Enable Gnome Video Thumbnails in Arch Linux

Gnome’s file manager Nautilus does a great job of automatically thumbnailing all kinds of files including pretty much any video file.
But, in a fresh Arch Linux install you still need a few gstreamer packages to enable totem-video-thumbnailer to do its job…

Hide Administrator from Welcome Screen in Vista

By default the Administrator account in Vista is Disabled – everything is run in a sudo fashion without actually logging in to the Administrator account. Some times due to external password recovery systems or other various reasons the built-in Administrator account is enabled, causing it to show up on the Welcome Screen.
In order to stop [...]

Atheros Wireless in Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex

Did a fresh install + updates of Kubuntu 8.10 on a customer’s laptop and had no wireless even though it’s an Atheros chipset.

Using SIW to Find Hardware in Windows

I’ve often resorted to loading up a Linux livecd and running “lspci” just to get an idea of what hardware is in a box. Let’s face it, even if box manufacturers do provide the drivers you need, that model may have shipped with one of 4 different NICs, video cards, etc. So it used to [...]

Useful find Commands

Recursive, multi-file find and replace with grep and xargs for performance:
Source: http://www.jonasblog.com/2006/05/search-and-replace-in-all-files-within-a-directory-recursively.html
grep -rl 'what_to_find' ./ | xargs sed -i 's/what_to_find/what_to_replace_with/g'
Put  a not in front of that expression:
find ./ ! -type d
Escape wildcards to avoid the shell expanding them:
If you just quote it; “*.avi” you can often run into trouble.
find ./ -name \*.avi
Prune empty directories
find ./ [...]

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 [...]

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.

Echo PHP Nested Array Contents + Keys

I’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.

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.

The below is a MySQL query to [...]

The REAL Way to Change Lost Passwords in Ubuntu

If you lose any of your user passwords – including root you can change your password booting into single user mode. What you aren’t likely to find off the bat is the proper instructions to do it. They are out there, but chances are you will have to dig a little after some frustration. The [...]