A few days ago I was wondering if there was actually a real alternative to Skype for calling overseas landlines from the internet. This is not simply PC-PC VoIP.

Of course you all would say: Ekiga!

Not actually, yet.

Of cource Ekiga has support for this through the so called Ekiga Call Out service, but…

This service actually relies on a provider called diamondcard.us from Dreamtime.net Inc. Please keep in mind this name so that you can safely avoid it. My experience with it has actually been a nightmare and above all I have lost 10$ for a pathetic company with weired fraudulent paranoiac policies.

The bottom line is that Ekiga’s partner diamondcard.us made me waste 4 days after they withdrawn the money from my credit card waiting for them to enable my account to call landlines and wasted 10$ money for no service at all!!

After having registered filling their form with all my data and given them my credit card number to charge my account with some money they began telling me:

1) I had to provide a landline telephone number (usually when you apply for a phone number why should people require you to already have one? If not for selling it to advertisement agencies later on…)

2) make an international call to the US or to the UK. (if I was willing to spend all my money in an international call just for having a talk with those guys I would have rather spent it calling my overseas friends!)

3) Of course they offered to call me after I provided them with a phone number but actually never did so.

4) I have sent them several emails asking them to either enable my account or refund me the money I had given them for a service they were not actually providing me. No way to get my money back. Their so called “processing costs” for refunding customers are, guess what, more than 10$!

I eventually signed on with Skype and I had an immediately working phone number to call friends, without having to worry for my privacy and to hand out my phone numbers to be resold for advertising.

If you do care of your money keep away from diamondcard.us!

Conky developers have added a bunch of cool new features in recent versions (direct managing of nvidia GPU data/clock/temp, audacious media player support, entropy indicator, ecc.), however the version shipped with Ubuntu is dated august 2008. Do you dare compiling it by yourself?

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Tags: conky

There are several Open Source tools for this purpose over the internet lets have a look at some here.

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L’editing di docmenti PDF su Linux è ancora oggi piuttosto difficoltoso. Questo articolo ha lo scopo di mettere insieme le risorse attualmente disponibili per la manipolazione (editing, modificare, evidenziare, commentare, unire e dividere) documenti in formato PDF.

Nell’attesa auspico che vada presto in porto il progetto GNUpdf volto ad introdurre un pieno supporto per i documenti PDF su linux, attraverso le liberie gnupdf e il  nuovo programma per la visualizzazione e modifica dei documetni GNU Juggler. Se desiderate sostenere questo progetto potete considerare di effettuare una piccola donazione a questa causa della FSF (Free Software Frountiers).

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PDF editing in linux is still somehow tricky nowadays. This post aims at putting together the currently available resources for manipulating (editing, highlighting, commenting, splitting and merging) PDF documents.

We are all looking forward at GNUpdf project completing its major tasks in order to release a full featured GNU Juggler which will be a full-fledged PDF viewer and editor making use of the GNU PDF Library. If you want to push this project forward you may consider donating to this FSF cause.

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OpenOffice Writer and compiz Desktop Effects + nVidia 3D driver nvidia has long been buggy in redrawing / refreshing the page when you edit or simply scroll it up and down.

Con i drivers nvidia, gli effetti desktop compiz abilitati e l’accellerazione hardware di OpenOffice Writer abilitata potrete notare dei problemi nell’aggiornamento / ridisegnamento della pagina mentre modificate il contenuto della stessa o scorrete il vostro documento.

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Tags: fix

After my upgrade to Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 I’ve experienced a weird beahaviour of system-config-printer (which is the applet in System -> Administration -> Printing used to add printers and configure their default settings) consisting in the window stuck grey with 100% CPU usage and increasingly huge memory leak (>350Mb after 60 secs) (this is by python process since it’s simply a python script).

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Tags: fix

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* JFTP::mkdir: Bad response
* JFTP::chmod: Bad response        
* JFTP::store: Bad response        
* Warning! Failed to move file. 
Unable to find install package

and error

• JFolder::create: Could not create directory
Warning:
file_put_contents(path_here)
[function.file-put-contents]: failed to open stream: No such file or
directory in /libraries/joomla/filesystem/file.php on line 297
Unable to find install package

This kind of errors occour because you have previously installed Joomla locally and then uploaded the Joomla folder to the remote server. By doing so you forgot to update all the parameters of your configuration.php file.

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Tags: Joomla

These are two examples on how to write an interactive shell script, either with a YES/NO prompt and with a LIST among which the user has to choose.

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