A couple weeks ago, i wrote a tutorial on how to get Windows Media Player 11 to play FLV files. I received some emails asking how to get a thumbnail preview of FLV file in Windows XP and here’s the answer.

Since Windows explorer does not generate Thumbnail previews of FLVs, we need to install an application that can. That application is K-Lite Mega Codec Pack. Download the program(17.1 MB) and run the installtion. When you get to the Additional Tasks Menu, scroll down to “Make thumbnail gerneration possible for the following file types” and select the formats that you like special FLV.

That’s it, just complete the installtion and now windows explore become capable of generating FLV thumbnails for flv, mp4, hdmov, ogm, ts, m2ts, 3gp rmvb files

Posted in Windows | 2 Comments | 2 Comments »

In this article, i’ll explain the importance of Defragmented your Hard Drive every now and then, in aim to maintaining the good health of your computer.

When a computer starts writing to hard drive, it write everything in a spiral fashion. A healthy spiral would look like this:

But as time passes, you’re bond to delete some file off of the hard drive, that will leave an empty space in the spiral. And now it looks like this:

When the computer starts writing on the hard drive again, the writing process will start in the first empty space that the computer finds. In the case of our last spiral image, that first empty space will be the one previously reserved to the deleted files, witch as you can see is a limited space. If the file being written is larger then the available space, the computer will continue writing on the next empty space that it finds, that’s called fragmentation:

With time, the fragmentation process will slow down the computer, because loading files will take more time since the computer has to search the hard drive for all the different pieces of the file
Defragmentation will reverse the fragmentation process by finding all the pieces of a file through the spiral, lining them together in an orderly fashion, thus making it eithier for computers to find the files requested. Once defragmented, the spiral will look healthy again.

 

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In the aim of getting myself comfortable in working with Ubuntu, i decided to install an RSS reader so i can be able to stay up-to-date while working on the desktop. The job turned out to be very simple. On my lap, running windows xp, i use GreatNews to manage my RSS feeds, so the first thing i did was to export all the feeds to an OPTML file.

On Ubuntu, i launched “Synaptic Package Manager” and looked-up the term “RSS”. From the list, i chose Akregator, a KDE feed Aggregator. The program was instanlty downloaded and installed.

Now, it’s time to import all feeds from GreatNews, to do that: File > Import Feeds… > select the optml file > choose the feeds folder’s name and let Akregator do the rest

Akregator has lots of great features. To add new feeds, you simply add the link to the website you want to monitor, and Akregator will automaticly retrieve the feeds from that website. You can also set the time interval on witch the application should wait before updating the feed.

Akregator is available on Linux/BSD/UNIX-like OSes

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Setting up AMP(Apache, Mysql, PHP) was the first thing i did after installing Ubuntu on my Desktop computer. So this will be the topic of my first article in regards of working with Ubuntu.

Most guides to installing AMP on ubuntu relies on the terminal to
download all the packages and install them one by one, in this guides i
use the terminal in a limited way for editing purposes only.
I’m a beginner with ubuntu and this guide is based on my own experience
in install the trio(AMP) on my machine, so if it worked for me, it
should work for you.

Installation:

To download and install the necessary software i’ll use the
“Synaptic Package Manager”, witch you’ll find in System >
Administration

Search for:

apache2

libapache2-mod-php5
libapache2-mod-auth-mysql
mysql-server-5.0
mysql-client-5.0
php5-mysql
phpmyadmin

and mark each of them for installation then click the apply button to download and install the packages.

Once you finished download and the installation process began,
you’ll be prompted to select from a list of webservers, the software
that you would like phpmyadmin to be automaticly configured with,
select apache2 from the top of the list. You will also be prompted to
choose a password for the root user of the MySQL server.

When the installation process is over, open your browser and point
it to http://localhost. a page titled Index of/ should appear.
Congrats, you just installed AMP on your Ubuntu.

To make sure that apache is capable of handling PHP, open the terminal and run the following command:

gksudo gedit /var/www/test.php

Add the following line to the file and save it:

Reload the localhost page, for the new test.php to appear. Click on
the page, to make sure that apache can handle it. A new white page
should appear with the following words written on it:

Hello World

If everything goes as stated, you are doing great.

Configuration:

Now, we have to configure Mysql to work with bother PHP and Apache, here’s how it’s done:

In the terminal run:

gksudo gedit /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

* You’ll need to uncomment the “;extension=mysql.so” line so that it
looks like this

…
extension=mysql.so
…

* Save the file then exit

That it, AMP is now installed on your ubuntu box.

Note: The document root of the apache server is /var/www/, you might
want to grant yourself full privilegs of that directory, so that you
can eeasly create and edit files without the use of the command prompt.
To do that, run the following command:

sudo chmod 777 /var/www/

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