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Daily Cup of TechBean There, Done Tech |
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I recently read that people are starting to move away from VLC for their default media player to GOM. I plan to do a side by side comparison in the near future but I was hoping to hear from you, the reader, to see which you prefer and why.
Fill up the comments with your pick and convince me that this is the best way to go!
My plan for this weekend was to go out and but yet another computer so that I can have a dedicated Linux box to work on. I need to have Windows on my machines simply because most of the people that I need to support are running Windows and that is what I need to keep up to speed on!
But, I am also finding that a lot of the tools that I want to use are only available for Linux. Since it takes quite a while to save up for another computer from the proceeds I make from Daily Cup of Tech, I have been struggling along with VMware versions of Ubuntu.
So, I was going to bite the bullet this weekend and take my kids’ college fund to go but a computer to put Linux on. As I was about to head out the door, I ran across something that might actually allow me to keep my kids’ college fund where it is!
Portable Ubuntu for Windows provides the user with the ability to install Ubuntu on a Windows machine and do pretty much everything that you can do on a regular Ubuntu machine! And, you can do the install to a USB device so that you can take your Ubuntu with you and run it from any Windows machine you want!
From the website:
Portable Ubuntu for Windows is an Ubuntu system running as a Windows application.This system is built with the Colinux Kernel, Xming X server and Pulseaudio server for Windows.
Portable Ubuntu for Windows is a useful tool for when you need to use Ubuntu on an machine that has Windows as operating system.
I have just started to play with it but from what I have seen, it is pretty impressive. Here are some videos of pubuntu (as they are calling it) that I have found which may give you a bit of an idea what this is all about:
[portableubuntu.demonccc.com.ar]
If you found this post useful, why don't you buy me a cup of coffee to show your gratitude?
Just in case someone missed the 24 in 24 marathon from earlier this week, here are the 24 freebies that I posted about:
I’m starting to get more and more into building home media centers. Sure, you can buy a Windows Media Center version but what is the fun in that?
I’ve run across a cool media center software called GeeXboX. Here’s what their website says:
GeeXboX is a free embedded Linux distribution which aims at turning your computer into a so called HTPC (Home Theater PC) or Media Center. Being a standalone LiveCD-based distribution, it’s a ready to boot operating system than works on any Pentium-class x86 computer or PowerPC Macintosh, implying no software requirement. You can even use it on a diskless computer, the whole system being loaded in RAM.Despite his tiny ISO image size, the distribution comes with a complete and automatic hardware detection, not requiring any driver to be added. It supports playback of nearly any kind of audio/video and image files and all known codecs and containers are shipped in, allowing playing them through various physical supports, either being CD, DVD, HDD, LAN or Internet.
GeeXboX also comes with a complete toolchain that allows developers adding easily extra packages and features but that might also be used to give birth to many dedicated embedded Linux systems.
One of the cool things about GeeXboX is that it is designed to be completely self sufficient. There is no need to upgrade your operating system or download the latest codecs in order for the system to work. All you need is to boot from a livecd and you are off and running.
Of course, what really caught my eye was the ability to put GeeXboX on a bootable USB drive and then dump my videos onto it. The whole process took me about 10 minutes with 9 minutes being the wait for the download to complete!
Here is how I did it.
First, you will need to get a few things:
Once you have downloaded everything and have your USB drive in your computer, start the Win32 Installer.
Click on Next>.
Click on I Agree.
Select Install to drive/partition dedicated to GeeXboX: and click Next>.
Click on Browse and select the ISO that you previously downloaded. Then click on Process. This will prepare the ISO for installation to your USB drive.
Once it has completed processing, the Next> button will become available. Click it.
Select the drive letter of the USB drive on which you want to install GeeXboX. Read the warning and then click Install.
Wait patiently which GeeXboX installs to your USB drive. It shouldn’t take more than a minute or two.
Click Finish and you’re GeeXboX bootable USB media center is ready to go!
Now that you’re system is ready, all you need to do is put some videos on the USB drive. Simply drag the video files from your computer to the root of your new USB media player. Once they are done copying, you’re ready to go!
Now, all you need to do is take your USB drive to a computer system, get it to boot from the USB drive (either by changing the BIOS to boot from the USB device first or by using a boot menu). It should boot into the initial splash screen:
Once it has completed the initial boot, you should get a menu looking something like this:
This gives you complete control over the entire system.
Here is what a typical movie would look like with the menu overlayed:
There are lots of other things that you can do with GeeXboX. I’d love to hear what you come up with!
By the way, here are some more links to GeeXboX that I have found to be useful:
If you found this post useful, why don't you buy me a cup of coffee to show your gratitude?
One of the annoying things about web design is the fact that you are really quite limited in the number of fonts that you can use on your website. Unless you’re really into rendering your text to graphics and adding a pile of alt tags so that search engines can see your content, there really is little that you can do.
Well, it appears that your prayers have been answered. typeface.js is a javascript library that will render your text in real time so that your website looks the way it should without all of the advanced work. Check out some examples of how this works.
You also aren’t just limited to the fonts that the authors of typeface.js produce. You can upload any TrueType font that you may have in your library (i.e. c:\windows\fonts folder) and it will prepare it for the script.
