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Back in 2005 when I started work at a Milwaukee area technology consulting company I was asked to develop a kiosk system that could automatically copy images from a digital storage card to a CD . Image via Wikipedia The business idea from our customers perspective was to provide an iMac G4 with a handfull of cheap waterproof digital cameras to a water park free. The water park would then provide a camera to their customer during their stay, and when they returned the camera they would have the option to purchase a branded CD of all of their pictures for $20. The problem was that even though the iMac was easy to use, staff still had issues at times with dragging the images to the proper template folder for burning the project to CD. That's where I came in. I started to research the needs and available GNU projects that could do what we needed: Automount BashBurn Festival We spec'd out a Shuttle Box and had one purchased for testing. My first distro chosen was SuSE...

What a PITA. I have a cool smart phone that takes video, and can't get audio to work in Ubuntu , since Intrepid and Jaunty don't appear to come with AMR codecs compiled in ffmpeg , or gstreamer. Now, you can try to compile your codecs from source, and I've certainly done this sort of thing before; I can build my own kernel (In the days BEFORE xconfig), run Slackware/Gentoo, etc. This just didn't work for me. BUT, there is an easy solution. YOUTUBE.COM Image via CrunchBase That's right. Upload your video to YouTube , wait for it to process, and download the resulting MP4 from the My Videos area of the control panel. Presto, you've got your audio converted to something usable in short order.

Please don't wait. I'm usually not one to step on a soap-box to promote a product (steps down...) but this is a good one, one which many already know about and use. I used to be a heavy Evolution user. Dunno why I initially made this decision, only that it came installed on my Ubuntu Jaunty install as the default email client with the Gnome UI . I started having some issues with it recently, where the retrieval of my POP3 or sending mail caused it to hang. I read a few bug reports and posts related to clearing out temporary ~/.evolution files, but this really never worked very well, as the issues always reappeared. The last straw was not being able to expunge the Trash bin , and after a little bit of playing, decided I needed to migrate my mail to something else. I figured since I already used Firefox , I might just as well take the Thunderbird plunge. Boy, was I glad I did! It was a snap using these directions, " How To Migrate From Evolution To Thunderbird In Ubunt...

First, I realize this is going to generate some issues for some, since Twitter 's use is primarily for micro-blogging , keeping connected with others, but some have been using it for other various reasons. Image via CrunchBase I think the producing backlinks (which really doesn't work as far as Google is concerned...but I digress) and driving website traffic are two good examples, and these are what I've been investigating with a couple of accounts at Twitter. One of those accounts is @zippydpinhead . I picked on him because I used to read Zippy the Pinhead comic strips in HighTimes magazine in my early 20's and thought it was...*dude*...*funny*...*cough**cough*... I primarily use Ubuntu for my workstation these days, but have used Linux for years on the desktop and in small enterprise. My experiments were first to see if automation worked. Fortunately we have curl and a multitude of posts on the subject floating about the internet. My zippy character posts several...

I've always disliked the fact that I couldn't print to our Canon iR C2880 in color. It's not got the postscript option, which had I known how difficult it would have been for non- Windows PC's to use it, I would have investigated that option. They advertise the fact that the folks at Codehost, Inc. make a product called BrightQ that will print to these machines, but I never got it working well on my SuSE distribution . Image via Wikipedia I just recently updated my desktop from SuSE Linux Desktop Enterprise 10.1 to Ubuntu 9, and I've not been more pleased, but STILL couldn't print in color to our Canon...until now. I found a thread about this subject here where a kind soul named Andy informed the board that Canon Australia released Linux UFR and Postscript drivers in Deb, RPM, and source  (link updated 7/29/2013)! According to the documentation, the following Canon printers are supported: LBP3360 LBP3370 LBP3460 LBP5360 Image via Wikipedia ...

Most healthcare professionals know at this point that all providers of health care, require NPI (National Provider Identifier) numbers. Without one, it will become increasingly difficult for claims to be paid by commercial payers, and impossible to collect medicare and medicaid payments. Since we are a coding/billing/collection/management agency, we have frequented the NPPES (National Plan & Provider Enumeration System) to lookup NPI information. Unfortunately, there have been brief periods of downtime of the site, causing us to implement our own solution: a backup of the registry. I have a daily cron job that downloads the NPI database, push it into MySQL, giving us an albeit slow, but accurate access to an off-line version of this data. The shell script below performs the retrieval: #!/bin/sh WORKDIR="/srv/htdocs/npi" LOG="$WORKDIR/npi.log" MONTH=`date +%b` LASTMONTH=`date +%b --date='1 month ago'` YEAR=`date +%Y` URL="http://nppesdata.cms.h...

Back in 2004, we were looking for a cheap way of providing remote desktop support to our customers. This would serve a few purposes: Reducing or eliminating trip charges to the customers. Providing instant support to our customers. Reducing the cost to my employer who was paying us mileage. Using a ShuttleBox as a server, I set about installing FreeBSD and configuring vncserver to run in a sort of Terminal Services mode. I used FVWM as the windows manager, since it is lightweight and simple to modify. Many projects use this for kiosks and the like because of it's ease of configuration. I set up a fvwm2rc file that would be placed in /etc/skel/.fvwm2rc so that when each user account was set up, it would already be setup for use. # this is a bare bones sample .fvwm2rc/system.fvwm2rc file for fvwm. # It should be customized before install. See other sample .fvwm2rc files # for hints, as well as pointers from the various links on the official # fvwm web page (see the FAQ). EdgeR...

My first implementation of VMWare in a test environment, went quite smooth. I was pleased to see the installer resembled that of RedHat or Fedora. Very comforting, warm, fuzzy feelings came over me as I ran the install script...;) I installed a Windows 2003 member server, and a Nagios sample image found on the VMWare website. Quite easy to install guest os's and especially the images, as no installation process is needed, just configuring the guest os once the image is deposited and added to the list of guests available to boot. I only wish I could have had a better host, as it was only a dual PIII, with less than a Gb of RAM.

One recent project for my employer was to create a headless (pc with no keyboard, mouse, or monitor) CD burner that automagically detects an inserted flash card, renames the files, and burns them to a CD along with a Flash Projector application that plays the images on PC's or Mac's. My solution was to use the AutoFS automounter daemon, and shell scripts. Much of the scripting ideas borrowed heavily from the BashBurn project. The hardware used was commodity workstations, and a 9-in-one flashcard reader configured as a SCSI device. See the following articles for interesting info: http://www.grack.com/news/2003/Atech9-in-1CardReader.html http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~ggbaker/personal/cf-linux The file test.sh is run by cron every 20 seconds, piping the command through sleep: * * * * * root sleep 0; /usr/local/copydisk/test.sh && sleep 20; /usr/local/copydisk/test.sh && sleep 40; /usr/local/copydisk/test.sh Test.sh contents: #!/bin/bash if [ -f /usr/local/copydisk/...