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So, I’ve been flying pretty high lately. My Ubuntu 8.04 install has been running like a charm and I’ve been adding more tools and aids without a problem. I’ve even gotten Wine ( a Windows Emulator for those Windows apps you just can’t replace ) to run my Quickbooks accounting software (more on that in another post I hope!) Things couldn’t be better as more and more functionality was switched from my Windows Desktop, to my Linux (Ubuntu) environment.

So, maybe I was a bit lazy, or maybe I just had a brain cramp last week, don’t know, but it’s still hurting…. I had discovered this wonderful little tool that would allow me to convert just about any type of audio file into any other type. It sounded too good to be true. It even installed without too much difficulty.

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Or How to Undelete Files in an ext3 file system

So this article was supposed to originally be about a great new tool I found for those who rip, share or download  MP3 audio files and are frustrated by the large variance in volume levels between them ( and of course are running Linux! )

I came across this great little utility that allows you to singly, or ( my preference ) batch process MP3 files so that they are all normalized either by album or across the spectrum. It’s called normalize-audio and the really neat thing is that it is also available for Windows as well – so if you don’t have a tool already you can certainly give it a try – the cost of course is “free”.

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In between being tied up with babysitting my grandsons and fighting off flu bugs I have been battling a rather nasty problem that I have been having with playing anything associated with using Flash on Firefox 3 on Ubuntu 8.04.

And FINALLY, just now, I found the fix that worked. It’s the little things like this that give Linux a bad name  ( and unfortunately still make it not ready for the masses! )

Ever since I moved to Linux full time, I have been having a problem getting Flash ( a pervasive type of multimedia programming language or file type that is spread all over the Internet – used mainly for watching Videos ) from consistently working properly. This was most common or prevalent when logged into Yahoo and You-Tube.

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So I have been making great progress moving over to Linux, my printers are printing.  My scanners are scanning, my email is emailing and of course my share files are sharing! However there was one area that I was having a little problem with – Microsoft Live Messenger (or MSN Chat if you prefer)!

There are of course tons of chat programs out for Linux, of pretty well any flavour and/or function that you could think of. However I wanted something that was graphically pleasing and something that would let me chat ( and possibly do more than that ) with all my friends and family that are already using, which of course is Messenger!

Well my first attempt came with high expectation. Many users raved about it and were happy with its performance – Pidgin Internet Messenger. It’s designed to work and talk with about every chat service that is out there today. It even listed MSN as well…. Alas after fighting with it for a while and eventually finding supporting information – I discovered that it doesn’t always play well with Microsoft. It does work initially, but then Microsoft Live shuts down the connection shortly there after…

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Merry Christmas everyone – I hope, as this festive season closes, that everyone had a great time catching up with friends and renewing old acquaintances and the like!

By now, pretty well everyone you know has a digital camera and thousands of pictures were taken during the last few weeks within your family alone. Unfortunately, one of the hardest things to do with those pictures afterwards is share them.

Sure you can sign up with one of the many free (and not so free ) picture sharing websites that are out there but whomever you want to share pictures with will have to do the same. Or you will have to burn a couple of CDs or DVDs or print off a bunch of pictures and send them in the mail or post or ….

Of course, pretty well everyone you know has email now, and you could attache a few pictures to your email and send them that way, but with todays cameras it isn’t unheard of having just one picture being 5MB in size and adding just a few of these to one email can quickly cause hiccups for most peoples email services… so what to do…

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