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As I mentioned in my previous article, I recently put together a DVD showcasing my daughters performances on her recent contract. EasyMpeg MX saved me a HUGE amount of time doing this and if you want to know more about that tool, please check the previous article .

Now I’m going to tell you a bit more about the other member of that software production team, Cyberlink Producer and of course why I am writing about it! To start off with, I really, really like it!

It’s kind of hard to talk about a particular product without first having experienced other packages that were or are out there. To that end I have had a lot of experience trying out different Video Editing packages and prior to Cyberlink I have found ALL of them to fall down in one area or another, some so badly that I won’t even name them!

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One of the Windows based tools I have had to use recently, has been in my arsenal of video editing tools for quite a while. It’s called EasyMpeg MX and it is the easiest and fastest video editor that I have ever seen!

To make matters even better, they have a Freeware “Lite” version that you can try (and it works just as quickly and as simple and easy as the full package ) to see just how quickly editing and pasting videos can be. I liked it so much that I purchased their full “MX” version which gave me more flexibility with editing various Video Formats AND most importantly let me edit and create a video file larger than 2GB !

Their own words tell it all:

Someone said that edit a mpeg file is diffcult and time-consuming, but you will found it is so simple and quick under EasyMPEG™ . EasyMPEG’s friendly user interface will have you editing and playing video with ease. Integrated with optimized MPEG editing based on the “Result-Now” technique, MPEG Player and MPEG Demultiplex/Multiplex feature, EasyMPEG provides you with the tools that professional editors use, within a simple, easy-to-use interface.

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Man, time flies when you are having fun… or not…

You have once again probably noticed that I haven’t been on for a while. That’s due to a combination of things, from family related matters (requiring lots of travel and time away, ) to just taking care of day to day “stuff” and grandkids and and and…. Whoever said that one gets even busier when one is retired was absolutely right!

That being said – it isn’t that I haven’t had time to “play” with new toys and/or software, but the problem has been in finding the time to write about them! Plus, us old guys have this memory problem and can only hold so much data (which I try to get down on electronic paper within this blog for your pleasure ) and I have reached my “buffer” limit and am starting to lose stuff about which I wanted to talk about! Soooooooooo I am going to make a concerted effort over the next couple of days to get what I still remember onto the blog so that we BOTH can remember it <grin>.

First off let me finish off or close the book on my HPLIP issue (see last article ). It would seem that I am on my own now to figure out what may or may not be working with my HP1000 and why it won’t print across the network. The boys back at HPLIP have washed their hands of it, not finding any “major” issues to fix, they just simply stated that they don’t support any Network Printing Issues… Can’t say as I blame them and I still think the problem is in the had off over to HPLIP – it certainly acts like it is printing – it just never gets there…

I guess I’ll have to just tweak and play with it in my “spare time” – like I have any right now …. sigh … I guess I will have to keep an eye open for a couple of updates for both CUPS and HPLIP and hope one of them fixes the issue for me. For now it is the biggest show stopper for me moving over to Ubuntu full time – I share this printer (connected of course to the box that I want to switch over ) with all the other networked printers within the household and would be lynched if I turned off access to it!

If I get it fixed – you’ll be the first to know… that is if I can find the time to write about it…. sigh…. till next time then …

So I have been working with Aaron over at HPLIP trying to resolve an issue that I am having with that troublesome printer that I talked about yesterday. Thanks to his great product I am now able to print to my HP1000 within Ubuntu but for some reason, when that one printer is networked any prints to that particular printer go missing…

I’m sure it’s something I’ve done (or not done ) on my end here and we are sharing quite a bit of information back and forth trying to get a handle on where the problem may lay.

One of the biggest tools in any administrators bag of tricks are the debugging or error logs. However they can generate a lot of data (as in thousands and thousands of lines within seconds sometimes ) and it becomes rather cumbersome to share this information within emails or worse yet blogs.

Well, in chatting with Aaron, he put me on to another wonderful site that I did not know about but of course have to share with you. It is a totally free service by a gentleman called Paul Dixon who manages his own blog BUT also makes this facility free to those who need it. The link for it is…

http://pastebin.com

Here you can just copy and past whatever large logs or text that you wish to share with another individual. Once you past the document you just click SAVE and instantly a web page is generated that you can then share with your colleagues (saving tons and tons of bandwidth, blog pages and email in-boxes ) all you have to send them is the link to that particular page (instead of all the text held within it! ) Awesome!

You can even set the length of time that you would like the web page to stay available from days to forever…

This is a great, simple and amazing collaboration tool that I will be making more use of in future. Hopefully you too will find it of benefit – and of course make this posting worth the effort that I put into it <grin>.

As I warned, I am now dabbling with Linux/Ubuntu again (since I finally got my hard drives partitioned in a manner that makes me happy .) I have to tell you that I am really, really pleased with how simple and easy (in general ) it is becoming to install and use a package like Ubuntu. Unfortunately, it isn’t quite up to speed for the “general” or “home” user I’m afraid…. For me it’s fun and relaxing, but for someone who is trying to install it on their own, on their current system it can be more daunting that climbing Mount Everest.

The challenge that I have had getting my current laser printer (an HP 1000 ) working with Ubuntu has been amazingly frustrating to say the least!

I have two printers connected to my machine. Both are HP (Hewlett Packard), one is an older “parallel port” connected inkjet printer (color printer ) and the other is a USB connected laser printer (my HP 1000 .) The color printer it recognized immediately and I was able to print right away, the laser/USB printer has been a royal pain!

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