I like changing my wallpaper automatically with a script (but alternatively, you can use Desktop Drapes or a similar app) every few minutes, but for that you need a lot of wallpapers.

You can already download hundreds of wallpapers with just one command but I really like the National Geographic wallpapers which are actually professional, amazing photos, so I made 2 really easy scripts which automatically downloads all the wallpapers (to date, the script will have to be modified when they add new wallpapers because the link is not fixed) from he National Geographic website.

To download all the National Geographic wallpapers from the 2008 or 2009 contests, simply download my scripts (download links at the end of the post), place them in a folder where you want to download all the wallpapers and run it like so:

If you use the Mac4lin theme on Linux, you will probably also want your WINE applications to look like on Mac OS X as well.

csongi has created an Mac OS X Leopard style for WINE which comes in 3 versions: transparent space taskbar, flat taskbar and plastic Unified toolbar.

Download Mac OS X Leopard Msstyle | Thanks to Mahdi for the tip!

Portable Ubuntu Remix is an Ubuntu system running as a Windows application.

Why would you want to run Ubuntu as a Windows application? There are several reasons / situations when you would want to do that:

1. If you want to try out Ubuntu in a really simple way (it's even easier than with Wubi)
2. If you really need to run some Linux / Ubuntu applications in Windows
3. If you want to use Linux at work for instance, but you are not allowed to install Ubuntu.
4. And of course, since it's portable: you can basically take Portable Ubuntu Remix anywhere with you on a Pendrive, etc.

Unfortunately, Portable Ubuntu Remix only works on Windows 32bit.

Download Portable Ubuntu Remix

If you plan on using it, you'll be needing this info: The password for the pubuntu user is 123456.

Ubuntu or PulseAudio actually really needs a good system wide equalizer. A project which initially begun as a simple script (actually it still is a script) now has become a fully working system wide PulseAudio equalizer. In the recent version, thanks to psyke83 the script comes with:

syndaemon is a program that monitors keyboard activity and disables the touchpad when the keyboard is being used. If you are using Ubuntu / Debian, syndaemon should already be installed and all you have to do is type this in a terminal to start it as a daemon:

syndaemon -d

To set the time you want syndaemon to restore your keyboard, run this command:

syndaemon -i 4 -d

Where "4" is the time between the period you stopped typing and when the touchpad becomes active.

Slimrat is a Linux download manager which can download files from the following online file hosting services: rapidshare, megaupload, metafire, easyshare, czshare, datahu, depozitshare, fastload, fastshare, filefactory, filehive, freakshare, hotfile, sharebase, youtube, zshare and many other including a direct download if there is no plugin available for a certain service.

Slimrat is lightweight, it can download multiple files and once and comes with both a GUI and a CLI. Another very interesting Slimrat feature is the automatic captcha solving based on an tesseract-ocr library.

Asus is finally launching the new EeePC 1201N and I was lucky to get my hands on it for a few days, for testing purposes.

I know many Web Upd8 readers love Linux, but the netbook I have received for testing came with Windows 7 and I am not allowed to install another operating system, so my review will be based on it's Windows 7 performances only.

Commander Stalin is a free, open source real-time strategy based on Boswars game for Windows and Linux.

In a RTS game, the player has to combat its enemies while running his war economy.

Everything run in so called real-time, in opposition to turn based games where the player always has to wait for his turn. The trick is to balance the effort put into building the economy and building and army to defend an attack the enemies.

Based on the Ubuntu Sun concept and New Wave, Narfss has created a Gnome theme for which the titlebar (Metacity only) changes automatically depending on the time of day (dawn, noon, evening and night).

The trick to use folder.jpg images as the icon for a certain folder in Ubuntu which we wrote about some time ago only works for Jaunty. But luckily, the same Stephen O'Sullivan has found a way to make this work in Ubuntu Karmic Koala.

This time, the script comes in a .deb package and it's called Cover Thumbnailer, and it displays music album covers, preview of the pictures which are in a folder, etc. in Nautilus. That means that it's no longer necessary to have a folder.jpg file inside a folder in order for the thumbnail to be displayed!

Googsystray is a Google Voice, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader and Google Wave checker application for Windows and Linux. The idea is to be able to keep track of all that stuff without having to keep a bunch of browser tabs open, or constantly checking them.

I recently got a new Eee PC and installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10 Karmic Koala (which is going to be renamed to Ubuntu Netbook Edition starting with Lucid) and even though UNR is already somewhat optimized, I don't like how some things work and also there is room for a lot more optimizations. I would like to share with you these optimizations, all with screen real estate and low power consumption in mind. A part of this article is for EeePC only, but most work on any netbook!

Let's get started (read on - huge post ahead)!

HandBrake is a free, open-source video transcoder for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. It supports any DVD-like source and most multimedia files and can convert into the following formats:

Among HandBrake features are:

Last week, we some some Ubuntu Lucid Lynx proposed themes and like always, there were mixed opinions. Here is yet another proposed theme for Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04 LTS: Wasp.

Wasp takes care of most used apps with adhoc configurations: no strange behaviour like dark toolbar where it shouldn't be, no redundant borders, no compromise on general setting just because of a strange behaviour in one app.

Don't like orange/brown colors? just use GNOME Appearance and choose all colors you want, Wasp is totally recolorable.

There are loads of short url services these days, but a lot of them disappear and your links are lost. So what can you do in order to have control over your short URLs? It's pretty easy (assuming you have your own domain): create your own short url service with Google Apps. Obviously, this is a free service (as long as you have the domain name).

1. The first thing you need to do is set up Google Apps for your domain.

2. Then go to THIS link and click on "Add it now" button and enter your domain name. After logging in, enter the subdomain for your short URLs. For instance "sh.yoururl.com". You then need to create a new CNAME in your domain name control panel. Name (alias) this CNAME "sh" (for my example, it depends on what you have chosen), and redirect it to ghs.google.com

3. Let's take care of all the settings for our short URLs. Click on "Additional Short Links settings":

As you probably know, the work on the next Ubuntu version 10.04 called Lucid Lynx has already begun. Until now, there was no ISO available and you had to do a little 'hacking' in order to use Lucid.

But now you can already download a development release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx from HERE. Obviously, this should only be used for testing purposes!

Happy testing!

A few days ago I was telling you about a new Google home page. Well, thanks to Blogoscoped, you can try it for yourself.

Here is what you need to do:

1. Go to Google.com and log out. Then, make sure you are on .com and not on your country domain extension.

2. Paste this in your browser's URL bar:

javascript:void(document.cookie="PREF=ID=20b6e4c2f44943bb:U=4bf292d46faad806:TM=1249677602:LM=1257919388:S=odm0Ys-53ZueXfZG;path=/; domain=.google.com");

3. Reload the Google.com page.

Axel is a command line application which accelerates HTTP/FTP downloads by using multiple sources for one file. For example, some FTP sites limit the speed of each connection, therefore opening more than one connection at a time multiplies the allowable bandwidth.

What if we could use a bash script to use "apt-get" with Axel so the "apt-get" download speed would increase dramatically? Well, you can, thanks to Matt Parnell who has created a bash script which does just that. The script works with any Linux distribution which uses "apt-get" (Debian, Ubuntu, etc.).

Before using the script, you must install Axel:

sudo apt-get install axel

Then create an empty file called apt-fast and paste this:

Inkscape, a SVG-based vector graphics editor for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X has finally reached version 0.47.

This new version (thanks to unixmen for the heads up) brings improved performance and tons of new features, some of which are as follows: timed autosave, Spiro splines, auto-smooth nodes, Eraser tool, new modes in Tweak tool, snapping options toolbar & greater snapping abilities, new live path effects (including Envelope), over 200 preset SVG filters, new Cairo-based PS and EPS export, spell checker, many new extensions, optimized SVG code options, and much more.

KOffice 2.1 was released yesterday, bringing a number of new features as well as general improvements in the maturity of the individual applications. Import and export of foreign file formats have been given an overhaul, and especially the import filters for Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt) and Word (.doc) have been much improved. This is a result of the work done for the Nokia n900 Office viewers.

This KOffice release is aimed at developers and early adopters and it's not indended for end users. Also, the KOffice developers do not recommend packaging KOffice 2.1 in any Linux distribution as a default office suite.

In case you don't know, FFmpeg is a command line tool for encoding and converting a numerous video and audio formats. x264 is a free software library (also command line) for encoding video streams into the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC format.

FFmpeg and x264 in the Ubuntu repository does not support some encoders, formats, and codecs (which are restricted).

There is a quick way of enabling the restricted encoders but it will not work for all of them. In Ubuntu Karmic, run the following command in a terminal:

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg libavcodec-extra-52

For Karmic, the libfaac codec has been disabled in the "extra" (formerly known as unstripped) libraries because it is considered non-free. The only way to get it is to compile ffmpeg yourself.

Google Reader has finally added feed favicons support, something for which you had to use Greasemonkey up until now.

The option is not enabled by default but you can turn it on by going to Settings, on the "Preferecens" tab and checking the "Show favicons for subscriptions" option:

Feedly is a magazine style feed reader which integrates with Google reader and used to work only on Firefox, as an extension. A Feedly extension for Google Chrome has been released, so Chrome users can finally enjoy the great feed reading experience provided by Feedly.

We've covered Feedly a while ago so you should read that if you are not familiar with Feedly.

To add the Feedly extension to your Google Chrome browser, simply click THIS link and install the extension. You will then see a new button, to the right of the omnibar.

Please note that you need the latest development version of Google Chrome in order to use this extension!

The 100 paper cuts project which was introduced for Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala will return for the next Ubuntu version: Lucid Lynx LTS 10.04. The 100 paper cuts project addresses small usability bugs in Ubuntu that are annoying for the users and should be really easy to fix but have never been addresses exactly because they are considered to be minor.

We have made a post exactly with such fixes and tweaks for Ubuntu Karmic. Hopefully, some of those will be taken care of in the 100 paper cuts project.

DLS has discovered a great website for generating great, made-up domain names.

The website is called Wordoid and it uses phonetics rules to generate internet domain names in English, Spanish, French and Italian. You can choose to put a word somewhere inside the domain and Wordoid automatically generates hundreds of domain names, and also notifies you if those domains are registered or not.

Looking for a skin compatible with the latest version of Foobar2000 (1 beta) music player? Then you should try Kameleon which, even though it was built for Foobar2000 0.9.4, 0.9.5 or 0.9.6, it still works with the latest version.

As a proof, here is a screenshot I have just taken with my Foobar2000 player using the Kameleon skin:

iConvert is a website which you can use to convert Windows, Linux and Mac icons in just one step.

Don't think that you will need extensive knowledge to use this web application. It's actually very easy to use: you are asked to browse for an image on your hard drive and in seconds, the image will be converted to different sizes and formats.


Once the converting operation is finished, some links will be displayed for various image sizes, such as: 512 × 512, 256 × 256, 128 × 128, 48 × 48, 32 × 32 and 16 × 16 and you can then save the image(s) you want to your computer. The converted formats available are: .icns and .hqx (for Mac), .ico (for Windows) and .png (for Linux):

Openshot, the great Linux non-linear video editor was updated to version 0.9.54.

New in version 0.9.54:

PulseAudio 0.9.21 was released yesterday and comes with even more bug fixes than version 0.9.20 which was released just two weeks ago. You can see a list of changes, HERE.

Besides bug fixes, PulseAudio 0.9.21 also integrates the device-manager module.

PulseAudio's device-manager module is used to keep track of the names and descriptions of any and all audio devices. This module then also provides a protocol extension for other programs to query this information. At this time, device-manager will largely be used in integrating support for KDE Phonon. The device-manager module is considered experimental at this time along with its API.

[information provided by Phoronix]

Like I told you earlier, if you are having issues with the sound on your PC / laptop / netbook, you could try upgrading ALSA to version 1.0.21. If that, however, does not fix it, you can try to also upgrade Pulseaudio to the latest version (read on).

Ubuntu Karmic comes by default with ALSA 1.0.20 and if that doesn't work for you, an upgrade to ALSA 1.0.21 might be the solution. We wrote about the ALSA upgrade script for Ubuntu and Debian but there is an easier way of upgrading ALSA: by using a repository (Launchpad PPA).

That's because new packages get pulled into the development version until a certain date that is called feature freeze (that was august 27th for Ubuntu Karmic). ALSA 1.0.21 was released on august 31st, therefore too late. While the new ALSA may not have caused any breakage, it might also have been the opposite, and the goal of the final stage of development is to make the system as stable as possible with a certain set of packages, which by release date may not be the newest anymore.

Google announced that it has opened up the Google Chrome extension gallery for submissions.

The first 2 Gnome panel backgrounds I'll show you have been created by Cláudio Novais (thank you for the suggestion!) and you can use them to get a glassy Gnome panel.

Here are the 2 Gnome panel backgrounds:

This second panel background works best for the bottom panel but I don't have one so that's why it looks a bit weird in my screenshot. To use this panel background, right click this image and select "Save image as":

Both of the above two Gnome panel backgrounds are semi-transparent so they will inherit the color of your wallpaper (but the image will be darker for the panel since it's semi-transparent).

After saving the background images to your computer, to use a Gnome panel background, right click on a panel, select "Properties", on the "Background" tab select "Background image" and browse for the image you have just saved:

1. There is an entire pack of Gnome panel backgrounds at Gnome Look:

There are maybe hundreds of applications which you can use to automatically change your desktop wallpaper, but is it worth using an application for such an easy task? You can do this with a 3 lines bash script. Let's get started!

Create an empty file anywhere you want. I've created a folder in my home directory, called "scripts" where I place all my scripts so you can do the same. Name this file whatever you want, but in my example I am going to name it "wallpaper.sh" and paste the following code inside this newly created file:

Finally, after a long time of waiting, Spotify, the online music application for Windows is now available for Symbian devices too. Just as with the previous iPhone and Android versions, users must be Spotify premium subscribers to use the service on their mobile phones. In return they get to ditch the ads and can cache play-lists for off-line (out of signal) coverage and to conserve battery life.




Compatibility: Samsung Galaxy, Samsung Spica, SonyEricsson U1i, SonyEricsson Satio, Samsung Omnia HD, Samsung GT-I8910 and of course Nokia Symbian S60v3 and S60v5.

To download it, just use your default mobile browser and go to: m.spotify.com.

TangoGPS is an lightweight, open source mapping application which you can use with or without a GPS device. Currently, it runs on any Linux distribution - from desktop to eeePC and even phones, such as Openmoko Neo.

TangoGPS uses the maps from Openstreetmap project but you can add various other repositories. The maps are downloaded and cached for offline use, so there is no need of a permanent internet connection. You can also pre-cache the areas of your choice.

If you have a GPS device, your current position will be shown on the map, it can keep a log of your positions data and also, it has a friend finder function which lets you exchange your position with others:

Opera released today Opera 10.10 which comes with Opera Unite, a technology you can use to share files directly between computers. Opera Unite is finally available as a standard feature in Opera 10.10 (previously it didn't come by default).



Some interesting Opera 10.10 features:

Even though now you can use the "Send to" option in Google Reader to post something to Twitter, I was still using the old Google Reader feed in Twitterfeed trick for that, mostly because it's easier and fewer clicks. But that takes a about 30 minutes (at least - depending on your settings) for something to be posted to Twitter.

Today I stumbled upon a great tool called Reader2Twitter which synchronizes your shared items in Google Reader with Twitter.

First of all, Reader2Twitter uses the new pubsubhubbub protocol to make the sync real-time.

Another really nice feature is that you can use the "Share with note" option to add a comment to something you're sharing on Twitter, and that's going to be posted to Twitter also. For instance, you could add a #hashtag to a post, your opinion on it, etc.

Reader2Twitter uses bit.ly for shortening the urls, and you can also add your bit.ly API to get some stats for what you post on Twitter.

WSUS Offline Update is an open source Windows offline updater which supports Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, windows Server 2003, 64-bit editions of XP and Server 2003 as well as Windows Vista and 7 but not only operating systems - it also supports Office XP, 2003 and 2007.

You can use it to download Windows updates from another computer and then run them on your own PC. The application can create an ISO file with the updates which you can then burn onto a CD.

Download WSUS Offline Updater

Some people do not have a permanent access to the Internet or the connection is limited; as an example, a friend can't download files larger than 10 mb. So how to install applications offline, in Ubuntu? Obviously, the packages have to be downloaded from another computer but this should include all the dependencies or else it would be useless.

The answer is a simple command:

We've managed to use Adium themes in Pidgin on Ubuntu Jaunty and in Empathy (Ubuntu Karmic). But how about Pidgin and Ubuntu Karmic? That's pretty easy actually; here is what you need to do:


1. Installing required packages

a) You need to add the Webkit PPA (paste the following command in a terminal):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webkit-team/ppa

b) Now let's install all the required packages with one command:

sudo apt-get install libnotify-bin pidgin-dev libpurple-dev libwebkit-dev bzr checkinstall

2. Compilling Pidgin-WebKit plugin for Ubuntu Karmic:

Perfection Window Decoration:





Fedora 11:





LaGaDesk-BlueNight-II:

FooBillard is a free, open source billiards game, originally implemented for Linux and ported to Mac OS X and Windows. It is written using OpenGL, and has very high quality graphics and textures.

The games that can be played with FooBillard are: Pool, Carambol, Snooker, Eight ball and Nine ball.

You can play FooBillard against the computer (AI), against another human player or in network mode (multiplayer).

FooBillard features:

There are numerous ways one can convert a web page (HTML) to PDF. Some using websites, a Firefox addon, but here is how to do it in Linux.

I found out from Penguin Inside about a small utility called GtkPerf which measures the performance of GTK themes.

You can install it in Ubuntu, using the following command:

sudo apt-get install gtkperf

GtkPerf is an application designed to test GTK+ performance. The point is to create common testing platform to run predefined GTK+ widgets (opening comboboxes, toggling buttons, scrolling text etc.) and this way define the speed of device/platform.

It seems that my favourite theme - New Wave - is probably the slowest GTK theme around (at least from the default and community themes).

Here are my tests results:

In Windows, it take a while to press Ctrl + Alt + Del, then select an application which has stopped responding end select "End task". There is a much easier way to do this, with a simple shortcut which will terminate any non responsive application.

To create a shortcut to kill stop responding applications, right click on your desktop and select "Create a new shortcut".

Point the shortcut to this:

HoldingNuts is an open source multi-platform poker client and server game on which you can play the popular Texas Hold'em variant with people all over the world, meet your friends, run your own games and even setup your own poker-network.

Among the HoldingNuts poker game features are: the ability to chat with other players, auto actions (auto fold, auto check, auto call), configurable table view, support for different poker card decks (4 color deck, 2 color deck), taking screenshots of the poker game table, sounds and localization for several languages, including English, Dutch, Romanian, German, etc.

After 15 weeks of development, Shutter 0.85 has finally been released. Shutter is a feature-rich screenshot program. You can take a screenshot of a specific area, window, your whole screen, or even of a website – apply different effects to it, draw on it to highlight points, and then upload to an image hosting site, all within one window.


New in Shutter 0.85:

The dual panel Nautilus which previously was only available for Ubuntu Jaunty is now available for Ubuntu Karmic Koala. Thanks to the author's comment, I kept checking to see when Karmic packages were finally available and it didn't took long until he finally build them.

Download dual panel Nautilus for Karmic:

After 7 years since it's initial release, my favourite Windows music player, Foobar2000, finally reaches version 1.0 beta.

Foobar2000 1.0 beta changes:

A small number of Google users should already see the new Google main page with a new look to the Search Options. This will be released to everyone some time after the New Year.

This is how the new Google home page will look:

We covered Maximus a while back:

Maximus will make sure that each window is maximised (hence its name) as soon as it’s open. The windows will also miss their title bar, freeing up precious screen real estate.

Maximus also comes by default in Ubuntu Netbook Remix. One annoying thing is that it maximizes every window you open, even small windows which should not be maximized.

Here is a quick way to tweak Maximus so that it doesn't maximize every window: press Alt + F2, enter gconf-editor, navigate to: /apps/maximus/no_maximize and set it to "true" (Do not automatically maximize newly opened windows. If undecorate is set, will still undecorate maximised windows.)

WinCDEmu is a free, open source virtual drive mounting software allowing you to easily mount iso images of your CDs and DVDs exactly like you would do with Daemon Tools or Virtual Clone Drive softwares. The main advantage is that, this one is really, really tiny piece of software (about 500KB).


WinCDEmu makes mounting CD/DVD images simple: double-click on an image file in Windows Explorer and a new drive letter with the mounted image will appear. You can mount as many images as you want at the same time, and you don't need to reserve drive letters when nothing is mounted. WinCDEmu supports ISO, CUE, NRG, MDS/MDF, CCD, IMG formats and runs on all Windows versions from WinXP to Win7.

Download WinCDEmu

Mark Renouf has compiled a VMware hard disk image of Chrome OS for testing out in your virtual machine environment [via lifehacker]:

This is a ChromeOS image converted to VMware .vmdk file. It was built from instructions provided on the ChromiumOS developers site:
http://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/chromium-os/building-chromium-os/build-instructions

Built from sources retreived on 11/19/2009, following the announcement of the opening of the ChromeOS source code.

Shared user password (for sudo, etc is 'chromeos')

The image can be downloaded the Pirate Bay.

Keep in mind that Google Chrome OS might now be usable for now and that the source code has just been released yesterday.

Instructions for using the .vmdk image in VirtualBox can be found at TechCrunch.

Update: Korben (thank you!) uploaded the Chrome OS to Megaupload. There is a virtual machine disk image for VMWare and one for Virtualbox:

Download Chrome OS for VmWare (.vmdk)

Download Chrome OS for VirtualBox (.vdi)

Cannonical just announced on their blog that they are "contributing engineering to Google under contract". For Chrome OS, obviously.

More about this, on the Canonical blog.

For users who wish to return to the policy of always prompting for a root or administrator password, the command:

sourcepklalockdown --lockdown org.freedesktop.packagekit.package-install

Read more about this change, HERE.

Update: Paul W. Frields, the Fedora Project Leader and chairman of the Fedora Project Board has made some clarifications:

• The PackageKit installer as shipped in the original release only allows users at the local console to install software without a root password.
• The PackageKit maintainers have changed the defaults in an update to be issued shortly

See his comment below.

A new features was introduced a few days ago in Google Analytics, called "Analytics Intelligence", which monitors your website's traffic. Anytime something significant happens, it adds an automatic alert in your Intelligence reports. If your bounce rate suddenly jumps on one of your referrals, Analytics Intelligence creates an alert.

You can view these alerts on the Google Analytics Inteligence submenu:

But here is how to also create email alerts: on you Google Analytics dashboard, on the left side menu, click on "Intelligence" and then select "Daily", "Weekly" or "Monthy". You will then be able to create a custom alert for the period you selected: