Downloading Packages for Expired Ubuntu Releases

When Ubuntu releases expire, the package archive mirror is disabled as well. You will get error messages when trying to access e.g. archive.ubuntu.com or de.archive.ubuntu.com. (e.g. http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/karmic-security/main/binary-i386/Packages.gz not found.)
But the fix is easy:

Regex made easy - Great Regex constructor website

A great tool to help you construct regular expressions is this website: txt2re.com. Thanks a lot to the genious who is so good at regex he can create a tool to create them. You may now imagine me tipping my hat.

Newest version of swype includes Dragon dictation software for android

The newest version of Swype, the text input software for android, includes dictation software which lets you to dictate text directly into any text field on android.

Though there are still some issues with it recognizing my German accent, it already works very well and better than the standard Google text input software, especially in German. The newest version is available only for android ice cream sandwich (4.0), but it&#39;s completely free of charge - you can download it from <a href="http://beta.swype.com">beta.swype.com</a>. </p>  <p>The only downside so far is that you may not change its privacy settings to stop it from posting information about your usage to the Corporation. But then of course the voice recognition works anyway by encoding the audio data from your voice into packets which are sent to the cloud and processed by servers there. This has been dictated to the dictation software with swype. This last sentence has been dictated with google&#39;s speech recognition which is also very good. Also it&#39;s much faster and supports selecting alternative results based on the speech input and similar sounds, not just on similar spelling as the dictation support in the current beta of Swype. But neither version works without internet support.

Insecrure Screensavers with Xorg 1.11+

Due to a serious bug, pretty much all screensavers are vulnerable if they run with a recent Xorg 1.11+. I leave it to others to describe more details and a hotfix.

Learn the new Linux Network Commands

Doug Vitale wrote a wonderful summary of the new linux network commands on his blog. It includes typical commands as they were before as well as they replacements.

F.lux adjusts your display to the sun's color and brightness

And there's a Linux version with GUI add well, check it out: f.lux for Linux. This is great especially for people working on a computer and suffering from insomnia or e.g. if you have a work room without windows (glass filled frames that is).

GAP bzw. DECT-Telefone mit der Fritz Box nutzen

Es gibt eine sehr praktische Liste der kompatiblen Telefone, die hilft das richtige zu kaufen. Sonst hat man oft z.B. keine Tonwahl oder keine Anzeige der anrufenden Rufnummer. Grundsätzlich lässt sich sagen, dass Siemens tragbare ISDN-Telefone recht gut funktionieren und Gigaset 1000, 2000, 3000.

Sort Algorithms Visualized and Other Fun Projects

Thanks to ck's blog I just found this great website visualizing number sorting computer algorithms. And I want to share it with you.

Also I love the concept of fold.it to solve difficult scientific problems using computer games and gamers.

And at duolingo.com, a project is in closed beta to learn a language and help translate texts at the same time. (Click bottom left to ask for an invitation to the closed beta.)

Cool Android Apps for eReaders (e-Ink eBook Readers) and Developer Information

E-Ink readers like the Nook touch currently come with 4 bit (16 levels) of gray, no camera, often no sound, no GSM, often no landscape detection sensor etc. And especially, the display refresh rate is very slow. Still or nonetheless they have advantages like battery time, especially with the display on, clear readability in bright direct sunlight over a tablet and display size over a phone and also more and more often come with Android. Here are some apps and hints which work great for that scenario.

Resuming a Copy in Linux -- like cp --resume

When you want to copy a large file and close before the end the copy is interrupted. There are some ways to work around this.

Cropping (Scanned) PDF Pages, e.g. double pages into single pages

If you have a PDF document and want to crop it, e.g. because you have too large borders and/or it is skewed or there are actually two pages in each page, this software may help.

Briss comes in Java and is good for cropping and deskewing pages: http://briss.sourceforge.net/. This works fully automatically for single pages and is very nice. As it's written in Java, it works on Mac, Windows and Linux just the same. I will keep this for all my image pdf cropping needs. To split double pages I would first deskew and crop automatically in the first run and then save. That file I recommend to use for a second run and there crop the pages into two parts manually.

Unpaper (http://unpaper.berlios.de/) is a CLI tool for the job, which supports double pages, which briss doesn't yet seem to support. But it requires the PDFs to be split into .pbm , .pgm or .ppm first.
e.g.  convert  ./unpaper -l double -s a5 00000001.pgm 00000001a.pgm. But in my experience it didn't work at all...

And this helps for OCR: http://blog.konradvoelkel.de/2010/01/linux-ocr-and-pdf-problem-solved/

Enjoy!

A Disk Healing Itself

Smartd just gave me this report:
Device: /dev/sdb, SMART Usage Attribute: 193 Load_Cycle_Count changed from 197 to 196
Now how it's possible for the load cycles to decrease during run time, I don't know...

KDE's New Touch Interface

Aaron Seigo from KDE has posted on his blog an intro to KDE's new touch interface - quite nice, impressive and recommended to see.

How to run Android in a Virtual Machine

Brighthub has a nice howto for installing Android x86 in a VirtualBox Virtual Machine. This way you can run android apps on your computer -- with a fair speed as opposed to with the android emulator that comes with the android sdk.

How to Pin a Package in Debian or Ubuntu -- to stop automatic upgrades of the package

If you always wanted to know how to pin that one package so it won't get upgraded, here's how.

Tips for saving power on Intel Notebooks with i915 driver

Phoronix published some intel laptop linux power saving tips you might want to read: i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 i915.i915_enable_fbc=1 and i915.lvds_downclock=1

Fix for Google Reader/Mail Login Page Always Refreshing Instead of Logging

Do you also know the problem that you want to sign in to Google services like Google Reader or Mail but the page just keeps refreshing? Have you also enabled cookies and use a supported browser, etc, but it didn't help? Try this...

Skype Video auf Android deutlich verbessert

In einem der letzten Tests hatte ich Skype Video auf dem Samsung/Google Nexus S getestet. Dabei war das Video und der Ton für mich gut, für die Gegenseite aber abgehackt und ruckelig. Das Problem hat Skype mit der aktuellen Version, die auf mehr Handy lauffähig ist, nun behoben. Ein zweistündiges Videogespräch nach Brasilien lief unproblematisch. Dabei wurde das Handy recht warm und danach war der Akku dann aber auch leer (von 60 % auf 15%). Trotzdem: Es macht jetzt einen riesigen Spaß auch mit Skype Videotelefonate zu führen. Die Unterdrückung von Hintergrundgeräuschen und das Telefonieren mit Lautsprecher an (statt Headset) geht dabei besser als mit Google Talk Video soweit ich das getestet habe. Das Video war meiner Meinung nach etwas weniger scharf als bei Google, aber das könnte auch an dem anderen Gesprächspartner liegen. Einen kleinen Hakler gab es noch als das Gespräch durch einen Anruf unterbrochen wurde. Das Videogespräch wurde zwar vorbildlich geparkt und ließ sich nachher fortsetzen. Aber ich konnte den Anrufer aus dem Mobilfunknetz nicht hören. Reproduziert habe ich das bisher allerdings nicht.

How to (Re-)Compress PDFs with Images for Free

I'll show you how to compress PDFs including their images for free using LibreOffice/OpenOffice.