How to Install FFMPEG On Centos (Yum)

Installing ffmpeg is really easy with the YUM package manager, so don’t fret!

Shell in, or open up your terminal, and execute the following command:

yum install ffmpeg ffmpeg-devel

If you see an error stating package not found, then you probably need to add a repository. We can do that with vi in the same terminal window:

vi /etc/yum.repos.d/dag.repo

Once vi is open, press i to go into INSERT mode, and paste the following text in:

[dag]
name=Dag RPM Repository for Red Hat Enterprise Linux
baseurl=http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el$releasever/en/$basearch/dag
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1

Press ESC to exit out of INSERT mode and then hold SHIFT and press Z Z to save. (Or, of course, :wq to write and quit.) You can now add the GPG key for the repository:

rpm -Uhv http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/i386/rpmforge/RPMS/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm

Once that is complete, run the yum install command again. After installation is complete, you can run this command to test if FFMPEG is installed and working correctly:

ffmpeg -i Input.file Output.file

How Can I Test My SMTP Server

Are you unsure if you setup Postfix correctly, or you seem to be able to connect, but mail isn’t going through? You can telnet into your SMTP server and run a direct mail test from the console.

If you’re on Windows, open a command prompt. If you’re on Mac or Linux, open up a Terminal window. Once you’re ready, you can follow along.

telnet [server ip] 25

When you’re successfully connected, enter these commands line by line, hitting return after each line.

EHLO
MAIL FROM: test@testemail.com
RCPT TO: [your email here]
DATA
[your message here]
.

When you enter a period on a line by itself, the SMTP server will attempt to send the mail out. Once it’s sent, you can type quit and hit return to exit the SMTP console, and verify the mail actually got to you!

Can’t Open Network and Sharing Center

I’ve never ran into this issue on Windows Vista or Windows 7 on my own computer, but my roommate had a problem with their new laptop where trying to access the Network Adapters or Network Connections dialogs would just result in a hang and you would have to close the window. When trying to automatically connect to a wireless network, the loading icon didn’t even spin, it just sat there. Really quirky, right?

Well, I found a couple suggestions on the world wide webs, and here’s what worked for me, a simple one liner in the command prompt, a quick registration of a DLL file, and BAM, they were back online!

Open a command prompt with administrator privileges and type this in:

regsvr32 netcenter.dll

Once you hit the ENTER key and it returns with a success message, give your computer a restart and you should be back online.

If this didn’t work for you, you can try to reboot into safe mode (reboot and hit f8 while your computer is booting up, and select safe mode from the menu) and once you are in, open a command prompt with administrator privileges and type this in:

net localgroup “Administrators” “local Service” /add

Once you’ve entered it in and you see a success message, reboot your computer and cross your fingers!

json_encode Does Not Exist

It’s broken because the JSON module for php isn’t installed and/or loaded! So, install it!

1. Install the PHP Developer Package
   yum install php-devel
2. Compile the JSON PHP Module with PEAR or PECL (PEAR Recommended)
   PEAR » pear install pecl/json
   PECL » pecl install json
3. Configure PHP to Load JSON PHP Module
   Create a file json.ini in the directory /etc/php.d/ with this line:
   extension=json.so

See, that wasn’t that hard, was it?

Giving Away A Google Wave Invite

I was recently invited to the Google Wave sandbox, and even more recently doubled up on the amount of invites I have available.

So, I would like to extend an invitation to a reader of Cubicle Generation. What’s the catch, you say?

I want to know what you guys would like me to write about next, what interests you?

Let me know what you would like to see in upcoming blog posts, and I will pick my favorite out of all the submissions this upcoming Monday (November 9th) and announce the winner of the Google Wave invitation!

iPhone Cover Flow Meets Palm Pre’s Cards

Why can’t multitasking really be that beautiful? Hopefully, the user experience engineers at Apple will take a page out of the Ocean Observations book.

Reasons to Hack Your Android Phone

Just like the initial iPhone jailbreaks, rooting, or hacking your Google Android phone was a scary process at first. If you screwed up, you’d have to do a hard reset at best, if you really blew it, you had a broken piece of hardware.

However, several posts over at Lifehacker have shown us that the rooting process has been vastly improved upon, and is now relatively safe to perform. (By the way, this article is pretty much a rewrite/reiteration/combination of these LH posts, but I agree whole heartedly with every point, and had to share my paraphrased version.)

Still not convinced you should take the leap? Here are some pretty darn good reasons to have a cracked Android phone.

A noticeable performance boost. Most of the complaints from Android users is the lag experienced when navigating through the phone’s interface. Having to wait any noticeable amount of time after hitting a button for the action to perform gets to be a drag real fast. It’s reported that using the CyanogenMOD ROM makes things really snap into place.

Extremely easy cell tethering via WiFi or Bluetooth. android-wifi-tether is a free application that allows one click tethering of your cell connection for use on your computer. Run the app on your phone and you will be able to connect to your phone and access the internet. (WiFi SSID/Bluetooth Device: G1Tether)

Improved on screen keyboard. Cracking your Android phone allows the use of the on screen keyboard designed for the HTC Hero, instead of the standard, sometimes problematic, Android keyboard. You can enable it by navigating to Settings, Locale & Text, then turning on the “Touch Input” feature. You can also adjust its spell, suggest, and feedback settings.

Multi-touch web browsing, baby! It might not feel as suave as the iPhone experience, but it still improves the flow of browsing just as much. You might never see this on a regular Android phone, unless the Big Apple wants to share.

Specifically, all the build specific Android apps! If you choose to root your Android phone, you will have access to all the different applications available from any Android build, including applications not available in the United States, such as the apps on the HTC Hero, and the apps from the Android Donut build, which isn’t even distributed by wireless carriers yet!

So, there you have it. Several pretty solid reasons to nudge you over the edge and persuade you to hack your Google Phone!

Amazing GDM Login Screens

If you’re looking to customize your Gnome Display Manager’s login screen, look no further! Let me point you in the direction of some of the most amazing GDM Themes publicly available.

ArchDark Don’t let the Russian text scare you, this login screen uses your language, so don’t worry.

Somatic GDM If a brightly colored off-color illustration is your thing, this is your thing. Several different illustrations available.

Humanoid

Woobuntu 2 If you like to stay classy and rep Ubuntu at the same time, this is the login screen for you.

Underground Ubuntu

Once you’ve downloaded your theme’s tarball, go to System > Administration > Login Window, then select the Local tab. Click on the [ADD] button, and open your tarball, and voila!

Hackintosh Netbook Compatibility Chart

Mad props to the excellent folk over at Boing Boing for creating this Mac OS X Netbook Compatibility Chart, updated against the new Vostro A90, Toshiba NB200, Asus 1008HA Leopard compatible models.

HacBook Compatibility Chart

Obviously you’re going to want to be going with a Dell Mini 9, EEE 1000H, HP Mini 1000,

Rename Multiple Files in GNOME

Renaming your photos downloaded off of a digital camera to something relevant can be quite a chore, especially if you have hundreds of pictures to rename. If you’re running a GNOME desktop environment on your Linux machine, Nautilus and Purrr makes this an easy task.

First off, we’ll need to install the Purrr application, which is a GUI application that will allow you to rename multiple files at once with a slew of options to modify the naming conventions. Run the following command in your terminal:

sudo aptitude install purrr

Once Purrr has been installed, navigate to the files you wish to rename, select the files, then drag and drop them into a Purrr window. If you want to rename pictures with a numeric offset, use this as your naming template:

BeachPictures_[C,100].[E]

This will rename all files selected to BeachPictures_100.JPG, BeachPictures_101.JPG, BeachPictures_102.JPG, and so on, and so forth.