Randy Jensen Online Blog

Why Bing Will Ultimately Fail

Randy Jensen — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 14:25:13 +0000

I clicked on a link off of the MSN homepage today and this is what I saw…

Why would Microsoft start combining not only Live search with Bing search, but also the MSN branding with Bing instead of MS branding?? They have some serious issues here.

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Skydiving Was Amazing!

Randy Jensen — Sat, 30 May 2009 21:41:58 +0000

I’ve been wanting to go skydiving for a while now. I finally got the chance to go today. It was absolutey incredible. Pics and video below.

Shortly after we jumped out of the plane. You spend about 60 seconds in freefall and 3-5 minutes of canopy ride.

My instructor is apparently bored… (can’t blame him considering he could do 10+ jumps a day though

Just pulled the chute. You go from 120 mph to 20 mph in under 2 seconds…Hence the constipated look on my face.

Last shot of the camera guy before he completely disappeared.

Coming in for a perfect landing.

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Install Woopra 1.3 RC2 On Ubuntu 9.04

Randy Jensen — Mon, 04 May 2009 01:00:11 +0000

If you’re not familiar with Woopra, it’s an amazing real-time analytics system. I’ve been using them ever since I got lucky enough to get a beta invite at WordCamp last year. They’ just released the last Release Candidate for it before it goes Gold. Here’s how to install it on Ubuntu.

Download the .sh file from the Woopra site (at the bottom) or here’s a direct link.
Right click the file and choose ‘Properties’ and the click the ‘Permissions’ tab
Check the box at the bottom that says "Allow Executing File As Program"
Double click the file. When the dialogue box pops up, choose “Run in Terminal”
A terminal window should open. If you see something about a “write protected file”, just hit “y”, then Enter
You should now see the Woopra installer begin. I left everything as the default.

That’s it! You should now be running Woopra on Ubuntu. All of the issues I was having with initial releases of Woopra have been fixed and it’s working just as well as on Windows/OSX. Huge congrats to the Woopra team!

Download the Woopra 1.3 RC2: The Final Release Candidate Blog Post

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Get Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope Now

Randy Jensen — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 13:42:51 +0000

So Ubuntu has released 9.04 as an RC and you’re waiting for launch day to get it. Bad idea. If you’re planning on upgrading to the latest and greatest Ubuntu 9.04. I recommend doing it now. When it’s officially launched, there’s no telling when you’ll be able to get your hands on it because of the server load. Here’s how.

Hit “Alt + F2″ and type “update-manager -d”

Want more? Sorry. That’s all I got.

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Unable to Lock Download Directory When Updating Ubtunu

Randy Jensen — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 15:00:03 +0000

Sometimes when you’re trying to either use the Update manager or sudo apt-get update in Ubuntu, it will throw an error saying it was ‘Unable to lock download directory’. More than likely another instance of apt-get is running in the background. Luckily this issue is easily fixed by typing this into a terminal:

sudo pkill apt

This will look for apt to see if any instances are running and kill them. Now you should be able to update as you would normally.

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Using Pandora’s Windows Vista Gadget

Randy Jensen — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 15:00:04 +0000

I recently bought a new computer that is running Windows Vista. My Ubuntu computer is still my main machine, but when I need to do some serious design work, CS2 running in Wine just can’t compete with CS4 running natively on a quad-core machine with 8 Gigs of RAM.

I also love listening to Pandora. It gets turned on the second my computer boots, and turned off only when I’m away from my machine or going to leave for the day. I’ve used Pandora’s AIR app since the first day it came out (and before then I used another desktop app who’s name escapes me currently) and I absolutely love it. Even more so now that AIR has hit Linux with an official release that I can use on Ubuntu and has been rock solid so far.

While listening today, I saw that Pandora had an official gadget for Windows Vista so I thought I’d give it a shot.

Installation was dead simple. Just click the button that says ‘Download the Pandora Vista Gadget‘. Then choose ‘Open with Windows Sidebar’ and ‘OK’. When propmted, click ‘Install’.

After you’ve got it installed, you can manage your playlists, thumbs up/down songs, etc right from the gadget. The guys at Pandora continue to pump out seriously cool ways to use their service and this one is no different.

Get the Pandora Vista Gadget here.

*Side note for 64 bit users: I use Vista 64 bit, so I had to do a couple extra (very easy) steps. Directly from their blog.

Right-click the Windows Sidebar and select Properties.
Un-check the “Start Sidebar when Windows starts” option and hit OK. Then…
Click the green Windows Start Button in the lower left of your screen.
Click “All Programs”
Scroll down until you see the “Startup” folder
Right-click the “Startup” folder and select “Explore”
In the window that pops up, right-click the empty white space and select New->Shortcut
Copy the following text, including quotes:
“C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Sidebar\sidebar.exe”
Paste that copied text into the Shortcut’s “Location” field.
Click “Next.”
Click “Finish.”
Restart Windows Vista 64

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Make Ubuntu Instantly More Useful

Randy Jensen — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 15:00:19 +0000

Because of it’s open source nature, some really useful but proprietary software is not included in a default Ubuntu install. Some of them include Java, Flash, Microsoft Fonts, DVD playback, etc. Luckily there’s a quick fix to install most of the things you’ll need to get up and running quickly.

Here’s how

Go to ‘Applications’ –> ‘Add/Remove’
Next you’ll see a drop down that says ‘Canonical-maintained applications’. Change this to ‘All available applications’
Now type ‘Ubuntu restricted extras’ in the search box and check the result that says ‘Ubuntu restricted extras’
Now just click ‘Apply’ in the lower right and let it download everything. When it’s installing, you’ll have to check the box that says you agree to the Java EULA, but other than that, everything will take care of itself.

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Speak & Spell In Ubuntu?

Randy Jensen — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 15:00:43 +0000

Turns out Ubuntu has a seriously weird built in text-to-speech function available right in the terminal. It unfortunately sounds strikingly similar to Speak & Spell…just in case you weren’t around during the glory days of Speak & Spell (*ahem*), you seriously have to check this out first.

Now that you know why there is a generation of people who ‘can’t speak good’, I’m going to show you how to make Ubuntu talk.

Open a terminal and type
espeak "Luke, I am your father"
Just make sure you type ‘espeak’ and then follow that with a string of text in quotes (don’t forget to wrap it in quotes)

More Options

Espeak can do some other really cool things including saving to a WAV file and speaking in different voices. Here’s how.

Save as a WAV file

Enter:
espeak -w luke.wav "Luke, I am your father"

Change Voices

Enter:
espeak --voices=en
(That’s two dashes before ‘voices’. It may show up as one long em dash)
This will show a list of all the available voices. I had some trouble with a few of them, but it’s fun to play around and see what you can come up with.
Example:
espeak -v en-scottish "Luke, I am your Scottish father"

Not much to say for this tip, just stupid fun. I will say, however, that the ability to save to a WAV file could come in handy somehow….just not sure how yet.

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Monitor Your Laptops Power Consumption With Ubuntu

Randy Jensen — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 15:00:04 +0000

Found a really cool and very useful command today to monitor your Ubuntu laptop’s power consumption. Simply type the following command into your terminal.

gnome-power-statistics

If your hardware supports it, you should be presented with a screen that looks similar to the following

It’s interesting to play around with this to see how different things affect your laptops power. I turned the brightness down on my laptop from 100% to about 50% and the drop was dramatic. There are also different graphs you can view like charge history of your current session.

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Recover a Lost WordPress Password

Randy Jensen — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 15:00:20 +0000

Recently I had a client contact me and tell me they lost their WordPress password and couldn’t get into their account. I guess they had the wrong email in there and couldn’t use the ‘Lost Password’ feature either. Luckily, there’s a ‘not too difficult’ method for resetting your password (or more than likely your favorite client’s password).

I’m going to be using cPanel and PHPMyAdmin for this, but you should be able to do it with whatever system your host is using to allow you to manage your DB’s.

Login to cPanel and look for phpMyAdmin
Look for your database to the blog you forgot the password to on the left hand side
Look for the ‘wp_users’ table and click the ‘Browse’ button
Find your username/user ID and click the edit button next to it
Look for the ‘user_pass’ field and change the function to MD5. Then simply type your new password in the text area. When you’re done, click the Go/Save button
Finally, go and try to login to the blog using the username you chose to edit and the new password you just entered. What’s that? you forgot the password? Go back to step 1 and go to jail.

That’s it! There are a couple other ways out there to get your WP password back, including one where you upload a file to your server that basically opens WP up so you can get in and change the password. This method is by far the best way to do it, however.

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