Pete says check out istanbul when I need to make a screencast. xvidcap is another possibility but it doesn't seem to be in Synaptic Package Manager.

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My Dell 690 at work has lots of audio devices and I couldn't figure out how to get all sound to go to the Audigy2. I found a tip about changing /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base to include the line #options snd_emu10k1 index=0 and that worked but... ALSA would get hung up occasionally when a window opened. Pete suggested that I turn off ESD and I tried that, but then the Audigy2 was not detected. I found that either enabling ESD or deleting that line above would restore its function. I deleted that line and found this tip for how to fix it. The simple answer appears to be:

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I hate the default font on Feisty. Capital J should NOT descend below the line! I followed this tip and got some nicer fonts.

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I've been fooling with Ubuntu for just over a week now. I started with wubi, then did the standard install with a CD I made. At home on the old Dell D800 laptop it was super easy. Wireless didn't work at first but a quick Google search on feisty d800 showed I had the kind of wireless card that needs some microcode. Asking for the fwcutter-??? module fixed things right up. A work on this old Dell 690 things were made tricky by the funny interaction between the scuzzy disks and the ide disk in the bios. Murray fixed that in just a few minutes with some grub incantations.

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I heard this in the publicity surrounding Ruth Graham's recent death. Wow. I really like the line "Anticipating joy is itself a joy".

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Firefox is the only browser I use, so when things don't work, I get worried. We're looking at Flash as a delivery vehicle for some of our applications for people with disabilities and ran into two potential show stoppers:

1. Flash doesn't get focus unless you click on it with the mouse; many of our potential users don't use mice!
2. Flash doesn't allow access to right click; many switch interfaces generate left and right click events to signal the user pressing the mover or chooser switch.

I surfed around a bit expecting to find some quick solution and only found despair. It seems that lots of people have encountered these problems in various forms and haven't found a solution.

I've found a very simple approach that works just fine for what we need; perhaps it will help someone else. The high bit is I'm using the Flash ExternalInterface object to allow JavaScript to catch keyboard and mouse events and then tell Flash about them. Flash never gets the focus and doesn't need it.

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Gretchen pointed out these videos at AssitiveWare , very interesting.

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Steve says check out MultiTouch Console an open-source project with camera input.

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I modified my former post Python OpenCV wrapper using ctypes to reflect the new version available on SourceForge. This update includes lots of constants from the .h files (thanks to Russell Warren) and a simple hack to make it work on with the differently named DLLs on Linux. The source is now in CVS at SourceForge .

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