But, in a fresh Arch Linux install you still need a few gstreamer packages to enable totem-video-thumbnailer to do its job…

1. Install necessary packages (as root):

pacman -Sy --needed totem gstreamer0.10-{{bad,good,ugly,base}{,-plugins},ffmpeg}

2. Delete old video thumbnails to force generation of new ones:

rm -rf ~/.thumbnails/fail

3. Browse a folder of video files in Nautilus:

In some cases you may need to restart Nautlius for the changes to take effect:

killall nautilus

…or simply log out and log in again.

System Info

• Arch Linux – Kernel 2.6.31-ARCH
• Gnome 2.28.0
• packages gnome & gnome-extra

Source

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Common_codecs

In order to stop the Administrator account from showing as a login option on the Welcome Screen in Windows Vista you need to set the Administrator account to not active with the net user command from an Administrative cmd prompt as follows:

net user Administrator /active:no

Some people report that the “/” causes the command to fail, try it without:

net user Administrator active:no

From then on the the Administrator account should no longer show on the Welcome Screen.

SOURCE:

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/08/10/activate-enable-and-show-administrator-account-in-vista-welcome-screen/

UPDATE:

I recently tried this method on a similar Acer laptop with Ubuntu 8.10 AMD64 with no results. After searching, I used another guide that makes compiling madwifi from source simple. If my method doesn’t work for you, remove the backports modules:

sudo apt-get remove linux-backports-modules-intrepid-generic

then reboot, and try out the below guide. Thank you Hyperandy.

Link: http://blog.hyperandy.com/2008/11/01/atheros-ar242x-ubuntu-810-ibex/

Hardware:

• Laptop: Acer Aspire 4520
• Wireless Card: Atheros AR242x Communications Inc. 802.11abg

lspci | grep "Atheros"
07:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)

Resolution:

sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-intrepid-generic

After above install completes, reboot, then open up the Hardware Drivers manager (jockey-gtk or jockey-kde) and disable “Support for Atheros 802.11 wireless LAN cards” and make sure that “Support for 5xxx series of Atheros 802.11 wireless LAN cards” is enabled then reboot. You may need to reboot to see both drivers in the Hardware Drivers manager.

This is at least a temporary fix, you’ll end up with the ath5k drivers- hopefully a stable universal method for Atheros card support will become available soon.

Source:
8.10 Release Notes | Ubuntu

I thought SIW (System Information for Windows) was a nifty tool from the beginning, it replaced CPU-Z for RAM and Mobo information and since discovering the PCI listing, getting appropriate drivers has become much easier. Now don’t think just cause it’s under PCI that only PCI related devices are there, pretty much every relevant device is in there including VGA controllers, Bluetooth adapters, SATA Controllers, and more.

Anyway, all you gotta do is get siw.exe from gtopala.com, run it and go down to the Hardware tree, then click PCI. You can also click on the Hardware menu up top then PCI or hit File, then Create Report File to get it to go.

Don’t forget, SIW also has a Password Revealer (Tools -> Eureka!), a MAC Address Changer (Tools -> Mac Address Changer), a Licenses List (Software -> Licenses), and much more fun.

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 ./ -depth -type d -empty -exec rmdir -v {} \;

Source: http://duramecho.com/ComputerPrograms/DeleteEmptyDirectories/index.html

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.

METHOD:

Enter the following into a terminal:

rm ~/.recently-used.xbel
mkdir ~/.recently-used.xbel

When you’re done, go check your menu and Recent Documents should be grayed out.

This works because the data concerning your recent documents can’t be written to a directory and the Recent Documents menu item is simply disabled. (I played around with retaining the text file and changing its permissions, but they were eventually always overwritten.)

NOTES:

It has been mentioned that you may receive GTK related warnings in the console after applying this, since we did a sort of end-run that’s kind of expected.

There was another method that involved making the file immutable (sudo chattr +i ~/.recently-used.xbel) but this is only for ext2/ext3 filesystems (I prefer JFS whenever applicable).

There may also be a left over file, ~/.recently_used that you can also remove:

rm ~/.recently-used

SOURCES:

Arch Linux Forums /  Disable Gnome Recent Documents [solved]

Disable recent documents – Ubuntu Forums

I take no responsibility for coming up with this hack, I just wanted to clearly document it. BTW, this has been a problem since 2005 > Bug 30942 – Request to add option to disable ‘Recent Documents’ lists

Well I tend to just let these vids chill on my hard drive where space isn’t an issue, so I’d rather just have one 1.4GB vid file instead. In order to cleanly join two halves of a .avi together I use MEncoder in the following command:

mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy -idx -o Final_Big_Output_File.avi First_Half_Video_File.avi Other_Half_Video_File.avi

So, Final_Big_Output_File.avi = the big output file to be created,

First_Half_Video_File.avi = the path to the first half of the video,

and Other_Half_Video_File.avi = the path to the file with the second half.

Note: This method assumes that both halves have the same codec, resolution, etc.

MEncoder is usually packaged with its close friend MPlayer which is available on pretty much any platform. I’ve successfully tested this command on Arch Linux with MEncoder 1.0rc2-4.3.1 and Windows XP with MEncoder 1.0rc2-4.2.1 (just grabbed a binary from MPLayerHQ) – besides, this is a popular method.

I know there are other ways to combine two .avi s but this was the cleanest and most reliable for me, if you have any others worth looking into please leave a comment.

Structure is as follows:

print_r $contents;

([Cutbacks.jpg] => Array
(
[time] => 1207637110
[hash] => 05dee882129fe1574bcc8379ad3a40ac
[size] => 43928
)
[matrix3.zip] => Array
(
[time] => 1208040588
[hash] => 5f317404880304b82e9502fb399f2737
[size] => 46790
)
)

Code:

foreach( $contents as $key => $list ) {
echo 'Filename: ' . $key . "\n";
echo 'Time: ' . $list['time'] . "\n";
echo 'Hash: ' . $list['hash'] . "\n";
echo 'Size: ' . $list['size'] . "\n";
echo '----Next File----' . "\n";
}

Outputs:

Filename: Cutbacks.jpg
Time: 1207637110Hash: 05dee882129fe1574bcc8379ad3a40ac
Size: 43928
----Next File----
Filename: matrix3.zip
Time: 1208040588
Hash: 5f317404880304b82e9502fb399f2737
Size: 46790
----Next File----

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` )

Scroll down for simplified instructions!

1. Reboot, when the message from GRUB comes up, hit Escape to view the boot menu.
2. Scroll down to the first like with “Recovery Mode” in the title ane hit “e” to edit that boot line.
3. Select the like that starts with “kernel”, hit “e” to edit.
4. At the end of the line, the option “single” should already be there, leave a space after single and add “init=/bin/bash” this makes it so that you immediately are dumped to a root command line.
5. Hit Enter, then “b” to boot. Wait to boot and be left at a root console – it will look like “root@(none):/#“.
6. Remount the OS partition so that it’s writable (in this example “hda1″ – maybe “sda1″ or otherwise) with the command “mount /dev/hda1/ -o remount,rw”
7. From there you can issue the command “passwd <username>” or just “passwd” for the root user password and you can enter the new password for the user and reboot.

Simplified instructions:

1. Hit escape to enter GRUB menu.
2. Hit “e” on the first recovery boot line.
3. Select the line beginning with “kernel” and hit “e”
4. Leave a space after “single” and add “init=/bin/bash”
5. Hit Enter then “b” to boot.
6. Wait to boot and be dumped at a root console.
7. Remount the OS partition “mount /dev/hda1 / -o remount,rw”
8. Use “passwd <username>” to change the user password .
9. Reboot.

I take no credit for this procedure, I definitely wouldn’t be able to figure that all out on my own.