Thumbs.db is a file used to store thumbnail data of a folder in Windows. It makes loading of thumbnails significantly faster, however it has some privacy issues. Like if you delete an image, its thumbnail might still be there in thumbs.db file which would allow you to view it.

There’s an open source python script called Vinetto available to extract all the thumbnails in open.db to a folder. It works on Linux, Windows and Mac OS. You can download the script from here.

On Ubuntu, you can use apt-get to install vinetto:

sudo apt-get install vinetto

To extract thumbnails:

vinetto -o ./thumbnails ./thumbs.db

This will extract all the thumbnails inside thumbs.db to thumbnails folder.

Cheers!

Kopete supports yahoo webcam and it works seamlessly. Although it doesn’t work right away after installing kopete. If you try to access anyone’s webcam you’ll get the following error.

Unable to find the Jasper image conversion program.
Jasper is required to render Yahoo webcam images.
Please see http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=Kopete%20Webcam%20Support
for further information.

You can fix it simply by installing jasper packages available in Ubuntu repositories:

sudo apt-get install jasper libjasper-java libjasper-runtime libjasper-dev libjasper1

You can now send and receive anyone’s webcam.

Cheers!

After upgrading to Maverick Meerkat yesterday, my Guake terminal started giving the following error on executing top:

TERM environment variable not set.

You can fix the error by doing exactly what error says – set the TERM variable. To do that execute the following in terminal:

echo -e "TERM=xterm\nexport TERM" >> ~/.bashrc

Kill the guake terminal

kill -9 $$

You don’t need to run guake again, just press your keyboard shortcut to bring back Guake and it will appear. Now you can execute commands as normal.

Cheers!

I was fixing my friend’s computer hard drive whose partition structure had gone corrupt. I restored the partition structure using testdisk. However, on booting through this hard drive, BSOD appeared. It said UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME. The hard drive was perfectly healthy, so the error looked a bit out of place. I looked into google and found that most of the people who had this error had 2 SATA drives. My friend had 2 SATA drives too.

So, I switched the cables (connected HDD1 with HDD2′s cable and vice versa) and voila! It worked!

If that doesn’t work for you, you can remove the other drive completely and see if the problem is really with having 2 drives. You can also try replacing the cables with new one.

Cheers!

I had a primary NTFS partition with windows 7 installed on it. Somehow, its bootloader went corrupt so I used install-mbr in ubuntu to fix that but it only made the problem worse. Now my system didn’t recognise the partition as NTFS partition and I couldn’t access the partition.

I modified the partition ID using fdisk but that didn’t work. Fdisk recognised it as NTFS but gparted didn’t, nor did Ubuntu. To fix it, I followed the following steps:

The disk should be accessible again now

Cheers!

I had this problem where subtitles were not being shown in VLC. No matter what I did, it just wouldn’t display. I reinstalled VLC but still it had problems. So I removed all the vlc config files to reset the settings and fix the problem.

rm -rf ~/.config/vlc

That fixed it.

Cheers!

Its easy to delete all mails from a label/folder or inbox, but sometimes we’d like to save our starred mails and delete all the rest. The search box in gmail comes in handy in such situations. Its really a very powerful tool with various operators to make the search more efficient. The gmail search really gives it an edge over other free email applications.

I have subscribed to one of the yahoo groups and over time it has accumulated over 9000 mails. I quite frequently star the mails which I like. I wanted to delete the rest. To do that I just typed “label:techgroup -is:starred” without quotes in the search bar and clicked on Search. It displayed all the emails from that label which isn’t starred. Notice the hyphen, it means exclude.

Explanation

Its really simple and I doubt anyone would be needing this section.
label:techgroup means we want to display all the mails from label techgroup.
is:starred means we want to display all starred mails form the label.
But the – infront of is:starred negates what it does. It means we want to exclude starred items from the search results. So we get unstarred mails from label techgroup.

After making the search, click on the checkbox beside the ‘Archive’ button to select all the emails on that page. You’ll get another option just above the search result which would say:

All 20 conversations on this page are selected. Select all conversations that match this search

Click on ‘Select all conversations that match this search’. This will select all the matched results. Click on ‘Delete’ and empty the trash if you want.

Read more about the advanced search in gmail.

Cheers!

As you probably know, Twitter completely ditched basic authentication method on August 31st, 2010. It now supports only OAuth method of authentication which complicates the coding process multiple folds. Scripts which were previously 20 lines long now span several files.

While there are numerous advantage of Oauth like client doesn’t need to know your password, increased security etc, lots of twitter clients which used basic authentication stopped working right away after Aug 31st.

However, there had to be someone to the rescue. This time it’s http://www.supertweet.net/. They act like a proxy between twitter and your app, converting all basic authentication requests to oauth requests. So practically, twitter will be getting oath requests and your app would still be making basic authentication requests. This would help the twitter clients or php scripts to still use the same code and function just like before.

Documentation:
http://www.supertweet.net/about/documentation
The process is pretty simple and you should get through everything without a hitch.

You just have to change the API url from http://api.twitter.com/ from the application settings or PHP code to http://api.supertweet.net/.

If you still have problems, post it in comments.

Cheers!

Recently apt-get update started throwing notices which read:

Ignoring file 'opera.list.distUpgrade' in directory '/etc/apt/sources.list.d/' as it has an invalid filename extension
Ignoring file 'opera.list.save' in directory '/etc/apt/sources.list.d/' as it has an invalid filename extension

It occured because sources.list.d directory isn’t supposed to contain files with .distupgrade and .save extensions, but since I upgraded my distribution from 10.04, backup copies of the source files were made with .distUpgrade appended to them. Similarly .save files were not supposed to be in the directory which made it throw this error. Fortunately you can suppress this error by executing the following command:

sudo sh -c "echo 'Dir::Ignore-Files-Silently:: \"(.save|.distupgrade)$\";' > /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99ignoresave"

This will suppress the error. Next time you run sudo apt-get update you wouldn’t see those errors.

UPDATE: Apt 0.8.8 seems to have fixed the issue as mentionedby _khAttAm_ in comments. You can install it from Unstable repositories.

Cheers!

Tuxguitar stopped working after upgrading to Ubuntu 10.10 Alpha. Many people seem to be having this problem after a distribution upgrade.

The fix is simple. Install timidity and tuxguitar-jsa package.

sudo apt-get install timidity tuxguitar-jsa

After the install, run tuxguitar and play a file. You should hear the sound. If you still cannot hear it play, goto Tools->Settings->Sound
In the MIDI Sequencer drop down list, select ‘Real Time Sequencer’. In the MIDI Port field, select ‘Gervill’ and click on Ok. Click on Yes when it asks for confirmation.

Try and play sound again, and you should here it this time.