Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

Screencasting in Linux

I came across an excellent tutorial on how to do screencasts in Linux.  The original article is in Russian, so I just grabbed the important bits and translated them below.

  • Install screencast recording application.  recordmydekstop is available via yum install recordmydesktop and comes with a simple and straight-forward interface for both KDE and Gnome.
  • Record a screencast.
  • If you want to edit the screencast (cut out mistakes, add music, etc), install a video editor.  These came recommended: Pitivi, Kino, Kdenlive.
  • Edit your screencast.
  • Convert to AVI if needed (recommended before uploading to video hosting services, such as YouTube, as they don’t always work well with Ogg).  ffmpeg -i screencast.ogv screencast.avi should do it.  ffmpeg is also available in most distributions.  You can play more with parameters, or prepare the video during the editing stage.
  • Upload the video and share.

This is the kind of a guide that I need once in a while, but which I can’t seem to find when I need it.  Hopefully now that I have it blogged, it’ll come handy.

Happy 6th birthday, Firefox!

Download Squad reminds us that it has only been 6 years that Firefox is with us.   That’s true, but I find it so hard to believe.  What was the web experience before Firefox came along?  I remember that Firefox made it way better, but I don’t really remember how bad it was before that.  And even though I spend most of these days using Google Chrome, I clocked thousands of hours in Firefox and it is almost like a relative to me.

Happy birthday dear browser! Best wishes and may you continue to improve, especially now that you have some competition to get you going.

Adding flags to Gnome keyboard layout switch

One of the little things that has been bugging me for a few years now is the Gnome keyboard layout switch.  I am using two layouts – English and Russian – and instead of having two nice flags, like in KDE, I had to live with ‘USA’ and ‘RUS’ letters in my task bar.  Not that big of a problem, but annoying.  Icons are much easier and faster to understand than text.  And all the other things in my task bar are graphical, so the text stands out too much.

Today I finally decided to do something about.  Thanks to this forum post I had a solution in hand which almost worked.  The steps were:

  1. Download en.png and ru.png icons into ~/.icons/flags/ folder.
  2. Run gconf-editor.
  3. Change the value of /desktop/gnome/peripherals/keyboard/indicator/showFlags to true.

The only thing that went wrong for me were the actual images.  Gnome scaled them to 24×24 pixels and they looked rater ugly.  So I created my own icons using Gimp.  I created a new image 24×24 pixels with transparent background and then dropped in the center of it the flag icon that I got from the FamFamFam icon set.  Saved the results back into the ~/.icons/flags/ folder and vuala!

Type while walking problem solved

Even though I don’t ever type when I walk or drive, I can still aware of the problem.  And I think that this solution – a mobile phone application, which uses the camera to project the image in front of you as the background of your text entry – is really genius!  Simple, straight-forward, and utilizing available resources.

Via Download Squad.

Diagram : Internet vs. Privacy

I’ve spoken my opinion on my trying to protect online privacy before.  If you missed it, I tend to mostly agree with those bold voices saying that the privacy no longer exists.  At least not online.  Today’s addendum is a this Venn diagram that illustrates the opinion.

Via Geeks Are Sexy.