monline

It seems that Windows by default caches the result of failed (aka. negative) DNS lookups for 6 minutes! If you're using dynamic DNS in your company, this can be pretty upsetting. Imagine: you try to check whether a virtual machine is up and running by pinging it's FQDN (eg. virtual12.example.com). Since you use dynamic DNS registration, the ping request will tell you that the DNS request failed. What you probably don't know is that the "DNS Client" Windows service will cache this reply for you for 6 minutes! You start the virtual machine and expect to be able to ping it in a few seconds. Wrong! You're DNS client won't find the IP for the virtual machine (even though the VM already registered the hostname with the company DNS server) for another 6 minutes.

Some Python scripts use the webbrowser module to launch a browser for a given URL. If you're on a headless server, it'll launch a text-based browser (eg. in Debian it's w3m) which might not be desired (many websites are less than usable in text-based browsers and the launch of such an URL in a text-based browser is more an annoyance than help). You can easily avoid this behaviour.

It's really not that difficult, requires only a few tries with various repositories and APT configurations. First of all let's make something clear: when I say "up-to-date", I mean the latest release. To get this, we've to install ffmpeg from the sid (aka. unstable) packages of www.debian-multimedia.org.

Update (2011.12.23): I've added a few corrections to this post after applying it to a number of Debian Squeeze servers.

I guess this feature is available on most mobile phones, but I only know it for sure for Nokia phones. When entering a number (eg. in your phonebook), you can add short pauses or explicit waits to the dialing sequence (to separate the phone number from the extension number).

"GoogleCL brings Google services to the command line.
We currently support the following Google services: (...)"

On linux you can set protocol handlers (eg. for http and https) to various apps via the network.protocol-handler.expose.* preferences. On Windows Thunderbird does not honor these, so you've to do it a little differently.

The correct answer to this question lies in a comment of the most popular answer:

I used to set the F12 key in Ubuntu as the global hotkey to play/pause the current song in my music player (since my keyboard does not have media keys). Very useful since it's a key that is easy to find and press (eg. pressing a key that is surrounded by other keys requires a lot more attention/concentration from you). However in Windows F12 does not work as a hotkey (by default). If an app tries to register F12 as a global hotkey, it'll get an error.

The default Firefox cookie management is not very sophisticated. I guess it's OK for users who don't know any better, but people with some knowledge about online security & tracking & enough paranoia to care might want to have a tighter control over which site is allowed to track them and their activities. Cookie Monster is the right tool for the task. It sits in your addon bar and shows you what cookies are set for what domain/site and exactly how the permission for a specific site came to be (from which rules). It gives you easy understanding and access to cookie control.

The Google Translate site has a page with bookmarklets for all the supported languages. Just drag the bookmarklet link to your bookmarks toolbar, name it whatever you like and click it whenever you want to translate a page into the selected language. I always wanted something like this, but didn't know about this bookmarklet collection. Well done G.