Facebook Font

Ever need the facebook font for desktop publishing? Instead of paying $300 for the official one try this one free one. It comes in OpenType format. I needed to update my OpenOffice to version 3.4 in order to use in in  OpenOffice Draw.

http://www.maxfonts.com/fonts/f/facebook-letter-faces.font

Linux Tip of the Day - sudo saving within VIM

I browse a lot of files across different servers with different configurations. It is very helpful for me to be able to save changes I've made to a file I've opened with limited read only privileges. The last thing I want to do is save to a temprorary file and overwrite the target file with the temp file.

:w !sudo tee %

Thanks to the Ubuntu Forums and user singlow

Linux Tip of the Day - Hard Drive Identification

Here is a command I found very useful today. I needed to identify the hard drive with out opening the enclosure.

sudo lshw -businfo -C disk

Thanks to the Ubuntu Forums and user Temüjin

Text messaging from the web

In Canada who wants to pay 15 cents, or a monthly plan, just to send a text message? Especially when carriers use 'empty space on the truck' to deliver SMS messages.

I use Web2SMS which unfortunately does not let you reply with the exception of Fido and Rogers.

Text for free:
Telus:
http://www.telusmobility.com/sendamessage/sendamessage.shtml
Rogers/Fido:
http://websms.rogers.page.ca/2way/
Bell: (i have had limited success with Bell)
http://www.txt.bell.ca/bell/en/
Solo Mobile:
http://www.txt.mysolo.ca/
Koodo Mobile
http://msg.koodomobile.com/

You can also email mobiles using the following addresses:

[10digitnumber]@txt.bell.ca
[10digitnumber]@pcs.rogers.com
[10digitnumber]@fido.ca
[10digitnumber]@msg.telus.com
[10digitnumber]@vmobile.ca (Virgin Mobile)
[10digitnumber]@mobiletxt.ca (PC Mobile)
[10digitnumber]@msg.koodomobile.com

Happy texting!

Live and Recorded TV on the EEE PC

After getting over the excitement of getting a mini laptop for free I've moved on to suping it up and integrating it into services my local network has to offer. Probably the best feature of my local network is the server in the closet hooked up to the cable running Mythbuntu. After reading some entries on EEE forums, which there is a great resource of, I found some simple instructions on how to add a 'Myth' front end to the system using an EEE PC. This is a great feature because you can watch live or recorded TV from anywhere over wifi. Installing the needed packages was pretty basic using the default Xandros operating system with the addition of the Debian package library. The only problem I ran into was having to make my Myth Server MySQL database available to the local network by changing the "bind=127.0.0.1" to my local network address. The bind setting on a Mythbuntu system is in the /etc/mysql/my.cnf file. Before making this change the KDM windows manager would reboot and there was no feedback as to why.
I can now enjoy recorded shows and even live TV anywhere in the house. I can watch my Extreme 4x4 shows without annoying my wife with the hosts loud obnoxious commentating, which I love, but not as much as my wife, read happy wife.