Tip

While I hate Real as much as just about everybody else, I inadvertently downloaded an RMVB file today and was pleasantly surprised at the quality vs. file size ratio. At about 70MB for a 25 minute episode, the quality was - relatively speaking - extremely good.

To quote WP:

If you encounter issues with WinAMP not reporting the length of the song in the playlist, it is very likely that the mp3 is corrupt. However, in some cases, this could be due to a bug in WinAMP (I'm using v5.34) disliking unicode characters in the ID3 tags. In my case, an mp3 with the artist's name tagged as Dvořák - diacritics and all and especially the caronned (sic) r - was not gettings its song length displayed next to its title.

Removing the diacritic would have "fixed" the problem. But, I actually left it as it was.

I came across a neat service named Cryocopy earlier today. What it essentially does is mimic the service provided by archive.org except for the fact that Cryocopy does it on demand instantaneously and saves a screenshot to boot.

To quote:

CryoCopy is a web archiving service that allows manual caching of Internet pages, fully saving them both in HTML and in bitmap (PNG) format. This is done almost instantly upon request, not days or weeks apart, like with other services.

If you follow the posts on this site, you'd have noticed my issues with the recent Hardy upgrade. While I thought they'd been fixed in my fstab, this was apparently not the case. When I rebooted the machine next, I couldn't even get to the shell as I encountered the message - Unable to execute /bin/sh - Permission Denied.

The Flash plug-in for Opera in Kubuntu has been FUBAR-ed and it seems that it's caused due to an Opera bug w.r.t Flash player 9.0.115 which is fixed in the 9.50 betas. However, since Kubuntu etc. are still using 9.27, the only way to fix this issue is to go back to 9.0.48.

Yesterday, I decided to upgrade my Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10 install to the latest 8.04 Hardy Heron. While I didn't have any specific feature that I thought I might need, I really wanted to see if an upgrade would help me access my digital camera which isn't terribly well supported in 7.10.

WPA 2 is pretty much the default encryption standard for wifi networks nowadays. However, standard XP installations do not support it by default. To enable WPA2 support, an update - KB893357 - needs to be downloaded and installed.

If you are not keen on going through the whole Genuine Windows (sic) crap, googling for KB893357 should provide you with a direct download link for the update.

Firebug, the extremely popular add-on for Firefox is indispensable when it comes to debugging CSS issues. However, with the last update to Firefox, trying to inspect the CSS rules for an anchor element failed.

Issue: The update to Firefox 2.0.0.12 broke something.

If you are experiencing speed issues with your CD or DVD drive, here are some tips that might help:

1. Make sure that you use an 80-conductor data cable and that it is fine.

If you run into an error message along the lines of mount: /dev/sdb2 already mounted or /media/data1 busy, and the disk has not been mounted, it usually indicates that something has locked it intentionally to prevent it from being mounted. In my case, the culprit was dmraid, a RAID management tool that I am not using any more. Uninstalling the package did the trick. (Removing the array configuration from dmraid would probably have sufficed)

hth.