Thomas Nybergh’s pages

Due to recent very unclear, confusing and freedom hating legislation prepared by corrupt and incompetent people and an appeal court decision from a couple of days back, it’s now criminal to break the not very functional CSS copy protection used on most commercial DVD-Video discs. Watching DVDs using GNU/Linux systems is thus not something well [...]

After installing Ubuntu Linux 8.04 (Hardy Heron), I didn’t get any sound when I tried to play sound files in Amarok (the distribution’s own package of version 1.4.9.1), a music oriented audio player/music library for *nix.
I fixed this by changing opening Settings -> Configure Amarok -> Engine and changing the Xine engine’s (no other engine [...]

Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger instant messaging network (formerly MSN Messenger) is currently blocking messages with urls that contain *.youtube.com. Tietokone, a Finnish IT publication reports that this applies to messages with links to *.mediafire.com, too.
WTF, how did the people running Windows Live even come up with such a lousy idea? I’m guessing the explanation, if [...]

EDIT: This post gets some traffic from Google users who probably are more interested in a later post on fixing a problem causing Ubuntu 8.04’s Amarok not to play any sound.

After upgrading to Ubuntu Linux 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) I noticed that Amarok (Ubuntu package version 1.4.9.1-0ubuntu3), one of my preferred audio players/music libraries, didn’t [...]

The GNOME desktop environment project is plagued by a design philosophy that apparently aims to make user interfaces suitable for lobotomy victims at the cost of removing features and options from the GUI. This has been discussed endlessly elsewhere.
Something probably related to this surfaced when I upgraded to Ubuntu Linux 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron). A [...]

Although the new Ubuntu Linux 8.04 LTS release is nice and polished, there are a few glitches in how the bundled GNOME environment allows the user to customize some behavior.
Settings for how the desktop environment should handle removable media are important for me as I loathe the idea of having to deal with any [...]

In other news, somewhat related to my previous post: Russia may in the future require registration of “every Wi-Fi device and hotspot”. What a goddamn Kafka-Orwellian nightmare that country must be.
[via: Slashdot]

(I hate Courier New)
For some time, I’ve used Dimitar Zhekov’s clean, fixed-width font Terminus for terminal-heavy situations in both GNU/Linux and Windows. I’m clueless in the area of typography, but Terminus looks oddly appealing while looking at e.g. code (which I don’t write myself), configuration and log files. I keep backup copies of a TTF [...]

Late last month, the Debian GNU/Linux project announced that security patch support for the old stable release, 3.1 (codename Sarge), will end on the last day of March. Many people will be using servers, integrated and other special systems with Sarge for a long time to come, without applying any patches, and I’m afraid I’ll [...]

Not much time passed after I posted my previous entry about using Firefox 3 Beta 2 as my main browser until I realized that while I had browsed around for almost a day without much trouble, I hadn’t used Ajax heavy sites such as Facebook and Wordpress’ admin interface.
As soon as I started using [...]