Iain's posterous

Importing contacts from Gmail into Claws-Mail

I have been playing around with Claws-Mail as I want a fast way to send emails without loading up Firefox and Gmail.

I managed to export my Gmail contacts and import them into the Claws-Mail address book by exporting into VCF format at Gmail and then using this Online vCard Convertor to get them into LDIF format.

[Thanks to Arun]

 

 

Bad news about 802.11n wifi on Linux

I'm having a few wifi problems at the moment, so I had a look around for some of the latest wireless kit, conforming to the brand new 802.11n standard. I didn't hear any good or bad reports on Linux hardware compatibility, so I had a look to see if I could buy anything at The Linux Emporium.

Oddly, they didn't have any 802.11n standard kit. I emailed to ask when they would get any stock in and got this reply:

We have tested a variety of 802.11n devices, but at the moment there is some interaction between the kernel code and driver code for nearly all of them which results in problems. In particular we have encountered slow-downs when running an 802.11n connection and failure to support 802.11g access once an 802.11n one has been used.

If you watch our site we will start to sell some devices when we consider them to be sufficiently stable.


It's disappointing, but the drivers will catch up eventually. I'll wait and see.

Annoying things I had to do to get Debian + XFCE working

On Distrowatch's recommendation, I replaced Xubuntu with Debian and
Xfce. I downloaded debian-503-i386-xfce+lxde-CD-1.iso and I was off.
The text installer was fine but there was a bit of fiddling around to
make it pass the wife-test.

I had to:

1. Install hal + pmount and edit /etc/pmount.allow to get USB drives
automounting.
2. Use adduser to get other logins working. Shouldn't this be a GUI in
late 2009?
3. Update my sources.list file to include the non-free repository and
install the flashplayer.
4. Install a PDF reader - how basic is this?
5. Add the user logins to the "audio" group using "adduser user
group". Otherwise they could not listen to audio.

It connected automatically to the shared printer.

The whole Firefox/Iceweasel thing is *pathetic*. How can people take
Linux seriously with this sort of pettiness?

It's a shame OpenOffice and Iceweasel are both a full major release behind.

Most importantly for me, it's significantly more responsive on the P3
786MB RAM desktop my wife uses.

I'm quite happy with it, but Debian is not a match for Ubuntu.

How to convert YouTube videos into MP3s

Quite often, I'll find an interesting Youtube video that I don't have the time or patience to sit through. I have found a way of copying these video files from my browser cache and then ripping out the audio track to play on my MP3 player.
  1. Start the YouTube video and let it play all the way through.
  2. In Google Chrome, go to C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache or find the Firefox cache folder by typing about:cache into the address bar. In Linux, the video is stored in /tmp.
  3. Find the latest large file (typically in the tens of megabytes) and copy it out of the cache folder to somewhere permanent.
  4. For low quality vidoes, rename it to a .FLV file. For high quality videos, rename it to a .MP4 file.
  5. Check it plays properly in a video player like VLC or SMPlayer.
  6. At the command line, use FFmpeg to type something like: ffmpeg -i input.flv. This will show you the audio and video codecs of the video.
  7. If it's an MP3 audio track, type: ffmpeg -i input.flv -acodec copy output.mp3. If it's an AAC audio track, type: ffmpeg -i input.flv output.mp3.
If you don't like the command line, you can use something like SUPER to convert the files in a GUI.

You can use KeepVid to do this, but it's less reliable and can be lower quality. Flashgot or youtube-dl will also automate grabbing the video.

Thanks to George Out at ForMortals and this excellent FFmpeg tutorial.