Get Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope Now
So Ubuntu has released 9.04 as an RC and you’re waiting for launch day to get it. Bad idea. If you’re planning on upgrading to the latest and greatest Ubuntu 9.04. I recommend doing it now. When it’s officially launched, there’s no telling when you’ll be able to get your hands on it because of the server load. Here’s how.
Hit “Alt + F2″ and type “update-manager -d”
Want more? Sorry. That’s all I got.
Speak & Spell In Ubuntu?
Turns out Ubuntu has a seriously weird built in text-to-speech function available right in the terminal. It unfortunately sounds strikingly similar to Speak & Spell…just in case you weren’t around during the glory days of Speak & Spell (*ahem*), you seriously have to check this out first.
Now that you know why there is a generation of people who ‘can’t speak good’, I’m going to show you how to make Ubuntu talk.
- Open a terminal and type
espeak "Luke, I am your father" - Just make sure you type ‘espeak’ and then follow that with a string of text in quotes (don’t forget to wrap it in quotes)
More Options
Espeak can do some other really cool things including saving to a WAV file and speaking in different voices. Here’s how.
Save as a WAV file
- Enter:
espeak -w luke.wav "Luke, I am your father"
Monitor Your Laptops Power Consumption With Ubuntu
Found a really cool and very useful command today to monitor your Ubuntu laptop’s power consumption. Simply type the following command into your terminal.
gnome-power-statistics
If your hardware supports it, you should be presented with a screen that looks similar to the following
It’s interesting to play around with this to see how different things affect your laptops power. I turned the brightness down on my laptop from 100% to about 50% and the drop was dramatic. There are also different graphs you can view like charge history of your current session.
Quick Google Reader Subscription Update Tip
The biggest problem I have with Google Reader is how it acts sometimes when you have a ton of feeds (I’ve got 200+ feeds I read daily). I’ll go through them all, then the feeds will update, but the ‘new’ ones are actually after the ones I just read. Yesterday I came across a feature in Google Reader yesterday that makes updating your feeds a little easier, and will hopefully solve this problem (fingers crossed).
Click on the actual ‘Subscriptions’ text in the left hand side
This should run the ‘Refresh’ action that you can also find in the small drop down arrow next to Subscriptions, this is just nice and quick.
I’m testing this by making sure I click this everytime before I read my feeds to see if it clears up the issue I was having. Anyway, just a nice quick tip to make Google Reader even more useful.
YUI Compressor Gets An Awesome Online GUI
I use YUI Compressor to compress all my JavaScript files and up until now, they only way to do it was via the command line. While this is fairly easy for me, I think the majority of people don’t compress their JS files because they’re not sure how (or this practice hasn’t permeated the masses of average web developers).
Rodolphe Stoclin has come up with an incredibly useful online tool that takes the YUI Compressor and adds a web GUI to it, making it dead simple to use. It looks like he’s using jQuery to do everything on the fly with no page reload and it even tells you the compression ratio.
I tested the tool with an uncompressed version of MooTools and it works exactly as you would expect. If you’re not compressing your JavaScript files, now’s the time. It’s not going to get any easier than this.
Enable Num Lock On Boot In Ubuntu
One of the things that instantly annoyed me the first time I really started using Ubuntu was that the num lock was turned off by default at boot. A very small thing, but one that seems odd they wouldn’t fix since it’s so incredibly simple. Here’s how I did it.
- Once you’re in your Ubuntu desktop, make sure your num lock is on (I don’t think it really needs to be, but I did it just in case)
- Open Synaptic Package Manager and search for ‘numlockx’ and install it (or open a terminal and type ‘sudo apt-get install numlockx‘)
Reboot your computer to see if num lock stays on this time. If it doesn’t, there are some more configurations on the official Ubuntu site that you can follow.
RUBotted?
If for some reason you think your computer has been compromised by a botnet, Trend Micro has a slick tool call RUBotted. It’s small, lightweight and simple to use. Here’s how to do it.
- Download RUBotted here
- Run the installer
- You should now see the icon in your systray
- If you left the box checked to run the program, you will see the following screen
- If all is well, you now see this screen
That’s about it. you can leave this thing running in your systray to constantly monitor your computer, but if your careful on the internet you shouldn’t need to have it running all the time. It should also be noted that this is in beta so if it crashes, don’t be surprised.
A Cheap WiFi Adapter For Linux That Just Works
I’ve been searching for a very cheap wifi adapter that works out of the box with Linux. My search has finally come to an end with the AirLink 101 802.11G (AWLL3026).
I found this thing at Fry’s on the bottom shelf of wifi adapters, shoved way in the back where no one could get to it or see it. Original price $30. New price $10. What can I say but “Linux users are cheap as hell“:)
I’ve been recommending different Linux distros to a few friends for their old, secondary machines at home and everything seems to be working well except one thing…wireless.
Up until now, the only wifi adapters I could find that I knew for a fact were going to work with Linux without having to install the ndiswrapper or madwifi were around $40 or more. I would love to have wifi with my MythTV box, but not for $40. I also didn’t feel comfortable recommending such an expensive device for someone’s secondary “we were just going to throw it out” machine.
RE: Apple tells you how to use your iPod to move music onto another computer.
So I just read an article on Digg entitled “Apple tells you how to use your iPod to move music onto another computer.” After the first couple paragraphs I stopped reading and looked over at my scroll bar. Holy crap! The way I figure, on a screen resolution at 1280X1024, the process takes roughly ten and a half pages to describe (see it here). I call bull on Steve Jobs, DRM and the RIAA.
I took it upon myself to simplify the process…
Much better…
Stick It To the Cell Phone-Man
For the past couple months I’ve been seeing tons of articles dealing with “Confessions of a <insert cell phone company here> Sales Rep”. There are tons of amazing resources and tips in these so I thought would put together a list of all the different stories for easy acces. Enjoy:)
There should be enough information here to get yourself a decent deal on all those overpriced plans and cell phones.
