Quick Note

Published
by
billythekid
on June 29, 2009
in Linux and My Scripts
. 0 Comments

My Linux based PC is currently in storage. This means that the iTeddy video converters are currently offline for the foreseeable future.

I will be looking at somehow hosting them on this web-host but I’m not sure that’s even possible as I don’t have direct privileges to install the software that’s required. I will look into this further and apologize for any inconvenience this is causing.

Yes I Can

Published
by
billythekid
on April 6, 2009
in Linux, My Scripts, Other Computery Things and PHP
. 2 Comments

…make it easier for you that is.

I ended my last post with the question

“Couldn’t make it easier than that could I?”

Well after some productive typing I’ve created another form which will handle conversion to .amv and extraction to .mp3 on uploaded videos. Not only this but if you enter a YouTube URL it will skip over to YouTube, grab the video directly and do the conversion(s) for you.
So here it is:

This saves you time as this PC can download the video from the site instead of having to wait for you to download then upload it. If you have a slow connection that could be ages! (not that my connection is anything to brag about!)

You can find this form here.

Now, I really can’t make it any easier can I?

How To Get The Audio From A YouTube Video

Published
by
billythekid
on April 4, 2009
in Linux, My Scripts and PHP
. 1 Comment

I’ve made this brilliant online tool to extract the audio from a downloaded Youtube(or other video) file.

All the rest of this post is obsolete now as I added the option to input a Youtube URL into the form but feel free to follow it for downloading only.

So how to actually download the file from youtube?

Well I suggest using this free Firefox browser plugin. Then simply navigate to the youtube video of your choice and click the little spinning balls in the bottom of your browser thus:
DLHelper Screenshot

There may be more than one option for download but if it’s just for the soundtrack I’d suggest the .flv as this always works in the converter, other file types may work just as well it’s just that I’ve not tested for those. If you want the video and size is of no consequence I’d suggest getting one of the HQ/HD versions.

So get your video then upload it into my form above where my computer will perform black magic that strips the music/audio out and sends it back to you as an .mp3

Couldn’t make it easier than that could I? (Well if you ask nicely I’ll give you one you can use on your own linux machines for when mine’s is offline!)

Seven Things You Don’t Know About Me

Published
by
billythekid
on March 22, 2009
in Other Computery Things and the-kid.org
. 6 Comments

I’ve been tagged by Stuart Brown of OU fame and this brilliant blog for a seven things you (possibly) don’t know about me meme (pronounce this as meem not meemee, I made that error in the company of geeks once, not nice!)

Normally these wouldn’t make it onto this blog but, like with the TV Licence post there’s nowhere else for them now! So here goes…

The Rules?

  • Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
  • Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
  • Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
  • Let them know they’ve been tagged.

Seven things?

  1. I have four children. My eldest was born when I was just 19 years old, she turned 10 last year and yet I insist I’m still 24, go figure. My youngest is 2 years old. I’ve undergone a medical procedure to ensure she is also the last!
  2. I taught myself mIRC scripting having never learnt any other language, and with a tentative grasp of English, truth be told. Some of my scripts have been downloaded from various sites thousands of times! I’ve since dabbled in javascript with greasemonkey scripts and am currently learning PHP.
  3. I met my girlfriend when we were both only sixteen, she was still in high school!
  4. I have applied to the Open University for enrolment for a BSc in Computing course. I should start later this year having just missed out on the Feb start. My girlfriend already has a similar degree and I am very jealous of her, she’s a software engineer for an engineering company(Aker Solutions) and writes the control software that runs offshore oil rigs, she recently put in a system that lets BP make £900,000 a day! If her software fails for 20 minutes she would need to work for 33 years to pay back the lost revenue!(that’s not in her contract so don’t worry unduly – the oil will still be in the ground!)
  5. I am a time served plumber to trade but don’t do plumbing any more, this is why I am also poor!
  6. I passed my driving test first try at 17 and in the time since then have owned 13 vehicles, which I’ve listed(sad I know!) here
  7. I stopped smoking on the same day as I started my first blog, I’ve now been ‘clean’ for over 3 years. I never meant to stop I just stopped buying them one day, which led to 2 days and so on. I still to this day have the cravings and I don’t think they will ever go away. It’s easier to NOT buy smokes than it is to buy them so I’ll remain smoke free. Nothing to do with will power, just laziness!

Who’s Next?
Amy – Why Am I Here Again?
Russell – The Tomahawk Kid
David – David’s Blog
Chris – Flight of TheEaglehawk
Rashaan – Step Into the Nexus
Michelle – Critical Musings
Charles – Plurkfiends

Twitter Greasemonkey Script

Published
by
billythekid
on March 15, 2009
in My Scripts
. 0 Comments
PLEASE NOTE: You'll need the Greasemonkey firefox addon for this to work!

I’ve done a GM script that simply removes the DM count number from being displayed on your twitter page. It annoys me as it doesn’t show NEW DMs only but ALL DMs including those already seen. There’s no option to hide it and I don’t want to delete them.

I use tweetdeck on twitter anyhow so don’t need to see that count on the occasions I do visit my twitter home page. This just removes the annoyance.

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TV Licensing – Gotcha By The Balls

Published
by
billythekid
on February 26, 2009
in Other Computery Things
. 4 Comments
PLEASE NOTE: Reading this from outside the UK? Ignore this post! (In researching this post I DO have a UK TV license!)

This isn’t particularly techy or geeky but since I closed my personal blog I’ll put it here as it’s ‘just’ internetty enough!

According to the TV licensing site you need a license if you watch TV ‘as its being shown live’ no matter which medium you use, be it a PC with a TV card or a TV itself. The wording being

You must be covered by a valid TV Licence if you watch or record television programmes as they’re being shown on TV.

Interestingly though, until recently(and I’ve not bothered to verify, favouring writing this blog post on it instead) you needed some sort of hardware designed specifically for the reception of TV signals. Now however that wording revision, backed up on this BBC page*, means that you need a TV license IF YOU HAVE INTERNET ACCESS AT HOME!! (as that’s live streaming at the same time as it’s shown on TV.)

Alternatively that wording could be construed to mean that you need to actually WATCH TV now to require a license. In which case I have a TV, digibox, PC and VCR, but since I’m not recording or watching I need no TV license?? I wonder which version the authorities favours…

Anyone wanna start a revolt?

*-clicking this link requires a TV license!

How To Clean Your Twitter Followers

Published
by
billythekid
on February 26, 2009
in Other Computery Things
. 0 Comments
PLEASE NOTE: Since writing this article I've found the Friend or Follow service is a fantastic alternative to the method below.

I’ve been using twitter for a couple of years now and recently there has been a huge jump in users from the UK, thanks mostly to the publicity from @schofe, @stephenfry and @wossy and it’s a good thing. However with the good there comes the bad. The twitter lot who want to be seen to be more popular than they are.

They do it like this, they’ll follow you. So you reciprocate (as is encouraged – it’s rude not to imho!) then in a few days they stop following you. This makes it look like lots of people follow them for “content”. (Well, twitter is 140 character micro-blogging, anyone who’s following for content needs to hit Google’s blog search or something!)

So how do you tell who’s following you and who’s not. Well there’s always @useqwitter, a service that emails you when someone stops following you. Easier than this though is this technique…

Go to your following list, look for the option below the person’s nickname to send them a direct message. You can only send DMs to those who reciprocate a following link. Go thru that list deleting anyone who you don’t want to follow any more (obviously some folks you’ll not mind following without reciprocation – news feeds etc.).

Don’t forget to also go into your followers list and click your reciprocation buttons.

When you have lots of followers and are following them all back you might find things get a bit ‘busy’ so go and get tweetdeck!

Oh and if anyone wants to follow me (I will reciprocate of course!) I’m @billythekid (of course!)

Getting Google Earth to work in Ubuntu

Published
by
billythekid
on February 25, 2009
in Linux and Other Computery Things
. 3 Comments

SO I downloaded Google Earth yesterday but it kept crashing out on my Ubuntu install. The only way I could get it to work was as follows…

Grab the previous version(4.3) for Linux from Google here: http://earth.google.com/intl/en/download-earth.html

I downloaded this to my desktop, it’s saved as a .bin file which won’t run in Ubuntu for some reason. Simply renaming the file to remove the .bin extension(highlight the file and hit f2 to rename) then setting it as executable in it’s preferences (right click/Properties/Permissions Tab/check the box “Allow executing file as a program”) worked and it installed loverly, opened loverly and works loverly-ish.

A couple of issues I have

  1. It’s an openGL program so the old Compiz flicker bug comes into play(remember this isn’t the Windows version so no DirectX option here)
  2. The fonts are tiny – to the point of making hardly any sense

The compiz flickering bug can be worked around by closing compiz for the duration of your google earth session, to do this open a terminal and type killall compiz.real once you want it back on type compiz in the terminal.

Remember if compiz is OFF and you use it to provide your window decorations(title bars etc) that these will be unavailable to use. Handy hint: windows can be moved around by holding Alt and just dragging the window.

I’ve not been able to get the new Google earth 5.0 to work properly in Ubuntu yet, it opens, then almost immediately crashes closed. Could well be my hardware, it’s NOT Linux friendly most of the time!

Downloading New Youtube Videos

Published
by
billythekid
on February 19, 2009
in Other Computery Things
. 0 Comments

Recently YouTube made this announcement. In relation to this new ’service’ they started blocking most algorithms for downloading from them for nothing.

This meant that most popular browser plugins just stopped working, for the new videos anyway.

Thankfully the best of them all, Fast Video Download, has been fixed as part of an upgrade to version 2.0!
It does however re-route you to the applian website(the makers of FVD) where you now click a link to get the video. Still, it’s working and that’s what matters!

Remember my video converter will convert from .flv to .amv for your iTeddy etc. so go get your content!

How To Make JPG = PHP

Published
by
billythekid
on February 15, 2009
in Other Computery Things and PHP
. 8 Comments

Recently over on Blogshares we’ve been having a bit of a brainstorm about how to make things better. One of the suggestions to which I quickly replied, “I could do that easy, tonight!” was to alter the image people use to claim their blogs in the game so that it would show the current valuation of the blog on the claimed page.

My thinking at the time was, easy just use PHP to add the info pulled from the DB onto the image and pass that back to the browser. So that’s what I did and it was easy (here’s the code – excluding the DB calls.)

However this meant that the image was now blogshares.php and not blogshares.jpg. Well with thousands of claim codes out there already in place I couldn’t make everyone change their code to the new one could I?

This meant I needed to either have PHP handle .jpg requests via .htaccess or some other method or make the jpg auto-forward to the PHP script somehow. Neither was looking attractive as I don’t have access to the Blogshares administration tools. While researching the .htaccess method I found people were having irregular results. It’s a bit hit and miss. I was also told it coulsnt’ be done on the BS server anyhow so method 2. To make the .jpg point to another place you need to create a symlink. However the image itself is actually already a symlink to another image! I know, my head would explode if I thought about that for too long.

So in came hidden mystery option 3, which on the face of it is so simple it’s unimaginable how I didn’t think of it first. Just use the web server! The script was renamed index.php and placed in a folder called blogshares.jpg. And what happens when you hit a folder URL? Yep, it looks for the index page. So now the image is served nicely onto the pages of the 12,474 (at time of writing) existing claimants out there without them having to do a thing!

This is a great thing to remember for when you want to host images on a rotation or whatever in say a forum signature or some other place where you can’t use the .php extension for an image. Stick the php script you want to return in a folder named whatever.jpg !!

With relation to the BS script one thing I would recommend if you do have an existing code is remove the width and height attributes to make it look less squished. The result is something like:

If you have a blog and want to know how much it’s worth add this code to your blog’s main page(if it comes back as B$0 you’re not listed, so go and add your blog!):
<img src="http://blogshares.com/images/blogshares.jpg" alt="Listed On Blogshares" />

*Edit – 26/Feb/09* An example of how I’ve utilised this technique(ok it’s .png not .jpg but meh, pics is pics!) is at http://billy.the-kid.org/cotd.png this is a folder that uses index.php to provide the image randomly using the following code

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Epoch – A – Mundo

Published
by
billythekid
on February 12, 2009
in Other Computery Things
. 3 Comments
PLEASE NOTE: non geeks can come too!

YAY – Something I actually managed to wait up for AND caught on a screendump!

1234567890

Or for those non-geeks amongst us this is the day that computer clocks reach the number 1234567890 which is the number of seconds since 00:00:00 January 1, 1970 – the Unix epoch!

Fri Feb 13 2009 23:31:30 UTC – Which happens to be UK time too atm.

I’ll keep the NTP Daemon updated.

Party at my house, y’all are invited. RSVP below!

PHP Unzipper

Published
by
billythekid
on February 9, 2009
in My Scripts, Other Computery Things, PHP and mIRC
. 6 Comments
PLEASE NOTE: This makes use of the php system function to run the linux unzip command with the -o switch. This script will most likely only work on linux servers.

I’ve long been annoyed that my host’s login is a pain for their file manager so I tend to use FTP. Now this is great for the most part but occasionally you have a Wordpress installation to put on or something. Something from a .zip that’s not too big in size until it’s extracted, when it becomes too big for my patience in FTP, especially when it starts going down the directory tree inside the zip.

Yuck!

Now I could always just upload the zip file and use the convoluted login of my host, but I hate that. So I made a PHP script to unzip it for me.

I upload the unzipper.php file along with the file I want unzipped, then just navigate to http://www.example.com/path/unzipper.php and choose the file to unzip.

unzipper

It unzips recursively(all the folders inside too) and, if I choose, remove the original zip from the folder. It also has the option to delete itself when it’s done! This is a feature that’s missing from some of the other available online PHP unzippers and one that I feel is a big help to security. You can even have it delete itself without unzipping anything!

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New Blogshares Script

Published
by
billythekid
on February 8, 2009
in My Scripts and Other Computery Things
. 1 Comment

I spent the evening helping Ken implement the new show-blog tool on all blogs.php pages. We had a difference of opinion on the layout though so I’ve written this script just to make it how I want it! lol

It just stretches the blog to cover the whole general section rather than just half the page squeezed in beside the general table.

Find it here.

btk

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Can’t Type Keywords Into Firefox Address Bar

Published
by
billythekid
on February 7, 2009
in Other Computery Things
. 0 Comments

I reported this on launchpad but fixed it myself.

Whenever I typed a keyword into the address bar it would give me an error as follows:

The file jar:file:///usr/lib/firefox-3.0.5/extensions/langpack-en-GB@firefox-3.0.ubuntu.com/chrome/en-GB.jar!/locale/browser-region/region.propertiesKEYWORD cannot be found. Please check the location and try again.

Normally if I typed KEYWORD in the browser it would open up this page. Firefox uses Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” page on a search to determine where keywords direct.

I resolved this by typing about:config in the address bar.
Then searrch for (or scroll to) keyword.URL
double click on it and put http://www.google.co.uk/search?btnI=&q= in the box that appears, click OK and close the config tab.

Now entering KEYWORD works again!

If anyone has the default value of that field I’d appreciate a note in the comments.After a tiny bit of Googling I found this article that tells you the default values – in my case “http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=”

Cheers!

iTeddy Stuff

Published
by
billythekid
on February 6, 2009
in Linux, My Scripts and Other Computery Things
. 0 Comments

At the risk of this turning into an iTeddy blog, here are a few hints about the iTeddy based on my own experiences with the worlds best virtual babysitter…

  1. Firstly Know Your Version:
    • V1 came with an actual plug-in-to-the-wall charger V2 doesn’t.
    • V2 has the belt clip attached on the back of the media player whilst it’s in the teddy. The belt clip is not removable(unless you unscrew it.)
    • The top two buttons, Lock and Power, on V2 are concave, the rest are convex.
    • The expansion slot on a V1 is sprung with a screw to keep the card in place.
    • The expansion slot on a V2 has a proper plastic covering and the card ‘clicks’ into place.
  2. V2 iTeddys need to be plugged in and have the plug removed by an adult only. The port on the player is too delicate to allow the kids to plug in the charger. “My computer can’t see the iTeddy” and “My iTeddy won’t charge” are caused by this! To fix it you need to take the player to bits and delicately bend the contacts and jam them in place with a bit of paper or something(return the iTeddy for a new one!)
  3. The iTeddy conversion software is currently (Feb 09) being upgraded as per this post on the publisher’s blog.
  4. The official iTeddy websites are not well maintained!
  5. V1 could handle .avi files, I’ve yet to manage this on a V2, which only seems to play .amv files.
  6. The plug-in USB-mains charger from a V1 will not charge a V2 however it WILL keep it playing(provide a power source). when the battery runs out.
  7. I wrote a video converter for Linux to make videos work on the iTeddy.
  8. I wrote an online video converter to allow anyone to convert a video to .amv without downloading software.
  9. I wrote an even better version of the above converter here that can convert videos from youtube
  10. V1 can be reset by holding the Play/Pause and Lock buttons together.
  11. V2 is reset by inserting a paper-clip type thing into the small reset hole on the back of the media player.
  12. The official windows iTeddy converter software can be downloaded from http://www.iteddy.com/assets/download_apps/iTeddy_Convertor_Tool.exe(.exe file)
  13. iTeddy is on Twitter!Imran(The inventor of iTeddy) asked for this to be removed.
  14. V2 iTeddy games are “Cover The Dots” and “Chase The Spots” – the latter a snake clone, the former a tactical game.
  15. V1 iTeddys had a tetris style falling blocks game.
  16. The official iTeddy DVD ripper can be downloaded from these links: Windows(.exe) | Mac(.dmg)
  17. Some iTeddy pictures can be downloaded from here(.zip) The jingle from here(.zip)

That’s about all I can think of about the iTeddy right now!




© 2004-2009 billythekid