I have just joined the team over at OtherGaming so I should be writing news and helping out over there, if you’re into video games and want some news, reviews or just chat about whatever then head over and be sure to check their forums out too.

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Spotify the free music application for Windows and Mac has finally been officially ported to Linux, while this is only a preview build and currently unsupported it’s at least a step in the right direction and no more running the Windows version through Wine and all the trouble I had with that.

The main differences in this version is the lack of local music and that it’s only available to Premium subscribers while they are looking in to ways of “reliably” displaying ads for Free and Open users of it’s services.

With simple installation instructions for Ubuntu 10.04 and Debian Squeeze other Linux distribution users may be out in the cold for a while but I’m sure hacks and development with come quickly. Below are the instrutions given on Spotifys secret labs page:

More information can be found on their blog and secret labs pages.

After installing an update to WordPress I received the error:

“Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.”

I was unsure if this was down to my hosts servers being temporarily down, going down during the update or if WordPress had simply failed to update whatever it was updating. Turns out it was the latter and it’s really easy to fix, first log on to your ftp, file manager or whatever for your hosting and browse to your wordpress install, in the root of this there should be a .maintenance file, just delete this and everything should be back to normal. Once back in the WordPress dashboard you may be asked to reinstall whatever failed however sometimes it will have completed the install and just not managed to delete this file.

:~$ gimp
gimp: fatal error: Failed to register GObject with DBusConnection

(script-fu:3100): LibGimpBase-WARNING **: script-fu: gimp_wire_read(): error

I fixed this error by removing opening Synaptic Package Manager and searching for appmenu-gtk, right click and mark for removal, once this has been done it should begin to work again.

Remember this Photoshop CS5 sneak peak showing off it’s latest and greatest feature Content-Aware Fill a couple months ago, well it turns out a reasonably old plug-in for GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) named Resynthesizer seems to work just as great and because it is what it is, it’s free and open-source.

Installing on Ubuntu 9.10/10.04 install:

or for the Source/Windows/Fedora Core 4 versions see the download section.

Once you have it installed, it’s simple to use really just select something on your image that shouldn’t be there and right click on the selection Filters -> Map -> Resynthesize.. and up should pop an options box, these settings are pretty standard and will get rid of most things given that they aren’t too big. It’s best if you’re not getting the results you want to play around with the settings yourself to get to know them better.

Click after the break for an example with step by step guide.

Example:

Let’s see, we start out with this nice photo of a house but wait.. what are those smelly students doing there? Well, let’s sort that out..

First thing you’ll want to do is grab your best selection tool and cut around the edge of those waste of time students..

Now all you have to do is right click Filters -> Map -> Resynthesize..

Next here, you can just hit the Ok button and watch as they magically disappear (probably back to their germ infested student flat).

Now you can just do that for anything, however while doing the edges some strange things happen with the default settings:

To counteract this, I found unchecking “Make vertically tileable” seemed to fix this and I would assume (without trying) that if you are doing a vertical edge you might want to take off the horizontally tileable option.

This brings the end result to a pretty reasonable (student free) image only after a couple of minutes, much better than could be expected from using the clone tool and whatever other means you would go through.

Well played.

Embedded map:

View Larger Map

Processor: Intel Pentium(R) Dual-Core E6300 @ 2.8GHz / 2MB Cache

Geekbench Score Windows 7 Professional (32-bit): 2871

Geekbench Score Ubuntu:

Motherboard: Foxconn G31MX-K (Socket 775)

• 1 set 5.1 channel Audio jacks (3 jacks)
• 1 x PS/2 keyboard port
• 1 x PS/2 mouse port
• 1 x Parallel port
• 1 x Serial port
• 6 x USB 2.0 ports
• 1 x RJ45 LAN port
• 1 x VGA port

• 1 x PCIe x16
• 1 x PCIe x1
• 2 x PCI

Motherboard drivers (On-board Audio, VGA/ Graphics, LAN and System & Chipset drivers): http://www.foxconnchannel.com/product/Motherboards/detail_overview.aspx?id=en-us0000345

BIOS: Phoenix Technologies, LTD 6.00 PG

Memory: 4GB DDR2 800MHz (2xDIMM slots)

Hard Drive: 500GB SATA II

Dimensions: Depth 450mm, Width 180mm, Height 360mm

Power Supply: 230Watt

One of my most used commands in Linux is the history command, it lists all your recent commands. The problem with this is you might have to scroll through hundreds before you get to one of any interest, so adding grep to search through these and bring back only relative one’s is great.

Give it a try (just change searchcriteria for what you want like apt-get or tar):

history | grep searchcriteria

Manual pages:

• history
• grep

The new WordPress default theme, Twenty Ten, is awesome but one thing that annoys me about it was the fact it’s single column template isn’t full width but instead just removing the sidebar and centering the content. It’s really easy to change that though so here’s how I did it:

1. Under Appearance click Editor to open the theme editor
2. If it isn’t already click on “Stylesheet (style.css)” on the right hand side (somewhere near the bottom)
3. Now look for the following section of code (Ctrl+F will come in helpful here to find it) and change the width here from 640px to 900px then hit the Update File button:

Now when you view pages which use the one column template they should fill the same amount of space that both the content and sidebar usually do.