Nienhouse

Having a system here in the house that runs Boxee as a front end has been wonderful, but the one thing every user of Boxee will say is that it needs to be updated. Well, the time has come – this fall!

What is Boxee, you ask? Well it’s this pretty awesome Media-Center that was originally made for Linux/Mac/Windows, then was put onto it’s own hardware called the “Boxee Box.” You can check it out at http://boxee.tv/.

Good news for PC/Mac/Linux users – we are working to update the downloadable software version of Boxee and hope to have builds available this fall so you can enjoy the updated browser, improved playback, and lots more content that are currently available on the Boxee Box.

We know Boxee users on computers have been frustrated with the long wait and we want to be open with you about our priorities, growth, and the future of Boxee.

Read the rest of the post at the Boxee Blog.

UPDATE: The update hasn’t come yet, but I’ve been told by one of the people on their support team that the update is still going to be released by the end of the year.

Inserting Charts/Graphs

I have recently been asked how to insert a graph in Apple’s iWork Pages program, so here is a short post about inserting a chart or graph in Pages.

Inserting Graphs

To insert a chart, just simply click on the “Charts” button on the tool bar then you can select what type of chart you would like.

You can also go to the “Insert” menu then go to “Charts”. This will give you a list of different charts you can insert.

Editing Graph Data

Once you add a graph, the “Chart Data Editor” should comes up. This will allow you to edit the data that the graph displays.

The "Chart Data Editor"

Formatting the Graph

Along with the Data Editor, the “Inspector” also comes up which gives you options for formatting how your graph looks.

The "Inspector"

ATI

(Edit: this tutorial does not work with Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala and I will unfortunately not be able to update it for Karmic because I do not have the time nor hardware.)

(Edit 03/14/10: I no longer have the hardware to work on this issue. -This tutorial is no longer officially supported by myself- I personally suggest finding a way to get new hardware (NOT ATI – the driver aren’t worth it) and upgrading to the latest release of Ubuntu.)

Information on how to fix this issue in newer releases of Ubuntu is available.

Joseph Crowell
4/6/2010

Help with the open source ATI legacy drivers on Ubuntu 9.10:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver

Follow that guide to the point where it links to “KMS with a Radeon card” then follow the link to here:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/KernelModeSetting

and follow the instructions in the section KMS with a radeon card.

This worked perfectly for me on my ATI Radeon Xpress 200M.

With the newest realease of Ubuntu (9.04 Jaunty Jackalope) came a major problem with support for older ATI graphics cards. Though these cards work with generic drivers, the ability to use dual heads and more advanced configurations has been lost. You may think that you can simply head over to AMD’s ATI driver page and get a driver, but the latest version of Catalyst does not support the older cards. “Maybe I can just download an older version of the driver,” might be what you are thinking, but the old driver is not compatible with the new version of xserver that is included with Ubuntu Jaunty.

The only way to use the old driver is to downgrade your xserver, which is actually not too hard. As long as you have an internet connection and some terminal skills, you are set.

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After easily setting up your Gmail IMAP account in KMail (perhaps using a tutorial like the one featured on Jatecblog) you may wonder how to set up your outgoing SMTP acout too.  After some looking around, I don’t see much of anything on this subject other than people having problems setting it up, so I sat down to figure it and and I believe I have figured it out. Here’s how I went about doing it.

1. First off, open up KMail and go to “Configure KMail” under the Settings menu. This will bring up (as you might have guessed) the settings for KMail.

KMail: Settings > Configure KMail...

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I just moved over to KDE 3.5 (the good old days) and was migrating everything over to Kontact (which includes Akregator) and decided it would be nice to import my Google Reader feeds into Akregator. I’ve compiled steps on how I did this myself.

1. Head over to Google Reader (http://google.com/reader/) and go to the “Import/Export” tab under your settings.

Google Reader : Settings > Import/Export

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Sometimes a corrupt installation package can corrupt your package management system leaving your Linux unable to install or on remove any packages (Software). Here is the message error I got from apt-get after trying to install ndas-admin for Ubuntu.
$sudo apt-get install mplayer   (or any package)
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
E: The package ndas-admin needs to be reinstalled, but I can’t find an archive for it. (this is the error)

I got stuck with this problem and this article fixed it right up!

Original post by ITechLog > Fix Broken package – Ubuntu

The popular community developed Linux distribution “Ubuntu”, which releases every six months (a month after each GNOME) is having it’s 10 release this month! This upcoming release is version 9.04 which is named “Jaunty Jackalope”

Here I’ve compiled a list of all of the Ubuntu releases with their release dates, names, and version numbers.

1. October 26, 2004 – Ubuntu Warty Warthog (4.10)
2. April 8, 2005 – Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog (5.04)
3. October 12, 2005 – Ubuntu Breezy Badger (5.10)
4. June 1, 2006 – Ubuntu Dapper Drake (6.06 LTS*)
5. October 26, 2006 – Ubuntu Edgy Eft (6.10)
6. April 19, 2007 – Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04)
7. October 18, 2007 – Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10)
8. April 24, 2008 – Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04 LTS*)
9. October 30, 2008 – Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex (8.10)
10. April, 2009 – Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope (9.04)

(*LTS – Long Term Support. Releases with long term support are released every two years, and supported for three years (Desktop) or five years (Server) after the release.)

This tutorial explains how to set a specific default ALSA device for Amarok and Kaffeine. (This was tested in Amarok 1.4.9.1 and Kaffeine 0.8.6 both using xine on Kubuntu 8.04 [Hardy Heron]) The main advantage of this would be having your media go through one set of speakers and the system sounds going through another.

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DRM, which means Digital Rights Management (or as many say, Digital Restriction Manager), restricts how you can use media and even devices that you have purchased. DRM is used by many companies including Apple, Microsoft, and Sony.

When a file is protected by DRM the number of computers it can be used on can be limited and many other things. I would guess this would include things like the amount of time and the time of day it can be used.

Along with restriction of use, if a DRM server is shut down, the files are no longer usable. For example the Yahoo! music service was shut down recently and now people who purchased music from Yahoo! can no longer listen to the music they downloaded. Apple offers both DRM protected and DRM free files.

Apple’s DRM Restrictions:

• The media can be used on an unlimited number of iPods




• The media can be played simultaneously on no more that 5 computers




• A playlist containing a DRM protected track can be burned to 7 CDs before being required to change the playlist’s contents.




• Fortunately, though, you can burn this track to an unlimited number of standard Audio CDs. The resulting CD will have no DRM protection, but this may result in lower quality audio.

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairPlay )

By summer time, Apple will no longer use DRM with iTunes!

There are many biased websites about DRM like “Defective By Design” (http://defectivebydesign.org/).

Personally, I think that DRM shouldn”t be used, and that perhaps people shouldn’t try to protect things like that. I really think that with the current copyright laws and the ignorant people that the market relies are good enough because the owners of these intellectual properties would make enough money without having to tell who can use it and keeping certain people from using it in this way.