Online Video Chatting with a Flash Plugin

One of the fastest and easiest ways to video chat with someone is with the flash browser plugin. Here are several pages available:
- MeBeam
- feel free to post more in the comments!

Set the Default Sound Card in Ubuntu

If you have more than one sound card, you might want to set the preferred/default one:

You can find out the sound cards' names with
asoundconf list
and change the default one with
sudo asoundconf set-default-card xxx

Comfortable Internet TV on your Linux Box with Boxee

Now here's a company that did it the right way: The software is based upon the XBMC, is thus open source and released for Mac and Linux already while the Windows version is still in development :)
Boxee allows you to easily access popular channels such as BBC, Joost, MTV and Hulu. But right now their apt server is not working properly at all.
Btw. You need to register before you get the download address.

Multi-Threaded Bzip2 Compression

Did you know there's a (weirdly named) zipmt compression program that does only one thing: compress to bzip2 with multiple threads. Crazy that this is still not done automatically with the normal bzip2. You may also you parallel bzip2. The advantage of zipmt is that it can compress from standard input, which pbzip2 unfortunately does not. pbzip2 has the advantage that is can automatically detect the number of CPUs and adjust the cpu usage according to the current system/cpu load.

Backup your File System Better with FSArchiver

Interesting you hardly hear anything about the program. FSArchiver supports many important features, including multi-threaded compression and easy backup from one to another filesystem type. (E.g. from ext3 to btrfs).

The Web as a Picture

If your browser can't diplay a website correctly or your proxy is malconfigured, check out http://pici.picidae.net/.

Linux Video Contest: First Videos

You can now find the first videos posted for the Linux Video Contest.

Easy Open Source Web-Editor

If you're looking for an easy WYSIWYG web editor, komposer might be a good choice for you. It's available for windows, linux and mac.

War 2.0

Heise also informs us about the War 2.0 in Gaza (google translated).

Storm Botnet Cracked

Heise informs us that and how the Storm botnet has been cracked by German students.

Learn C++ Online

At first it looks like there's not much in the tutorial, but if you scroll to the bottom of the page, there are links to more parts of the tutorial covering quite a lot of C++ programming.

Linux Quick Boot Systems

Phoronix writes about Phoenix Hyperspace, a Linux quick boot environment that lets you switch back and forth between e.g. Windows and itself. And again, this wouldn't be possible without the help of Linux and other open source projects.

Comfortable Multi-Page Scanning with your Canon Multi-Function Printers

Did you know this is possible? Nicolas did it again. I just saw the explanation on this blog. Now you can comfortably scan multiple pages at once without sitting at the computer.

My tip: on scanning issues try to scan as user root. I had to rmmod usb-storage and usblp before it worked for me with Ubuntu 8.10 and Linux 2.6.29-rc0, otherwise I always get:

usb 2-4.3: usbfs: interface 1 claimed by usblp while 'quiteinsane' sets config #1 or
usb 2-1: usbfs: interface 2 claimed by usb-storage while 'quiteinsane' sets config #1

Bye Bye Privacy

The New Year begins with complete Connection Data Retention in Germany. This means e.g. your IP is logged every time you go online and many other things. The same happens more or less across the entire European Union. A sad day for citizen's rights such as privacy and anonymity.