This is a simple GTK program for openbox which calls on the shutdown and pmi commands to either shutdown or hibernate a laptop or tablet computer. It is released under the GPL version 3 licence. I accept no responsibility for any damage caused by this program.

Pictures

Downloads

Download lfpower.tar.gz

To install

To install this program you will need the following dependencies;

sudo apt-get install build-essential libgtk2.0-dev

You then need to open a terminal run the following commands to compile and install the program;

cd /archive/location
tar xvf lfpower.tar.bz2
cd lfpower
make
sudo make install
lfpower

Feel free to leave any comments or suggestions.

Dropbox is an easy way to share and store your files online and it is compaible with Linux, Windows(NT kernels) and Mac OS X. The only thing that would keep me from using dropbox is that it’s geared towards nautilus but this is not a problem because it is compatible with other file managers too.

The steps to install are as follows;

Step One

Sign up for a dropbox account here;

Sign up
if you use the above link we will both get an extra 256MB of space.

Step Two

Download the client program from Here.

You either have to compile the source or install the package listed for your distribution, so on ubuntu for example you might do the following command;

sudo gdebi nautilus-dropbox_0.6.1_i386_ubuntu_9.04.deb

Step Three

Setup a script that gets executed in place of nautilus, on ubuntu putting the script in “/usr/local/bin/” means that it will get called instead of nautilus. Use your favourite text editor to create the following script;

#!/bin/bash
exec rox $@
exit 0


an example of how this could be done;

sudo nano /usr/local/bin/nautilus
sudo chmod 777 /usr/local/bin/nautilus


If nautilus still starts when you execute the nautilus command use one of the paths indicated when you execute “echo $PATH”.

Step Four

Setting up Dropbox. To set up dropbox do the following command;

dropbox start -i

and fill in you account information.

Step Five

Add the following lines to your windows managers start up file;

(sleep 30 && ~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd) &

You might not need the sleep section if your net connection is already active when x starts.

If you have any questions please leave a comment.

This guide is intended to explain how to encode a DVD to a streamable mp4 codec under Ubuntu with ffmpeg.

Get Deps

The first thing you need to do is get the dependencies, you can do this with the following command;

sudo apt-get install build-essential dvdrip subversion avidemux libfaac-dev libspeex-dev libgsm-dev libgsm1-dev libmp3lame-dev libtheora-dev libvorbis-dev libx264-dev libxvidcore4-dev


Or you can click on this apt link, which will install these dependencies for you;

Install Dependencies

Set up Programs

ffmpeg

This part will require the terminal, to get to the terminal;

Applications > Accessories > Terminal


Then issue the following commands;

cd Documents ; mkdir src ; cd src
svn checkout svn://svn.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
cd ffmpeg


This will download a snapshot of ffmpeg, in the same terminal do the following to configure and install ffmpeg;

./configure --extra-cflags=-fno-common --enable-memalign-hack --enable-pthreads --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libxvid --enable-libvorbis --enable-libtheora --enable-libspeex --enable-libfaac --enable-libgsm --enable-libx264 --enable-gpl --enable-nonfree
make
make install
cd tools
gcc qt-faststart.c -o qt-faststart
sudo cp qt-faststart /usr/local/bin/


libdvdcss

We need to set up protected DVD decryption Ubuntu makes this pretty easy, do the following commands to set it up;

cd /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/
sudo sh install-css.sh


Ripping the DVD

Start dvdrip;

Applications > Sound & Video > dvd::rip

or “dvdrip” from cli.

When You first start dvdrip it will ask you what Directories to use for the projects, It’s up to you which directory to use. Once you have done that you will need to put a DVD into your DVD drive and start a new project. To start a new project go to “File > New Project” in dvdrip. You will need to enter a name for the project;

DVD Rip select project name

When you have selected a name for the project hit the “Create Project” button and select ok to save the .rip file, then select “Rip Title” and “Read DVD table of contents”;

DVD Rip Read table of contents

When you have done that you have to select the title that the film is on, which is almost always the one with the most frames;

DVD Rip selected tracks

To rip the dvd select “Rip selected title(s)/Chapter(s)” button, highlighted in blue on the above picture. dvd::rip will begin to rip the dvd, on my computer it takes about 10 minutes to rip a title.

Merge Vob files

At this point merge the vob files with the cat command;

cat title-001.vob title-002.vob title-003.vob title-004.vob >> output.vob


Linux: merge vob files into a single file

(filenames covered up because despite having paid for the DVDs and the act that I’m only doing this for personal use, I don’t want to take any chances)

Cut and Crop Film

The next step is to use avidemux to cut, crop and transcode the video to a format ready for conversion to mp4. Start avidemux with the following command;

avidemux


open the merged vob file that you created in the previous step and when asked “This looks like mpeg
Do you want to index it?” select yes;

avidemux: index vob file

I takes a little while for avidemux to generate the index;

Avidemux: Generaing a vob file index

Select Output Formats

The first thing you need do in avidemux is select the output formats that you will use, for this I choose;

VIdeo: MPEG-4 ASP (lavc)
Audio: MP3 (LAME)
Container: AVI

Video Format selection

Select filters

There are a couple of filters that you might want to take advantage of, for the video I use the crop filter, to do this select filter under the video section of the left hand side of avidemux and double click on crop;

Double click crop

This will bring up a window where you can set the crop dimensions, move the frame selector (highlighted in red) to a point in the movie where the border is well defined and press the Auto crop button (highlighted in green);

Avidemux crop settings

You might need to adjust the settings slightly, you should end up with something like this;

Avidemux crop example

Click apply and then ok to accept these settings, then close the video filter window. The only filter that needs to be applied to the audio is the mixer setting, it needs to be set to stereo;

Audio > filters > mixer > stereo


Avidemux Stereo

Click ok and you will done with filters.

Cut video

You can set the start and the end point of the video using the a and b buttons you can use this to cut out the titles at the start of the film and the credits at the end;

Set where you want he video to start

Move the frame selector (Red) to where you want the video to start (you can fine tune with the arrows to the left of the “a” button) and press the “a” button (Green), the frame number will be shown in the bottom right of the window (Blue). Do the same for where you want the movie to end, substituting the “a” button for the “b” button.

Start encoding

Now that everything is set up, press the save button, give the file a name (you need to include the extension as avidemux doesn’t do this automatically) and press ok. Avidemux should begin encoding;

Avidemux Encoding

Encode to mp4

The final step is to issue two commands that will convert the file that avidemux created, into a stream-able mp4 file, the first command does the actual conversion;

/usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -i "input.avi" -vcodec libx264 -flags +loop -cmp +chroma -deblockalpha 0 -deblockbeta 0 -b 1250k -maxrate 1500k -bufsize 4M -bt 600k -refs 1 -bf 3 -coder 1 -me_method umh -me_range 16 -subq 7 -partitions +parti4x4+parti8x8+partp8x8+partb8x8 -g 250 -keyint_min 25 -level 30 -qmin 10 -qmax 51 -qcomp 0.6 -trellis 2 -sc_threshold 40 -i_qfactor 0.71 -acodec libfaac -ab 128k -ar 48000 -ac 2 "output.mp4"
Where input.avi is the video created by Avidemux.

If you have a dual or quad core processor, it’s worth adding the “-threads” switch to that, so that you can get the most from your processor;
/usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -i "input.avi" -threads 4 -vcodec libx264 -flags +loop -cmp +chroma -deblockalpha 0 -deblockbeta 0 -b 1250k -maxrate 1500k -bufsize 4M -bt 600k -refs 1 -bf 3 -coder 1 -me_method umh -me_range 16 -subq 7 -partitions +parti4x4+parti8x8+partp8x8+partb8x8 -g 250 -keyint_min 25 -level 30 -qmin 10 -qmax 51 -qcomp 0.6 -trellis 2 -sc_threshold 40 -i_qfactor 0.71 -acodec libfaac -ab 128k -ar 48000 -ac 2 "output.mp4"
Example for a quad core processor.

and this command makes the file stream-able;

qt-faststart "output.mp4" "faststart-output.mp4"
Where “faststart-output.mp4″ is the streamable mp4 file.

comments

If you have any suggestions,questions or comments about how I could improve is article please feel free to leave a comment. Thanks

Edit: updated
Righty ho,

So I’ve been told by many of my readers that this guide is crazy.

Well yeah I sort of a agree but the solutions that they are suggesting are very manual, that is to say that “Or you can play the soundtrack in your fav. media player with repeat turned on.” isn’t filled with wisdom, it would require that you keep the AOE sound track in your playlist… computers are supposed to automate everything you do on them, yeah sure my method requires some up front effort but at least it doesn’t require additional effort each time you decide to play the game. with my method you just click the icon and away it goes.

I think that my method also gives you some idea of what is going on in your computer, yeah I could have provided you with an .exe but that could contained anything that I wanted it to, the long and short of it is that you don’t trust me.

End updated

This article is about getting sound working with the no-cd patch for age of empires 2 – The Conquerors expansion pack. I like to play games on my PC but I don’t like having to keep changing cds so I use no cd patches to get the games to run without the cd. The problem with this is sometimes, the music for the games is stored on the cd, to solve this problem I will be using some popular comand line applications and a script

Under Windows

The first thing you need to do is get the mp3, you can get this here;

TPB – age of empires 2 music

Then you have to get two command line utilities;

SMplayer

smplayer – get the “package with installer” version

This application will be used to play the mp3 file. Create the following folders;

c:\scripts and c:\scripts\command

we then need to add the c:\scripts\command directory to your users path so that the programs stored there can be used by our script. to do this;

Start >  Settings > Control Panel > System > Advanced > Environment Variables

change from

%SystemRoot%\system32;%SystemRoot%;%SystemRoot%\System32\Wbem;

to;

%SystemRoot%\system32;%SystemRoot%;%SystemRoot%\System32\Wbem;C:\scripts\command

note that all we are doing here is adding “;C:\scripts\command” to the end.

Getting to the section where you set the environment path

Setting the windows XP environment path

Now that this step is done install smplayer as you would any other program. Then go to the directory you installed it in and copy the contents of the mplayer folder to your c:\scripts\command folder;

copy the mplayer executable and deps

Now that mplayer is installed you can go to the next step. If you want to check that mplayer is installed correctly and that the path is set, open a dos prompt and type mplayer you should get this;

Mplayer command in windows

pskill

PSkill is a command line application that can be used to shutdown applications via the terminal, in this case we will be using it to stop mplayer at the end of the game, get it here;

pskill

To install it unzip the file and copy the contents of it’s folder to the c:\scripts\command folder. The first time you use it it will ask yo to accept a eula. execute the “pskill” command (in dos) to get this out of the way now.

Move the mp3

Now that’s done, you should create the following folder;

c:\scripts\data

and move the mp3 to there and rename it to “aoe.mp3″

Create the script

To create the final script, open notepad and write the following;

start mplayer -loop 0 c:\scripts\data\aoe.mp3
cd "\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Age of Empires II\age2_x1\"
age2_x1.exe -nostartup
pskill mplayer


Then save the file as “c:\scripts\aoe.bat”, this saves the file as a windows batch script. It is possible that the game is under a different directory to this to find the directorty it’s under right click the games shortcut, select properties and click find target.

The script works like this; it starts playing the file with mplayer in a separate process (that’s why “start” is used), then it starts the game once the games window is closed it kills mplayer stopping the music.

Now remove the shortcut for the game from the desktop and replace it with a shortcut to the script, rename the shortcut to the script with the name of the original shortcut “The Conquerors” for example. Then right click the shortcut, select properties and select the change Icon option;

Change shortcut Icon

If an error comes up just click ok and when asked to select an icon, just go to the games directory and select the right icon (.ico file) and click apply/ok and you should end up with the game working with the background it’s not perfect but it beats playing in silence.

Under Linux

Install mplayer with you distros package manager or from source, download the mp3 file;

TPB – age of empires 2 music

install the game with wine and use a script similar to this to play

LINK

Edit the script to suit your situation. You can probably setup the icon with your DE but I use a window manager so I’m not too concerned with icons.

<?php
$dir1=$_GET['dir1'];
$dir2=$_GET['dir2'];
$file=$_GET['file'];
$fid=$_GET['id'];
# echo results
echo $dir1."\n<br />";
echo $dir2."\n<br />";
echo $file."\n<br />";
echo $fid."\n<br />";
?>

perhaps you could call it values.php, then in the same directory as values.php create (or edit) a .htaccess file which contains the following;


RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([a-z0-9_-]+)/([a-z0-9_-]+)/([a-z0-9_-]+)_id([0-9]+)/index.html$ values.php?dir1=$1&dir1=$2&file=$3&id=$4 [L]


^ indicates the start of the rule
([a-z0-9_-]+) means that for the directories any character from a to z, any number, hyphans (-) and underscores (_) are allowed.
/ indicates that this part of the rule ends when a forward slash is found the same deal with the “_id” part.
([0-9]+) indicates any number

once this is all setup assuming that apache and php are setup correctly, you can test this rule by entering the url into firefox, for example;

http://localhost/test-dir1/test-dir2/filename_id1024/index.html you would have to write additional rules for any other url formats. if you wanted to use this with a database you should probably store the directories (categoires) sefurl value so that you could use $query = “SELECT * FROM tablename WHERE sefurl = ‘$sane_dir1′”; to get information on that category, this of course falls flat on it’s face if two categories have the same name to solve this you could use the category id in the url or just simply avoid creating categories with identical names. Any question or errors (well I haven’t tested this properly) please comment, thanks. Lee

Downloads

Download .zip

Download .bz2

About the plugin

This plugin adds flowplayer to your wordpress blog, it comes pre-configured and is very easy to use.
all you need is the location of the video and it’s resolution. The plugin comes with flowplayer
version 3 which is able to play the following formats;

1. H.264
2. FLV
3. MP4

It is supported by the folowing browsers;

1. Internet Explorer 6.0+
2. Firefox FF 2+
3. Safari 2.0+
4. Opera 9.0+

Contributors

This plugin uses flow player which is available from HERE, this plugin includes version 3 of the player and will be updated when a new version comes out. the code for this plugin is based on the WP-FLV plugin which is available from HERE.

Installation

1. Upload the `wordpress-flowplayer` directory to the `/wp-content/plugins/` directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress

How it works

To add a video to your post you can either click the ‘flow’ (only if you are in HTML mode)
button and answer the questions or you can enter the code yourself for example;

would add the video ‘/uploads/video.flv’ with the width 320 and the height 240 to your post.

You can convert to flv for free using this tutorial;

FLV Convert Tutorial

Screenshots

wordpress-flowplayer video player frontend

wordpress-flowplayer backend

Changelog

Version 0.1 (30/11/08)
- released

Version 0.2 (5/12/08)
- fixed a very nasty bug, which caused anything in square brackets to be parsed as if it was the flow tag.
- added support for the visual editor mce has been added.

Version 0.3 (6/12/08)
- fixed more problems with the parse code
- cleaned up code to allow easy addition of new features in the future.

Downloads

Download .zip

Download .bz2

RSS Buttons Preview

They are also available in PNG and SVG format;

PNG Format
RSS Feed Buttons in SVG format

You should be able to open the SVG version in Adobe illustrator for editing. The following video shows the basics of how they were created. I was rushed in the video to try and keep the time down but I go on to explain in more detail how they were made in the tutorial below the video;

You can get the windows version of inkscape free of charge here;

For linux, use your packager manager to install inkscape.

In case there was anything that you couldn’t see properly in the video, these are the steps that I took to create the buttons, in a little more detail;

Step 1 :- setup construction lines;

Inkscape construction lines

The first step is to setup construction lines in inkscape. to do this go to the edge of the canvas, press and hold the left mouse button, then drag the to the right.

Step 2 :- Draw initial shape

Draw the shapes outline

Use the construction lines that you setup in the last step to draw the shape of the button. then remove the construction lines by dragging them out of the canvas area. Then right click of the shape and select “Fill and stroke” from the menu, select “stroke style” and then sett the width higher and set to curved corners.

Step 3 :- outline curves

Make the edges curved

to make the curved edges, left click hold and move the mouse on the center of the diagonal sections that we created earlier, using the “Edit by paths” button (highlighted in green) see the above image.

Step 4:- Change colors

Change outline colors

Changing the stroke colors is done by dragging the color selector over to the right, under the “stroke paint” tab in stroke and fill, The next thng we want to do is to add a gradient to the inside of the shape;

Select gradient

Select Fill > The gradient button > Edit, this takes you to the gradient editor, from here you can set the colors that will be used in your gradient;

gradient editor

Set the colors to two shades of the same color. when you are done your button should look something like this;

button gradient

Step 5:- add shadow

To add the shadow, you need to duplicate the shape that we have already created, right click and select duplicate;

Duplicate the shape that we have created

then change is stroke and fill to solid black;

Set color to black and blur

Now all you have to do is set the blur on the shape, so that it is just slightly blurred, ones to are happy with the blur you have to put this new black shape behind the original shape that we created.

Move Blurred layer to bottom

Once you have done that you should be left with something that looks like this;

The button is really starting to take shape now

Step 6:- Text, arrow and divider

Now all that’s left to do, is to add the text and white divider line;

Divider

To create the divider, use the square tool (highlighted in green), set the square to no stroke (using the button highlighted in red) and the fill color to white, make sure that the square does not have curved edges. Next we have to add the down arrow, use the construction line technique from before;

Create down arrow using construction lines

Next add the font using the button highlighted in green and change the font using the button highlighted in red;

Changing the font in inkscape

Once you have choose the font you want to use, change it’s color to white and place it on your button. Your button should look similar to this now;

Button with it

Step 7 Manipulate button gradient

This is the last step, all you ave to do is select the the button/layer that has the gradient and change the direction of the gradient to vertical;

Editing the gradient direction in inkscape

Use the node tool, highlighted in red, to manipulate the gradient line highlighted in green. In the above example I used a construction line to ensure that the gradient it straight.

Summary

Well that’s it folks, I hope you liked this tutorial, feel free to comment, I would like to get some feed back and wouldn’t mind answering any questions you have about this tutorial.

Lee