Had a night out with friends, the plan was to watch a lot of movies but ended up playing this awesome game from 3am until morning. And the amazing part - all of us had hardly ever played any cue games before. I never realized that a non-arcade game like this could keep me awake all night .

My whole experience with the game might look a bit false based upon the fact that I haven't played such games in real-life much, but listen to this, "Foobillard was actually suggested to me by a college friend who is a die hard fan of cue sports and a good player too". So, if a real-life player is recommending it, you have got to give it a shot.

For the introduction part, Foobillard is free and opensource, cross-platform, OpenGL based game and the best part is that it was originally built for Linux and later ported to MacOS and Windows. The games that can be played in Foobillard are - Carambol, Snooker, Pool (8 ball and 9 ball). It can also be played over network, making it a complete multiplayer game.

Probably a little bad thing about the game is that it directly throws you in a game - no menu, no key bindings help, no game options etc. Although, it sucks only the first few times. Once you know stuff, it doesn't look like a bad thing anymore.

If you are planning to try it out, which you should do, I would suggest you to go through the key bindings first. It won't take you much time to figure out the basic controls, but to have a better gaming experience, do learn all the controls.

Install Foobillard

Ubuntu/Debian users, either click this link or run the following command to install foobillard

[shredder12]$ sudo aptitude install foobillard

For Fedora users, run the following command in the terminal

[shredder12]$ yum install foobillard

So, now go on and start playing .

The whole story began after the VP8 codec was opened by Google. Soon after its release, Jason Garrett-Glaser, a x264 and ffmpeg developer, came up with a highly extensive review of the codec. And in his technical review, he mentioned that the VP8 decoder is slow as compared to H.264, pointed out some of its weaknesses and also said that VP8 copies too much from H.264 for ease and because of this, the codec could be susceptible to patent issues.

That's when he teamed up with Ronald Bultje and David Conrad to come up with a community-developed and completely free decoder for FFmpeg, ffvp8.

Don't you just love OpenSouce devlopers .

In a blog post, Jason told that after a few weeks of work the new FFmpeg decoder, ffvp8 is "bit exact" with the official VP8 decoder, libvpx. And surprisingly, after only the first round of optimizations, it shows dramatic performance improvements over libvpx.

They used two 1080p video clips to test the two decoders along with the latest revision of FFmpeg from SVN. Even the developers are suprised to see it performing better than libvpx on all different systems, especially on ATOM processors, for which they haven't even started optimizing .

A number of optimizations are still to come and based upon its performance, once released, ffvp8 is definitely going to be used by a number of multimedia applications and probably the browsers too.

So, after trying out winff, the graphical frontend for ffmpeg, I kept looking for more such tools and found  the "Transmageddon Transcoder". Perhaps the name was inspired from Armageddon . Anyway, unlike winff which uses FFmpeg at the backend, this tool is based upon GStreamer framework and is only a video transcoder.

GStreamer is a pipeline-based multimedia framework which provides an interface to programmers for writing various multimedia applications.

Transmageddon was made keeping in mind a regular user needs who just wants to play video on his mobile devices, doesn't really care about formats or codecs. So, it comes with a bunch of presets for converting videos to formats compatible with various mobile devices.

Transmageddon is not all about presets. You can always go for simple format->format conversion aided with manual selection of codecs. Just use "No preset" while doing this.

It even provides various options to rotate/flip the output video.

The project's homepage clearly states that this is tool is under-development so you might face some trouble. It makes use of the most cutting edge libraries so, installing latest versions is not easy.

While Transmageddon converts almost any format into the one's listed for output, I actually ran into some issue while trying to convert a flv and a mp4 video to 3gpp format. It prompted me to check the availibility of a codec/plugin named "Quicktime Muxer" to make the conversion possible. But unfortunately, it was not available, so nothing happened :(. Well, I don't think its even an issue with the app, its just the unavailability of a codec due to licensing issues.

By the way, I am using Version 0.15, the default in Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx. The latest being 0.16, released this May, which adds WebM support.

If you are having some kind of trouble with it or can't install a decent version because of dependency issues then go for another GStreamer based transcoder, Arista.

Have you ever gone through the items listed in the "add to panel" option? If not, then you are missing one of the finest GNOME features. It has a great number of some really useful applets. I just ran into one of them, Deskbar applet and believe me, when they say its an "all in one" tool they are not kidding. It really does almost everything one frequently needs.

A few words of warning before you start adding Deskbar-applet to the panel. It might take some time to start, took around 10+ seconds on my system. So, be patient. Once done, you know where to find it. Now, click on the icon and you will see a search bar.

This simple looking search bar has tremendous capablities. You can send an email by typing in an emailID, search google, send a tweet, search through your folders, launch an application and a lot more. All these functionalities are managed by plugins. For a whole list, Right click on the icon and go to Preferences.

Now, you can see what all this applet can do. Check the plugin you wish to enable and when highlighted, click "more" to see extra configurations required to run the plugin.

Here is an example of the twitter plugin

• Don't forget to fill your login info by clicking "more"
• Now, write your tweet, move down and hit Enter.

• Here you go ;)

So, its time you start exploring Deskbar. You might find a few things, you do frequently, can be done faster with it.

So, I have already been using vnstat monitoring tool to keep a track of my Internet usage stats for some time. Recently, I started looking for a real time network bandwidth monitoring tool. Vnstat's live" mode works fine, but while looking for something better I came across bmon, which is actually a specialised console-based real time bandwidth monitoring app.

Install bmon

For Ubuntu or Debian systems, either click this link or run the following command in a terminal

[shredder12]$ sudo apt-get install bmon

I couldn't find it in Fedora repos .

Since, this is an console based tool, open a terminal and enter the command "bmon" and you should see the following output

As shown, it lists all the available interfaces. At the bottom, you will find two options to open graph and detailed output by clicking g and d respectively. If done, the output should look like this

As you can see, the tool is pretty good for real time monitoring but unfortunately the project is probably dead now. The last major release of this software was Version 2.0.1 released in October of 2004, which is the available version in Lucid's repo. So, I am guessing that the project is no longer under development.

Well, before I end you might be interested in knowing that Bmon is not just about the small screen shown above. It is actually known for sharing these stats in a variety of ways. I just used one of them - throwing the output in HTML files. So, if you keep those files somewhere in your /var/www directory, the data could be easily accessed remotely through the webserver.

You can do this by simply running this command in a terminal

[shredder12]$ bmon -O html:path=<path_to_dir>

Here is a screenshot of the html output

For more features, you might want to take a look at its man page. I am pretty sure better network monitoring applications would have been released in past 6 years, but as far as simple bandwidth monitoring goes, bmon is good.

I will keep looking for better monitoring tools, preferably graphical this time. If you use or have any in mind, do let me know.

Whenever I go to home on vacations, I usually share a lot of Music/Videos with my friends. On many occasions, my laptop is being used by someone else and since its a personal notebook, there is a lot of stuff I don't want people to mess around with. Under such cases, restricting other users by locking stuff comes in handy.

Since, most of my hometown friends are neither really techie nor even Linux users, a simple change in file permissions does the trick.

Lets say, I want to restrict some personal stuff in a folder named "special". Since, the system is being accessed from my account, probably the safest way would be to shift the creator/user rights of the folder to some other user for a while, preferably root. It can be easily done with this command.

[root]# chown -R root:root special/

Coauthor, Chia, wrote a good howto on linux file ownerships, check it out if you are unaware of the basics.

So, now the ownership of the folder is changed to root, but other users might still be able to access/read the files. If you want to restrict even opening of the directory i.e. completely locking it, then just change the permissions of the folder for other users. This can be done using the following command.

[root]# chmod -R 700 special/

A person on board can still change the whole thing back if he even knows your account's password. That is in case of Ubuntu, since the whole setup can be done as well as reversed using sudo. But this method pretty much does the job.

I like keeping a collection of my favorite TV shows and Movies along with the subtitles. For a single playback, I won't mind fixing the subtitle from the player's settings, even though its frustrating most of the times, but while making a collection, you need perfect subtitles. Finding the correct one is not an easy task and neither is editing it. This is where a subtitle-editor comes in handy. Gnome-subtitles is one such tool and by far my favorite.

Install gnome-subtitles

For Ubuntu/Debian systems, either click this link or run the following command in the terminal.

[shredder12]$ sudo apt-get install gnome-subtitles

For Ubuntu, you can even use the software center to install it.

Fore Fedora/RedHat systems, just run the following command in the terminal

[root]# yum install gnome-subtitles

Once installed, the application can be found in Applications->Sound & Video->gnome-subtitles

Features

Like me, if its the first time you are using a subtitle editor then pretty much every feature looks amazing and a tremendous time saver.

• As a subtitle editor, playing media and editing subtitles simultaneously makes synchronizing really easy.
• There are a lot of pre-defined functions that save you a lot of time while fixing bad subtitles e.g. adjust, shift etc.
• While editing, the app will automatically guess the concerned video from the subtitle's name and loads it. You can ofcourse mention it manually too.
• It supports more subtitle formats than most of you would know.
• Instead of editing, the other major function of this tool is to help create subtitles from scratch. And thanks to its user friendly WYSIWYG interface, even this redundant task becomes easy
• You can find a full list of features here.

I hope this will be useful for some of you. If there is some other subtitle editor you use, do let us know.

We have a National anthem, a National Song, a National Animal, but for the first time India has a national browser - Epic web browser. Yup! built on Firefox, modified and tweaked by the developers of Hiddden Reflex, an India based startup, Epic Browser aims to meet the needs of the ever growing number of Indian web users.

A majority of web users in India still think that IE is the only way to connect to the online world. Most of them are still not aware of either Firefox or any other free or opensource alternatives. This is where Epic browser might prove to be very useful in both improving the browsing experience as well as educating the Indian users about alternate FOSS technologies.

Although the browser is not open source at the moment but in a talk with linuxers, Alok Bharadwaj, CEO of Hidden Reflex, said that some of their code is not open, but as a believer in open source development the company is planning to open source the whole thing soon.

Firefox with its addon family is already a complete browser, what else could have been added to improve the experience? Epic here introduces a sidebar which resides apps/widgets to provide quick access to various web/native system services. They may look like just another way to represent addons but the aim is a little different.

Applications like, built-in word processor, an Anti-virus(Epic is the first browser to boast about this capability), support for indian languages are specifically designed keeping in mind an average Indian web user.

Not just this, while talking to us, Alok even mentioned that the big picture is to take this firefox derivative to another step, which in browser's terminology means a road to a complete browser based operating system. He said 

In terms of moving things to the cloud, we also believe in that future. Epic is itself a step in that direction with things like our File Backup App and you'll see some more akin leaps in that direction from us in the future.

This initiative by the startup reminds me of Ubuntu. How it adopted the giant Debian OS and is now the most widely used Linux Distribution. A sad news for Linuxers though - it runs on only windows now .

There are still a lot of improvements to be done in the browser.  It certainly has a long way to go before rising as a competitive participant in the browser wars. But their initiative of taking Firefox to the next level and the attempt to introduce the biggest democracy in the world to open source technologies is marvellous. This is just the first release and as a fresh startup, we can expect a lot from these guys in later versions.

I have talked a lot about various capabilities of FFmpeg over the past few months. But if you are not comfortable with command line and wish for a graphical media converter then Winff is the right tool for you.

Winff is a graphical audio/video converter which makes use of the giant, FFmpeg. Although it can't compete with the kind of flexibility a command line provides, but is still a pretty good tool for handling your day to day multimedia conversions.

Features

• One of good things about Winff is that it provides you a list of target devices for which you want to convert your media. After selecting one, it will present you with all the media formats compatible with that device.
• Another great feature is its ability to convert multiple files into a single target format simultaneously. So, the next time you want to convert a bunch of videos for your mobile, you don't need to do it one by one.
• There is also an option for advanced settings - to set video/autio bitrate, frame size etc. manually.

  

• Winff is pretty flexible too. You don't have to stick to the provided list of presets. You can even set your own, mention a command with all your suited parameters and set it as a preset.

  

• You can find a whole list of features here.

Install Winff

For Ubuntu/Debian based distributions, either click this link or run the following command in the terminal to install winff.

[shredder12]$ sudo apt-get install winff

Winff is not available in Fedora repos, but you can find the rpm available for RedHat distributions on their download page.

In order to install it, run the following command

[root]# rpm -ivh <package_name>.rpm

Once installed, you can find winff in Applicaitons->Sound & Video->Winff. The interface is pretty simple. Just add the file/files you wish to convert, select the format you want, select the output location and hit convert.