Once installed, you basically use one click to get a video preview and then a prompt with the filename to save the file. The script works by looking into the newest flash files in your /tmp folder, and creates a hardlink to the save destination. When the video has fully loaded, you can close the browser window. The temp file will get deleted, and the linked copy will remain.

Installing flashrip

Open a terminal like gnome-terminal or konsole, and run these commands:

wget http://martin.ankerl.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/flashrip.sh
chmod 755 flashrip.sh
sudo mv flashrip.sh /usr/local/bin

Now all thats left to do is to create a link in your gnome panel for ease of use: Right click the gnome panel, “Add to panel…”, choose “Custom Application Launcher…”. Choose a proper name, and a command like this:

/usr/local/bin/flashrip.sh /home/manker/Videos

For the command, replace the second parameter with the default location where you want to save the ripped videos (you have to use the full path here!)

I have tested this in Ubuntu, but it should work on any linux where gnome is installed.

Have fun!

Thanks to Johan Kivinemi I have just found out how to bring back the excellent legacy subpixel hinting engine. This has a much more crisp hinting, and uses subpixels only where it really is an improvement:

Just open these files in your home directory, and copy the content into them:

~/.fonts.conf

<?xml version='1.0'?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM 'fonts.dtd'>
<fontconfig>
  <match target="font">
    <edit name="antialias" mode="assign">
      <bool>true</bool>
    </edit>
    <edit name="hinting" mode="assign">
      <bool>true</bool>
    </edit>
    <edit name="hintstyle" mode="assign">
      <const>hintfull</const>
    </edit>
    <edit name="lcdfilter" mode="assign">
      <const>lcdlegacy</const>
    </edit>
    <edit name="rgba" mode="assign">
      <const>rgb</const>
    </edit>
  </match>
</fontconfig>

~/.Xresources

Xft.antialias:  true
Xft.hinting:    true
Xft.hintstyle:  hintfull
Xft.lcdfilter:  lcdlegacy
Xft.rgba:       rgb

This should work in Ubuntu 8.04, 8.10, and 9.04 too, and makes all fonts much more crisp. Of course, your mileage may vary.

UPDATE: Comparison Screenshots

As promised on reddit, I got back from an awesome snowboard trip so I am able to put up extensive comparison screenshots of the two subpixel hinting engines. Move your mouse over the following images to see the differences. Watch especially out for letters like “m” where the spacing between the lines is very small. You might have to wait a bit for the image to load.

I have used all of the most important fonts that I usually use, and just for fun I have added “Dijkstra”, which just looks cool.

Sans Fonts

Mouse to see the same fonts with the legacy hinter.

Mono Fonts

Mouse to see the same fonts with the legacy hinter.

Zoomed Comparison Screenhots

Here is an excerpt with 400% magnifications. Mouse over the pictures to see the legacy hinter.

Zoomed Sans

Zoomed Mono

10. Top 10 Eclipse Hotkeys

Ironically, this list starts with another top 10 list, namely Top 10 Eclipse Hotkeys. This article from 2006 has just made it onto this top list. With 3,302 pageviews it seems that these keys are still relevant.

9. Human Compact Themes for Ubuntu 8.10

Number 9 is a modification of the Ubuntu’s default theme that is optimized for small screens. With the recent rise of netbooks this becomes more and more wanted.

8. Logical Volume Manager Cheatsheet

sudo pvcreate /dev/sdg1
sudo vgcreate ext_vg /dev/sdg1
sudo lvcreate -L 450G -n ext ext_vg
sudo mkfs.ext3 -m 0 /dev/ext_vg/ext

A compact little cheat sheet that explains how to easily combine two harddisks into one large volume. I have used this to combine two 500GB disks into one large 1TB filesystem.

7. Comprehensive Linux Terminal Performance Comparison

In this highly controversial article I have compared how long several different terminals (xterm, gnome-terminal, etc.) take when displaying one large textfile. I still believe this is relevant, especially when compiling stuff and text flies by. You don’t want your terminal be the limiting factor for your compile speed! I would perform the test yourself, as this seems to be highly dependent on the graphics card driver.

6. Howto Create MANIFEST.MF Classpath from Ant

<!-- name of the output .jar file -->
<property name="jar.name" value="ourjarfile.jar" />

This HOWTO describes a simple way to create the classpath in a MANIFEST.MF file automatically from the libraries available on the harddisk. I have been using this since 2005, and it has never failed me.

5. Human Compact Gnome Theme (for Ubuntu 8.04)

Another Compact theme has made it on the list, this time for 8.04. I have used this theme for quite a while, even on a large 1680×1050 monitor because it really saves a lot of screen space. For everybody still using Ubuntu 8.04, this is the best choice to use a compact layout while still having the default Human look.

4. Optimized pow() approximation for Java, C / C++, and C#

public static double pow(final double a, final double b) {
    final int x = (int) (Double.doubleToLongBits(a) >> 32);
    final int y = (int) (b * (x - 1072632447) + 1072632447);
    return Double.longBitsToDouble(((long) y) << 32);
}

Through some funny floating point representation tricks it is possible to create an approximative calculation of the pow() operator, that is a hell of a lot faster than the standard calculation which has to be extremely precise. This might be useful for games, Artificial Intelligence applications, and everywhere else where performance is an issue and not precision.

3. Ajax Dojo Comet Tutorial

One of the most often seen article contains 3 buzzwords at once: Ajax, Dojo, Comet. This page was linked several times, and it is getting quite a bit of attention. The article was written by an intern at my workplace and he allowed me to put it up here.

2. Clearlooks Compact Gnome Theme

Yet another theme! This startet it all. The Clearlooks Compact Theme was the first compact theme I have created. It is just a modification of the original Clearlooks theme, with tighter spacing. This has been linked quite a lot of time and I get a continuous stream of visitors who are in the need for a compact theme.

1. How to get Enough Sleep Despite StumbleUpon With Ubuntu

This post about me struggling with getting enough sleep despite StumbleUpon was by far the most viewed article on the blog, it has received more than 4 times as much visits as the second best. I guess I hit some nerve with it in the large Linux using StumbleUpon crowd. The article is almost a year old, and I still get lots of visitors each and every day. Happy stumbling!

Thank you everybody for coming to this site and posting your thoughts. I appreciate each and every feedback. Happy christmas and happy new year!

1. Create a file ~/.mplayer/mencoder.conf with default compression settings. I use this, with encoding quality settings I have from mplayer’s x264 examples:

   o=out.avi
   ovc=x264=yes
   oac=mp3lame=yes
   
   #lameopts=preset=medium
   lameopts=aq=2:vbr=4
   #lameopts=preset=voice
   
   # the lower crf, the better
   # 20: very good
   # 22: Medium Quality DVD rips
   # 23: quite ok
   # 25: so-so
   # 30: acceptable
   # 40: my eyes hurt
   # 50: my eyes bleed
   x264encopts=threads=auto:crf=20:subq=7:partitions=all:8x8dct:me=umh:frameref=5:bframes=3:b_pyramid:weight_b
   
   # deinterlace
   # vf=yadif
   
   # slight denoise
   # vf=hqdn3d=3:2:3:3
   
   # turbo encoding (low quality!)
   #x264encopts=threads=auto:crf=23:turbo=2:subq=1:frameref=1
   

2. I use constant quality setting. The advantage is that it requires only one pass, and you get, well, constant quality In the config file find the crf=20 section and change it to your desire.
3. Find out which DVD chapter you want to rip, starting with 1 up (e.g. mplayer dvd://1).
4. If the DVD has black borders, find out their sizes with

   mplayer dvd://2 -vf cropdetect

   Fast forward a bit into the movie so that the ratio can be trusted.
   WARNING Some DVDs like Natural Born Killers are shot with multiple different films, so the border changes! Take care not to crop anything important away. Copy the -crop printouts into the clipboard.

5. Open another console window, run mplayer dvd://2 -identify, and quit. Now scroll up, there is some important information about the tracks which you need in the next step. I have extraced the important information here:

   ID_AUDIO_ID=128
   ID_AID_128_LANG=de
   ...
   ID_AUDIO_ID=129
   ID_AID_129_LANG=ja
   ...
   subtitle ( sid ): 0 language: de
   ...
   subtitle ( sid ): 1 language: de
   

   So there is audio language de and ja, and 2 subtitles for de. Mplayer the DVD and press J to find out which subtitles you want to have. (mplayer shows the ID, like (0) de).

6. I have chosen AID 129 and sid 1. In the other window, start ripping the movie:

   mencoder dvd://2 -vf crop=704:432:0:72 -aid 129 -o Yojimbo.avi -vobsubout subs -vobsuboutindex 0 -sid 1

   This will get you 3 files: Yojimbo.avi with Japanese audio and x264 encoded movie video, and subs.idx and subs.sub with the subtitles. Play the movie to check everything works as it should.

7. Rip additional sound tracks now, if you want them. You can rip one additional subtitle at the same time. To do this, increase the vobsuboutindex by one, or choose another filename. I choose to rip the german audio and another subtitle track:

   mencoder dvd://2 -aid 128 -ovc frameno -o de.avi -vobsubout out -vobsuboutindex 0 -sid 1
   

   The -ovc frameno part is important, because this skips video encoding. Encoding is much faster this way because we already have the video anyways.

8. Merge everything together with mmg, this is a GUI interface for mkvmerge which you get via sudo apt-get install mkvtoolnix. Select the correct languages for the audio and subtitle tracks.

I think that’s about it. This way you will get very high quality, multi language rips with subtitles. Oh, some other interesting points to note:

• I always encode with the same resolution as the source, no rescaling. Rescaling is very bad, I much prefer that quality is reduced by the codec and not preemptively through scaling down. Even a HDTV ripped to 700MB gets you a much better quality when not rescaled than a DVD ripped to 700MB. The x264 does an awesome job at preserving quality where it is important.
• I only rip with variable bitrate VBR. It has very good quality, but it is not surround sound.

I have now two versions of the theme: one with normal icon sizes, and one with the smaller 16×16 icons for even more compactness. Here is a comparison animation of the standard Human theme vs. the compact theme:

You can download the themes here:

• HumanCompact-8.10.tar.bz2
• HumanCompactSmallIcons-8.10.tar.bz2

Download and Installation

1. Save the theme to your computer.
2. Open the gnome’s appearence dialog with System > Preferences > Appearance.
3. Drag and drop the downloaded file into the Theme tab of the appearance dialog. If you get an error message “Can’t move directory over directory”, you have already installed a theme with the same name. To be able to reinstall it, remove the directory ~/.themes/Human Compact or ~/.themes/Human Compact Small Icons.
4. Choose “Apply new theme” in the popup dialog.

Most changes will occur immediately, but for e.g. the icon sizes it is best to log out and log in again. When you change the theme, you can get the Human Compact theme back by clicking on Customize, and then selecting Human Compact.

Any question, praise or flames? please post them!

Install for root (e.g. Synaptic)

Some readers asked how to get this to work for applications that run as root (e.g. synaptic), so here it is: simply copy the copy the theme file into the root’s home directory, like this (exchange username with your own name):

sudo cp /home/username/.themes/Human\ Compact/gtk-2.0/gtkrc /root/.gtkrc-2.0

Afterwards synaptic uses the human compact theme.

Older Themes

Here is some information about the original compact themes I have created:

• How to Make a Human Compact Theme
• Human Compact Theme (for Ubuntu 8.04)
• Clearlooks Compact Theme (for Ubuntu 8.04)

UPDATE: Human Compact Theme for Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) is available!

Comparison

Move your mouse over the image to see the difference of a save dialog between Ubuntu’s 8.04 Human, and Human Compact. Buttons and spacing is much smaller which results in a lot more free space for the actual content. See for yourself:

Here are some other screenshots. The eclipse window uses 800×480 resolution, which is the same as the eee pc has.

Download and Installation

1. Save the file HumanCompact.tar.bz2 to your computer.
2. Open the gnome’s appearence dialog with System > Preferences > Appearance.
3. Drag and drop the downloaded file into the Theme tab of the appearance dialog.
4. Choose “Apply new theme” in the popup dialog.

Most changes will occur immediately, but for e.g. the icon sizes it is best to log out and log in again. When you change the theme, you can get the Human Compact theme back by clicking on Customize, and then selecting Human Compact.

Any question, praise or flames? please post them!

Install for root (e.g. Synaptic)

Some readers asked how to get this to work for applications that run as root (e.g. synaptic), so here it is: simply copy the copy the theme file into the root’s home directory, like this (exchange username with your own name):

sudo cp /home/username/.themes/Human\ Compact/gtk-2.0/gtkrc /root/.gtkrc-2.0

Afterwards synaptic uses the human compact theme.

Clearlooks Compact is a Gnome theme that tries to make use of the wasted screen space as much as possible. It is especially useful for small screens like on the Eee PC, or with intense applications like Eclipse.

This theme is picking up some steam lately:

• It is recommended from the EeeUser Installation manual (also available in many other languages, see translations to the top right).
• Somebody wrote an idea into Ubuntu’s Brainstorm, and it got 86 votes already
• I have written a bug report in Ubuntu’s launchpad a while ago, and somebody wrote an Eee PC blueprint
• There is an entry in Gnome-Look and Xfce-Look.
• And of course there are several blog postings.

I am using it on my 22″ monitor and like it here too.

I followed the excellent LVM Tutorial, and was surprised how easy everything goes. Here is a short cheat sheet of the important commands (take care to exchange the partition/volume names if you use this):

Installation

I use Ubuntu, so this is a piece of cake:

sudo apt-get install lvm2

There is also a GUI available, but I found the command line tools are very easy to use so there is no real need. I wouldn’t use EVMS as it is not supported in Ubuntu 7.10 and may cause problems.

Create a New Filesystem

First I create the physical volume on the partition sdg1, create a new volume group ext_vg that contains this physical volume, and create a new logical volume of size 450GB within the volume group. Finally create the filesystem (disabled reservation space, see Get More Space Out of Your ext3 Partition).

sudo pvcreate /dev/sdg1
sudo vgcreate ext_vg /dev/sdg1
sudo lvcreate -L 450G -n ext ext_vg
sudo mkfs.ext3 -m 0 /dev/ext_vg/ext

Show Status

Each LVM layer has its corresponding command to get information about the metadata:

sudo pvdisplay
sudo vgdisplay
sudo lvdisplay
sudo pvs
sudo vgs
sudo lvs

Mount via fstab

I use the filesystem mainly for data, so allowing just rw is enough (no executables allowed). noatime allows quicker access.

sudo mkdir /media/mega
/dev/ext_vg/ext /media/mega     ext3    rw,noatime,user 0       2
mount /media/mega

Resize

It is even possible to do an online resize of the system, wohoo This extends the logical volume by 200MB.

sudo lvextend -L +200 /dev/ext_vg/ext
sudo resize2fs -p /dev/ext_vg/ext

You can watch the resize process going on with df -h.

Add Another Partition to the Logical Volume

To add another partition and use up all the available space in the logical volume, first add the physical volume to the volume group, then use pvdisplay to find out the total available number of free PE (add the numbers from the physical volumes), then use lvextend to use up all this available space.

sudo pvcreate /dev/sdb1
sudo vgextend ext_vg /dev/sdb1
sudo pvdisplay
sudo lvextend -l +63602 /dev/ext_vg/ext
sudo resize2fs /dev/ext_vg/ext

That’s it! Any questions? please post.

I am a long-term StumbleUpon user, which means that I don’t get much sleep. Now, after almost 4 years of stumbling, I have decided to get my life back. Well, at least some sleep!

What does this do?

Every night when I have to work on the next day (Sunday night to Thursday night ), at 23:25 my computer shows me this little warning message:

I use this little trick with Ubuntu, but it should work anywhere where Gnome is installed.

How?

Thanks to the power of Linux, this is not difficult to do for yourself, and configure it however you want it to behave:

1. Open /etc/crontab with your favourite text editor (no need for crontab -e since this is the system wide crontab), e.g.

   sudo gedit /etc/crontab

2. Add the following lines (replace manker with your username!)

   25 23 * * 0-4   manker  /usr/bin/zenity --display :0 --warning --text="Shutdown in 5 minutes. Go to bed."
   25 23 * * 0-4   root    shutdown -h +5

3. The first part of both lines 25 23 * * 0-4 means that the commands are executed at 23:25, but only Sunday (day 0) to Thursday (day 4). Read man 5 crontab for a detailed description of that format.
4. The first command uses zenity to show a warning message. You have to execute this as the same user that you use for working, or you will not see the message, so change manker to your username (root does not work either).
5. The second command shutdown -h +5 means that the computer will halt in 5 minutes. This has to be run as root, and it also shows nice warning messages in all your open terminals so you can’t really miss it.
6. Save the file, and stumble until it is 23:25.

Sweet dreams!

This encouraged me to do some further updates, I have incorporated lots of several tips and from the post “Making Eclipse look good on Linux“. The result is a very compact theme that does not waste space if possible.

• Get Clearlooks Compact here.
• Vote here if you think its good or bad.

Hope you like it as much as I do