split movies into smaller parts to make it easier for users with low bandwidth access to the internet to download the movies without facing problems like timeouts. Once downloaded it is rather tiresome to view such a movie because you have to click on each part which naturally means a short pause between the last and the next movie.

The following method makes it possible to join multiple video files into one big file making it that much easier in the end to play and enjoy the downloaded movie. The method is different depending on the type of movie that you are playing. If the movie consists of multiple mpg movies you can use the windows command line to merge them.

Start the command line by pressing the windows key and R. Enter cmd in the prompt which will start the command line window. Enter the following line into the command line, make sure you enter the right filepath to the movie. I suggest you move the files to the top of a hard drive to ease the amount of typing that needs to be done.

copy /B “C:\movie1.mpg” + “C:\movie2.mpg” + “C:\movie3.mpg” “C:\completemovie.mpg”

This joins movie1.mpg, movie2.mpg and movie3.mpg into completemovie.mpg. You can add more movies to join more parts without problems.

You need an additional programs if the parts are avi files instead of mpg. Download the freeware VirtualDubMod and unpack it to your hard drive. Run the tool and select File, Open Video File and browse to the first part of the movie. Select no If a popup named VBR audio stream detected appears.

Click on File, append Segment and browse to the second part of the movie. Once this is done click on File, Save As and save the newly merged movie file to your hard drive.

]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2006/11/11/join-multiple-video-files-into-one/feed/ 13 http://www.ghacks.net/2006/02/11/99-performance-tips-for-windows-xp/ http://www.ghacks.net/2006/02/11/99-performance-tips-for-windows-xp/#comments Sat, 11 Feb 2006 08:35:59 +0000 Martin Brinkmann http://www.ghacks.net/?p=317 A friend of mine asked me to take a look at his computer because it reacted slowly and took ages to boot. He was running windows xp home and shared the computer with his wife and his two lovely girls who unfortunately decided to install lots of “female” orientated applications like riding games, animated screensavers and the like. After getting rid of 185 spyware entries I told him that he could speed up his pc which had only 256 Mb if he would disable some features of windows xp.

Some of the features that I disabled yesterday are also mentioned in the pcstats.com beginners guide. I do not advice you to use each of the 99 tips, for example I would not recommend to overclock your pc. Categories worth taking a look at are “Windows XP Software and Registry Performance Tweaks” and “Improving Windows XP boot speed” which can have a great effect on overall speed of the system.

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