Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Youtube wants me to commit suicide

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Yeah, it does. It recommends me videos of suicide, execution, and all kinds of videos that would trigger a person who's also considering kind of suicide. And in my case, I've been feeling quite low for several weeks which left my mind in a state where I can no longer think as a rational human being. And, yes, one's youtube profile exposes himself.



So don't get much excited if newspapers flood news about "Youtube kills young student" soon.
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Saturday, October 3, 2009

Installing TrueType fonts in Ubuntu

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Switched to linux and feeling the lack of fonts? Not to worry. Installing ttf fonts is fast and easy. Here's how to do it in Ubuntu. Hope it doesn't vary much for other distros.
The first step, of course, is to download some ttf fonts to be installed. Or perhaps, you can copy them from your Windows drive, given you have one remaining. One of my favourite places for fonts is the Fonts section in http://www.gnome-look.org.
Once the fonts are downloaded, copy them to somewhere like Desktop. In case of zipped fonts, you have to unzip them to get .ttf versions.
Now open up a terminal and dive to the fonts directory.

   cd /usr/share/fonts/truetype


Now that you may perhaps install dozens of fonts in the future, it's a good idea to keep them separated from the pre-installed ones. So let's keep the new arrivals in a new directory.

   sudo mkdir myfonts
   cd myfonts


Note that you will be required to give the password in creating the new directory, if you're not logged in as the root.
The next step is to move our new fonts to their new home.

   sudo mv /home/<username>/Desktop/*.ttf .


Replace <username> with your username. Also take note of the dot (.) at the end of the statement, indicating that the files have to be moved to the current directory.
Now we have to notify ubuntu about the new arrivals like this:

   fc-cache -f -v ~/.font


Done! Now go to your favourite word processing application (AbiWord in my case) and enjoy the newly installed fonts to your heart's content!
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Wednesday, June 24, 2009

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Most people do it. When their products are not meeting the expected sales, they change the name of the product. Why shouldn't I?
This blog was so far named Techno Blog, and it was very recently I found out that it was one of the worst names a blog can have. Don't mean that Thameera's Column is the best of the names, but it's better. What do you think about the new look and feel?



Now spending most of my time in Ubuntu Linux 9.04, I found out several interesting tricks to speed up the things in Linux. And the best of them is that to copy paste some text from one place to another, you don't need to select it right click and select copy, and all the boring stuff. All you have to do is select the text and middle-click in the place where you want it to paste. Isn't that a simple plan?
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Friday, May 15, 2009

My new Sinhala blog

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I just started a blog in Sinhala. It's called තමීරගේ තීරය. 


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Tuesday, May 5, 2009

How to add pictures in gmail

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Now there is a Gmail Labs facility which lets you embed pictures while composing a mail. Follow the following steps to enable this feature:

1. In Gmail, click on the Labs icon   to the top right of the page.

2. Scroll the page until you find the lab Inserting Images and enable the feature. Then click Save at the bottom of the page.



3. If you have already enabled Gmail Offline, a message will appear saying that it will take some time for the lab to be enabled. In my case it took several days. Don’t know what the reason is. Anyway, after it is enabled an insert picture icon comes to the toolbar when you are composing a message.

However, the recipient will not see the image until he clicks on the Show Images link that would appear. 


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Saturday, April 25, 2009

How to save Word documents in PDF

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It is possible to publish Word documents in PDF format just in two clicks in Word 2007. All you have to do is to download and install "2007 Microsoft Office Add-in: Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS" from www.microsoft.com. (Hint: search for the above phrase at that site). After installation, a menu item as in the screenshot to the right appears.
XPS also seems to be a filetype like PDF but it is open source or something, I'm not sure. 

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Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Docx to doc converter

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Today I brought this certain DOCX file from home and at the internet cafe I'm horrified to find that Word 2007 is not available in the cafe's machines. Well, why worry, internet's got the answer to every problem. So I googled "Docx to doc converter" and followed the top link. And it was a pay-and-convert site!
So I added "free" to my keywords and searched again. Then results led me to several sites all of who requested my email so that they can send me the converted file. I followed their guidelines and waited for about 10 minutes only to find no reply in my inbox. Tried another site with the same result. Getting frustrated I finally tried www.convertfiles.com and in just a second I got the converted file as a link in my inbox! Thanks, ConvertFiles!
In the site you can, in fact, convert most file types, not only documents.
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Vista Hidden Context Menu!!!

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You can access the hidden context menu in Vista by holding down the shift key before right-clicking on a file or folder. One of the coolest features in the new menu is Copy As Path. By choosing this, the path of the selected object is automatically pasted in the clipboard so you can paste it elsewhere. Otherwise, we would have to open the properties dialog of the file to copy its path, but even then you would not be able to copy the full path.

When you shift-right-click a folder, the context menu gives you the option Open Command Window Here. This will open a command window (DOS prompt) with the selected directory as the current directory. Many of you will find this quite a handy feature.

The hidden menu also has some shortcuts to pin the selection to start menu, add to quick launch, etc.
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Office Compatibility Checker

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You have typed this certain document having several pages with lot of effort in the Word 2007 format, or perhaps the document may span several hundred pages. And now you have to convert the document to 2003 format. But will the converted document be exactly a clone of the original? Well, you can find this out by clicking on the Office button (to the top-left screen) and selecting Prepare->Run Compatibility Checker.

It gives a list of warnings on what will happen when you try to convert to 2003 format, and their number of occurrences. For example, I got the following warning recently: SmartArt graphics will be converted into a single object that can't be edited in previous versions of Word.

In the bottom of the box you can turn on automatic compatibility checking when saving in older formats (this is turned on in default)

This compatibility checker is available in other Office packages as well.
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Thursday, April 9, 2009

FILExt

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I was searching the web for some free vector graphics when I happened to download a file with extension .AI. What is the software to use to open this file? The simple answer is to go to http://filext.com
The site describes itself as the File Extension Source. Type in any file extension in the search box to the left and it will instantly display several results, and in my case I got the required result at the top. The result includes the meaning of the extension, the company with the copyright and the programmes used to open a file with the extension. In my case it was Adobe Illustrator (Should have guessed that before!).


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