Ubuntu Countdown
Batch Zip and Rename – I love the Terminal!
Today I needed to compress numerous (around 25) directories into individual archives (in this case, zip’s) and then rename them with a different extension (in this case ‘cbz’). This would have been extremely painful to do manually… I mean, right click a directory — one at a time — then left click “compress” (or zip, depending on the context menu)… and I’m not even going to go into renaming (there are at least 3 ways to manually rename a file, and I don’t want to describe them now. If you care to know just ask).
So what did I do? Did I really bother with all of that nonsense?! NO WAY! I have no patience for that!
Here’s the easy
Response to Reader Question: How to Archive Facebook Chats
Howto: Add Your Facebook Friends to Pidgin (via The Linuxologist)
One of my readers (and friends) asked:
“Is there a way to retrieve your facebook chats somewhere on your computer?”
While I personally do not use the Facebook chat (or any chat, seriously. I just don’t have time), I don’t get questions from my readers very often so I thought I’d look into it.
Here is what I’ve found…
The Basics
Facebook chat — as it is when you are logged in to Facebook.com — is nothing more than an HTML/AJAX “chat”… I’m trying to keep this in as plain of terms as possible for the sake of time and to save you the headache of technical details (I assume
Lexmark x1240 meet Ubuntu – play nice
I have an old Lexmark 3-in-one scanner/copier/printer and it’s been sitting on my desk collecting dust. I finally had a use for it today as I needed to scan something. I know that Lexmark printers are notorious for being unfriendly to Linux, so I did some searching before plugging the printer in.
Everywhere I looked showed that there is no scanning support for the Lexmark as they refuse to release any source code for their print drivers, and the only binaries they offer are for print functionality only.
Well I remembered that I had previously installed XSane (though for some reason I cannot remember why), so I figured I’d just mess around and see what happens.
I plugged in the
Ubuntu User Day – January 23rd
The first Ubuntu user day is scheduled for January 23rd!
It is geared toward new/beginner users, but anyone is welcome to participate.
Ubuntu wired connection problems
So my mom told me today that her Internet hasn’t been working since my sister was in town and disconnected her Ethernet cable and setup a wireless router and then put it all back to “normal”.
I’m not quite sure what caused the problem, but I went through the usual troubleshooting steps, including disconnecting the power from the cable modem, waiting 30-60 seconds, then powering it up to re-cycle it.
Once I booted up into Ubuntu 9.10 (yeah my mom is cool enough to run Linux) and tested out the connection. It appeared that network manager (nm) was somehow set to not manage networks by default anymore. So I did the following:
gksudo gedit /etc/NetworkManager/nm-system-settings.conf
Then I changed the settings