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when the bleeding edge just doesn’t cut it

Disable Recent Documents in Gnome 2.22.3

So even Windows lets you disable the Recent Documents feature, but for some reason Gnome really wants to remember what files you’ve been messing with. Personally I never use this menu item (usually under Places in the Gnome Main Menu) and find it to be a bit of a privacy concern.

Surprisingly enough there are no documented settings for Recent Documents, not even something in gconf-editor, so people have been going stone age to prevent this functionality. In the past you could change permissions for the file that stores the data in your home directory, but it seems in later versions of Gnome the following is the current method of choice.

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Join two .avi Videos with Mencoder/Mplayer

A lot of videos available from various sources are often encoded as .avi files close to 700MB in order to fit on a singleCD-R. This works out just great, but sometimes vids are split into two 700MB .avi files to fit two CDs so you get a Coolest-Movie-EVER_-_[2010][xVid](mp3)_dUff-mAn_CD1.avi and another but with “CD2” instead.

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Warning: FileZilla FTP Passwords now Stored in Plaintext

FileZilla Plaintext PasswordsI feel that this should be brought to the attention of FileZilla users out there even though it may be a huge concern. (Lots of apps do this but potentially giving up FTP access info to a bunch of servers you are responsible for is something to be avoided). Jump to the Important Stuff

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Praise for eeeXubuntu

Inifinite EeeSo when I first got my Black Asus Eee PC 4G xmas ‘07 I pretty much freaked out about all the possibilities but ended up installing my distro of choice, Arch Linux and all the Eee specific hardware support, then it kinda sat… and sat, until. I recently decided to review the current OS choices available for the Eee and settled on eeeXubuntu as the best candidate - clean little Ubuntu based with Eee hardware support out of the box. Besides, I just wanted to use my Eee not fiddle with the thing (I had my fill a few months ago, it was fun though).

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Echo PHP Nested Array Contents + Keys

PHP LogoI’ve always had some trouble with the syntax for accessing Nested Arrays and their Keys in PHP so I wanted to make note of this.

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My Apps List: Windows XP

WinXP Apps Screenshot

I’ve been doing a few reinstalls on my workstation boxes lately so I put together this list to save myself some time. This will change as I remember/find stuff.

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MySQL: Convert all Values in Column to Upper Case

Recently using osCommerce I had a customer who wished to have all the products’ names in uppercase but they had been entered in mixed case. After having some trouble finding a simple answer through Google, I pieced together this simple query that can also be adapted to other situations.

MySQL Query

The below is a MySQL query to update all of the products’ names in an osCommerce catalog to uppercase - you can copy this into phpMyAdmin.

UPDATE products_description SET `products_name` = UPPER( `products_name` )

OR GENERICALLY:

UPDATE table_name SET `column_name` = UPPER( `column_name` )

PhotoRec Saved My Butt

So my reckless typing really got me into trouble this time. I was attempting to zero-out a usb drive when I managed to put the wrong device in the dd command - I automatically typed sda1 (the primary HD) out of habit instead of sdb1 - the usb drive. I caught my mistake and gave it a solid control + c but I had still wiped out the first 60 MBs of the drive.

PhotoRec

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Why I Like KDE 4

So everyone trashed on KDE 4.0, I’ll admit I wasn’t impressed either, until I read the articles explaining that this is more of a milestone release - getting the core together, and that future releases will be something worth getting excited about.

KDE 4

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