Extract audio from AV container service menu for KDE4

Nowadays, we live in a KDE4 world for real, so it’s time to update my “dump audio from video file” service menu 😉 It should work both in Konqueror and Dolphin.

Create a file with the following contents and put it in one of your service directories (which you can find out by running “kde4-config –path services” , typically you will have something like $HOME/.kde4/share/kde4/services )


[Desktop Entry]
Type=Service
Encoding=UTF-8
ServiceTypes=KonqPopupMenu/Plugin,video/*
Actions=extractaudio

[Desktop Action extractaudio]
Name=Extract audio
Name[en-GB]=Extract audio
Exec=mplayer -dumpaudio %u -dumpfile %u.dump
Icon=speaker

Time Machine for Linux: Back In Time

Recently, I watched a vid about Apple’s Time Machine and was quite impressed. For the first time in ages, I was considering to try out MacosX, after all, you have to give them credit: they just keep innovating as no other computer company. The plan was quickly abandoned though, when I discovered it wouldn’t run on my newly bought AMD monster-machine (post about that in queue ;)).

Anyhow, I searched some alternatives and somehow nothing as user-friendly showed up.. Until today I stumbled upon the solution by accident while I was checking out LinuxJournal’s tech tips! Quite interesting/entertaining stuff there btw. 🙂 I’m talking about about Back In Time and considering the Ubuntu dev, it even has a KDE4 gui, yay! 🙂

Check out the LJ screencast and the LifeHacker article.

Best. Plugin. Ever.

I was trying to watch a vid on a website which was quicktime only. Since I’ve had some trouble a few days ago to play a wmv file on a windows media only site, I decided to give the firefox mplayer plugin a try. I had heard of it before but never found a compelling reason to install it. Until now. It just plays _everything_! I can’t believe how I could live so long without it. 🙂 Or maybe because 99% of the web’s vids are flash? 😉 (which works, of course)

Here is the supported formats list:
Window Media: wmv, avi, asf, wav and asx
QuickTime: mov and smil
MPEG Video and Audio: mpeg and mp3
Ogg Vorbis: ogg
AutoDesk FLI: fli and flc
Vivo: vivo
Real Player: ram and rm

Opera 10 send mail problem

I just discovered I had a mail in my outbox I sent last week. It turned out one of my email accounts was not properly migrated from Opera 9.
I ran Wireshark and it seemed Opera was sending a wrong parameter with the EHLO command (which queries an ESMTP server for its capabilities). It sent EHLO smtpserver instead of EHLO myhostname. Of course the server replied this could not be the case since he was that host himself. =)
So I grepped the accounts.ini file to see where that information could come from. It turned out there was a fqdn property present containing the smtp server name which was not present anymore in a newly created account (yet it seemed to attach some value to it, apparently). So I simply deleted the fqdn property and all was solved. 🙂
Keep in mind, I am upgrading the same opera profile since Opera 7 so I guess my particular upgrade scenario has received less attention. 😉

git through proxy

You’re at work and want to access your git repo who’s residing in the free external world?

create the following config file in your .ssh folder:

Host
ProxyCommand connect -S <proxy host>:<proxy port> %h %p

replace the hosts and port as appropriate.

You can find the connect executable for windows here (contains a lot of other useful socks info as well).
Hat tip to pieter.