‘OzKleen Carpet Power’ cleaning spray
Wow, shockingly good at cleaning - if you're looking for a powerful carpet cleaner, I think this is the product for you. Check out the before and after of my 8 y/old mousemat I decided to clean, but only half of it
KDE – kwin and Xgl
I tried Xgl today - and whist it looks nice and supports my twinview setup (shocking!) I coudn't get on with it. The reason I couldn't get on with is it because you need to replace kwin with something else, as kwin doesn't have support for it yet.
So... I went onto #kde and asked if there was going to be support for it in KDE4, apparently there will be, but this answer isn't offical. Some kind person (PhilRod) pointed me to a digest , which in turn pointed me to the KDE svn repos showing commits to kwin that appear to be relevent. I'll try to figure out who lunakl is, and ask him for an offical answer.
Update: Having mailed lunakl (Lobus Lunak) he pointed me to an article on On KWin wobbling and such stuff over on kdedevlopers.org. As it turns out, KDE is in need of graphics developers, and this was dgged about last month. So, it's planned... but some code monkeys with ubergraphical skills are needed.
Apple iSight camera under linux
Yes, it's possible. You can even use it for webcam chat under Kopete IM (and other probably).
Firstly, the camera doens't present itself as a v4l (video 4 linux) device, so you need vloopback kernel module. This kernel module will create 2 v4l devices, usually /dev/video0 (input) and /dev/video1 (output).
You'll want to install coriander and libdc1394, probably the latest versions.
Plug your camera in, insert vloopback, and start up coriander. Click 'v4l' button so that coriander will start to export your camera via the vloopback module, and that's it, you can now use your iSight as a v4l device. Fantastic.
I'm far from an expert in this field, so if you have questions about this setup, you're best taking them elsewhere 
Update: If you're finding that your colours are messed up and green and purple, you'll need to make a change to the coriander source (effects versions of at least up to coriander-2.0.0-rc1)
Thanks to Marc Roberts who pointed this out to me...
I have fixed the color problem that I had with Coriander. In conversions.c, I changed the enumeration in line 32 from
DC1394_BYTE_ORDER_YUYV to:
DC1394_BYTE_ORDER_UYVY
update:
Seems my blog software doesn't allow HTML in the comments, so here are some useful links.
- http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/VideoFourLinuxLoopbackDevice - The current vloopback webpage
Using Domi to install Ubuntu
Domi is a tool for building Xen domains. It's usage is covered in HOWTO Xen and Gentoo hosted on the gentoo wiki site. It says you can use it to install Ubuntu, but no where actaully tells you how. So.. here's how!
# cat ./ubuntu.cfg DOMI_XEN_CONF="/etc/xen/test" DOMI_XEN_KERNEL="/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.16.18-xenU" DEBIAN_MIRROR="ftp://ftp.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/" DEBIAN_RELEASE="dapper" DOMI_DISTRO="debian" DOMI_NAME="test" DOMI_VDISK="hda"
Yes, I do know the DOMI_DISTRO is set to debian, but ubuntu is based on the debian package manager, so that's correct.
Note that you have to setup the /etc/hostname and /etc/hosts after.
Do not buy from Filmnight
Don't join their rental stores atleast...
I recently joined the Epsom store and now I wish I hadn't. They had a great deal on that for £11.99 a month ( £30 one off first payment that covers your first 3 months too) you can rent 2 movies at once and rent as many as you like a month. Unfortunatly you are still bound by the rental period, so if you return them late (1 day for new films, 2 days for everything else) then you are fined. This however is not what's annoyed me. 10 days after signing up the shops closed completly. No advanced notice, no sign in the window, just an empty shop. On calling Filmnight they claimed they had nothing to do with it, they were simply a franchise. Well, personally, I don't want to by dealing with a company that has such loose management over it's stores that they don't know atleast 10 days in advance that it's having financial issues.
So, my advice to you, DO NOT USE FILMNIGHT. I'd also extend this to any companies that they work with, Apollo (which was the company owning my local that closed) and VidBiz.
I've recently joined screenselect instead, and I'm more then happy with the service.
Update: (2006-08-07)
Turns out Filmnight care enough about reputation to come along and take down the big 'FILMNIGHT.COM' sign from the front of the shop. They don't care enough about it to refund me the small amount of money that they took off me. Odd.