“Repairing” the numpad in Ubuntu
I haven’t posted anything for a while, mostly because there was nothing useful to talk about. But now I’ve encountered another “everyday problem” that people need to know about.
If you are an Ubuntu user, and suddenly find out that your numpad is not working (first make sure it’s on by pressing the “Num lock” button – it might work), while it works in other operating systems you have installed (if you have any), the chances are it has to do with accessibility settings.
To make things easier, I will post a quote from Eric Biven, which is where I found the solution:
- Go to System -> Preferences -> Assistive Technologies.
- When the Assistive Technologies Preferences screen opens, click the Keyboard Accessibility button.
- When the Keyboard Preferences screen opens, select the Mouse Keys tab.
- Uncheck the box labeled “Pointer can be controlled using the keypad”.
- Close out of all dialogs.
I still don’t remember turning this option on, but it doesn’t matter… I just want it to work.
Flash player in Ubuntu 9.10 [64-bit]
Since Adobe Flash player for 64-bit Ubuntu systems is still in alpha, the process of installing is somewhat different.
- You can download the TAR.GZ file from http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html (the download link is on the bottom of the page)
- Extract it to your Desktop. You will get a file named libflashplayer.so
- Open your Home folder. Press Ctrl+H to show hidden files.
- Open the .mozilla folder
- Then, open the plugins folder. If it does not exist, then create it (right click/Create Folder)
- Move libflashplayer.so from your Desktop here.
- Now restart Firefox, and Flash should work
If this is too gay for you, than you can do all these things in the Terminal:
- Download the package and extract it to Desktop (step 1 and 2 from above)
- Start the Terminal
- Create the .mozilla/plugins folder in your Home directory:
mkdir -p .mozilla/plugins - Move the extracted file to that folder:
mv Desktop/libflashplayer.so .mozilla/plugins - Now restart Firefox, and Flash player should work
Foo Fighters – live gig on Facebook
http://www.nme.com/news/foo-fighters/48121
Foo Fighters are set to play a gig at the Studio 606 complex in California, which will be broadcast live on Facebook.
The gig will air at 2am (GMT) on Saturday (October 31) morning. See the band’s official Facebook page, Facebook.com/foofighters, for details.
GeoCities is no more
A 15-year tradition has come to an end… GeoCities is no more.
Anyone who has been using the Internet for some time has surely stumbled upon a web site hosted at GeoCities, a free web hosting service owned by Yahoo! since 1999.. That person has probably noticed how ugly GeoCities web sites tend to be. But it was still a valuable part of the Internet.
In its original form, site users selected a “city” in which to place their web pages. The “cities” were named after real cities or regions according to their content—for example, computer-related sites were placed in “SiliconValley” and those dealing with entertainment were assigned to “Hollywood”—hence the name of the site. This feature has since been abandoned; however, a number of older sites using the original “city” system still existed up until the service was terminated.
As a tribute to GeoCities’ undeniable status in the Internet culture, the web site xkcd was “redesigned” in order to show what a regular GeoCities web site had looked like. Since the old design will surely be brought back tomorrow, or in a few days, I decided to present a screenshot, since this tribute is really one of a kind.
Of course, there are some GIF animations and some marquees which can't be seen on the screenshot, but you get the idea.
GeoCities, it was nice knowing you.
Multiple homepages with Firefox
I use Firefox as a default web browser both with Ubuntu and Windows, and have had GMail as my home page for some time now. However, I have just realised that I always open several other web sites when I start the browser, so why not make them my homepages as well? Is this even possible?
Yes it is. And there are several ways to do it. I will explain the most straight-forward one.
When you access Firefox options (Tools -> Options or Edit -> Preference, depending on the operating system), you can set the homepage on the “General” or “Main” tab (again, depending on the OS). Instead of typing the URL, you can also click the “Use Current Page” button – but, if your browser has several pages open, the button becomes “Use Current Pages“. So, you just open the desired pages (e.g. Google, GMail, Hotmail and Facebook), and set them all as homepages.
You can also enter those web addresses manually, while separating them with “|”, but Firefox does this automatically when you click the “Use Current Pages” button.
Tilt (the table)
As a sequel to my last “flash-games-where-you-have-to-think-and-spend-too-much-time” post, I am here to present another game that fits this “definition” – Tilt.
The aim of the game (it rhymes) is quite simple – you have to get the ball (or balls) through the obstacle course consisting of holes and walls (I seem to be poetic today, wouldn’t you say?). The course is actually a small board, and the only way you can control the ball is by tilting the surface with your mouse – just like you tilt a pinball machine when you are not satisfied with the outcome (which is not the current topic).
Cyanide and Happiness
Do you like comics? Probably yes. Everybody does 
On the Internet, you can always find a comic that is your cup of tea.
So, I would like to present a comic for those with a “weird” sense of humour – Cyanide and Happiness. You can find it on http://www.explosm.net/comics/. It’s the comic of language and sarcasm…and many other things. They update it almost every day.
Whiling away the time
When you have some free time on your hands, it is always a good idea to visit MiniClip, a web site with plethora of flash games – they have something for everyone.
If you, however, have too much free time on your hands, there is one specific game I would recommend: Chronotron
Free space on a NTFS partition that cannot be used
My PC has two hard drives, with the following configuration:
- 40GB hard drive
- Only one partition, with Windows 7 (previously Windows XP) on it
- 160GB hard drive
- 39GB ext3 partition for Ubuntu
- 1GB swap partition for… Well, swap
- 120GB ntfs partition for data
Since I have loads of data, the last partition has only about 7% of free space, or about 8GB. However, Ubuntu wasn’t able to use that space properly during the last few months.
