InstantRemote - Remote Touchpad App for Android

InstantRemote is a cross-platform (Mac, Linux, Windows) remote
touchpad with instant setup. I've successfully tested it on Ubuntu and Mac OS X 10.6.

You can get the app at:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.malte.remote

All you need to do is run this .jar file on any computer in a local network:
http://bremen-21.de/InstantRemote/RemoteServer.jar

After you run the jar, the app automatically discovers the computer
and offers to control it. It works like the touchpad on your notebook.
You can click by tapping, scroll with a two finger swipe, and zoom by
spreading your fingers. It works surprisingly precise and smoothly.
The setup is an absolute no-brainer. The app comes without apps and
only requires network setup.

What works:
- scrolling
- left click
- zooming
- auto-discovery of computers
- entering letter by letter and short words via Swype

What didn't work in my test:
- long words with Swype (1.4 beta)
- double click
- right click

Wishlist:
- right click e.g. via two finger tap
- double click via double tap
- disable the display's backlight to save battery
- better swype support

Want to Debug a Kernel Crash? But the system no longer responds?

If your kernel crashes every once in a while and you want to find out
what happened and/or create a good bug report so it can get fixed,
here's all you need to do in Ubuntu 12.04+:

sudo apt-get install linux-crashdump apport

This automatically installs and sets up a crash kernel to be loaded
via kexec in case of a kernel panic. And it installs apport to be able
to easily report the crash to Ubuntu. The logs will be in /var/crash.

Read here for more: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/CrashdumpRecipe
And this ebook might help with debugging a crash:
http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/crash-book.html#download

Of course sometimes this might not work for very hard crashes. But
most crashes should be able to be properly dumped and reported this
way. Good luck!

SAMSUNG SSD 830 Series not automatically going to standby or sleep

No matter how I configure my Samsung SSD, it does not automatically
enter a standby or sleep mode. It does with with hdparm -y/-Y
manually, but that's the only way. And of course during the next
reader it's automatically activated again. hdparm -B is "not
supported", hdparm -S does not seem to have any effect, with 1/253/254
settings. I've used lm-profler to find and stop any accesses to the
disk.

I'm using the sata_sil24 driver with a Sil 3531 SATA controller and as
stated a SAMSUNG SSD 830 with firmware CXM03B1Q. By the way, hdparm -I
tells me that it doesn't support DIPM, unfortunately. I've tested
Linux kernels up to 2.8-rc2.

The reason it's important to me is that I found out the system uses >1
W less power with the SSD in standby mode. And while the SSD uses less
power during disk access, the disk idle power usage is actually higher
now than previously with my plain old spinning hard disk.

Mostly I post fixes, this is just a problem I have. I would appreciate
any hints in the comments. Thanks!

Firefox 18 no longer backwards compatible

I just wanted to warn you and put this out there real quick: Firefox 18 requires a new SSL library. It's no longer compatible with Ubuntu 9.10:

gbeauchesne mplayer-vaapi mirror

As the original website
(http://www.splitted-desktop.com/~gbeauchesne/mplayer-vaapi/) no
longer exists, I've created a mirror with the most recent version I
had downloaded in Dropbox:
http://db.tt/HOr5MJPp
(Leads to mplayer-vaapi-20110127.tbz, a bz2 compressed tar archive.)

If you have a newer version (of the mplayer-vaapi package) please post
a comment. The new releases of other files have moved to:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/vaapi/