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…

Relevant Windows 7 facts

This is not meant to be a thorough report, just the highlights I found relevant related to its recent release.
Versions

Starter is weak (for netbooks) 32-bit only, OEM pre-install only
Home Basic is for emerging markets (we probably won’t see it in the US much)
Home Premium is what most consumers will end up with
Professional is the lowest [...]

Sometimes Ghost is truly the best tool

Lately I’ve been loving Clonezilla for rolling out refurbed Dell workstations. It’s been really cool, boot from USB “liveCD”, clone disk to disk directly over gigabit ethernet, reboot, repeat. But after doing 10 of them, I ran into the true limitation of Clonezilla. Clonezilla relies on ntfsclone and partimage (great tools) but they share a [...]

Fix Slow Scrolling in jEdit

So far jEdit is proving to be a great editor (FTP/SFTP support is great) but after tweaking it to my liking (BufferTabs plugin, fonts, etc.) I noticed that scrolling the main text area had become very slow. I didn’t want to just blame Java so I looked it up and found the cause.

Fix slow connections to Ubuntu SSH servers

As of Ubuntu 8.10 and older, connections to SSH servers with default configs can be annoyingly slow. This is because the OpenSSH daemon uses DNS to run a reverse lookup on the client to be sure that they aren’t faking their hostname. You can disable most look-ups by implementing the following setting:
As root edit “/etc/ssh/sshd_config” [...]

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 [...]

Fix Vista Update Loop

Symptoms include this message on boot:
“configuring updates stage 3 of 3. 0% complete”
and then an automatic reboot and the same message over and over again in an endless loop.

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 ./ [...]