Posts Tagged ‘os x’

How to fix Skype no (built in) web camera on MacBook Air with (Mac OS X 10.8.5) resolve Skype issue of Aug 2013

Sunday, September 29th, 2013

Resolve fix issue with no camera in MacBookAir

My dear fiance girlfriend Svetlana, has a MacBookAir from 2013 since a month time. We speak quite regularly in Skype since right now she is in Belarus and I'm in Bulgaria. So it was a big surprise for me today her brand new shiny MacBookAir camera stopped working. She is completely new to Mac OS X so she didn't have idea if something automatically updated on the notebook, probably some update poped up and she proceeded to update. Well no matter how the issue happened … I instructed her how to install TeamViewer (for Mac OS X – just download the .DMG double click it and install) and logged in to the PC to check what's happening. In FaceTime video was showing fine so obviously on OS level webcamera was detected. I saw some threads suggesting sometimes built in webcam is not working due to some other application which uses the camera (Safari instrance using flash to open webcam, FacePalm or whatever) …
I checked the version release of Mac OS X and it showed Mac OS X 10.8.5. I checked whether some updates are available but there were none. After browsing a bit figured out the web camera not detected Skype error is experienced by hundreds of MacBook air users online. Thanksfully there is a quick and simple fix by just substituting a file called AppleCamera.plugin.

Below are instructions on how to fix I followed from Skype's Community Website: 
———————

This is a very simple fix that works! There are lots of ways to do it, but to put it very simply ,

Download  the AppleCamera.plugin provided.
 

Click on go in the finder menu, select go to golder and paste in  /Library/CoreMediaIO/Plug-Ins/DAL/ ,

 

move that item, AppleCamera.plugin, to the trash

 

Go to your downloads folder and copy the new  AppleCamera.plugin, then paste it in the folder where the old one was. 

 

It works

After following literally instructions Skype camera worked out like a charm 😉

Downloading your favourity flash video from Youtube with a simple command (youtube-dl)

Wednesday, April 13th, 2011

downloading-flash-videos-from-youtube-on-linux-and-bsd-youtube-downloader-logo
Watching videos in youtube today and already for about 2 years is the de-facto hype.
There is almost none a day passed without almost each one of us has watched a dozen videos in Youtube.

Watching videos in youtube has become even more addictive for many than the early days of Internet Relay Chats (IRC)

As youtube is very accessible for people and it’s a comparativily easy way people share more and more with the day.
There is no question that the business idea of youtube is great and youtube generates millions of dollars for Google day by day, however I have a serious objection here! All is good the only pitfall is that you don’t own the youtube videos you watch!

Youtube’s story is not that different from the story of the cloud computing threat to internet users Freedom

The good thing here is that we’re not still completely dependant on youtube and there is still way to retrieve your favourite youtube video and store it for later watching or distribution.

Probably the most famous browser plugin that allows files retrieval from youtube, as most people know is DownloadHelper .

However using download helper is browser dependant, you need to use the browser to save the plugin and I don’t find it to be the best way to download a youtube video.

Since the old days I have started using Linux, I’ve been quite addicted to as many things on my linux as possible from the command line (terminal / console) (CLI) .

In that manner of thoughts it was a real delight for me to find out that a group of free software developer guys has come up with a command line tool that allows downloads of youtube videos straight from terminal, the great software is called youtube-dl and at the moment of this post writting it’s to be found on the URL address:

http://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl/

Youtube-dl is written in python so, it requires the Python interpreter, version 2.5 in order to properly run on Unix, Mac OS X or even on Windows!

The fact that it’s written in python has made the little shiny tool quite a multi-platform one.
To start using immediately the tool on a Debian or Ubuntu Linux you will have to install python (even though in most cases you must have it already installed):

1. To make sure you have python interpreter installed issue the cmd:

debian:~# apt-get install python
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
python is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

As you can see from above apt-get’s output I do have it installed so nothing gets installed.

2. As a next step I used links to download the youtube-dl python script, like so:

debian:~# links https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/raw/2011.03.29/youtube-dl >> youtube-dl
Use the links interface to save youtube-dl and use gzip to ungzip it
debian:~# gzip -d youtube-dl.gz
debian:~# chmod +x youtube-dl

Now to make it system wide accessible I have copied the youtube-dl to /usr/local/bin , whether I selected /usr/local/bin as a location as this location is predetermined to contain mostly files which does not belong to a regular deb package.

3. Move youtube-dl to /usr/local/bin

debian:~# mv youtube-dl /usr/local/bin

4. Test the newly installed youtube-dl command line youtube retrieval tool:

debian:~# ./youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7tvI6JCXD0
[youtube] Setting language
[youtube] g7tvI6JCXD0: Downloading video webpage
[youtube] g7tvI6JCXD0: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] g7tvI6JCXD0: Extracting video information
[download] Destination: g7tvI6JCXD0.flv
[download] 53.3% of 22.62M at 33.23k/s ETA 05:25
[download] 100.0% of 22.62M at 31.91k/s ETA 00:00 [u

As you might have noticed from the above youtube-dl command output the newly retrieved youtube file will be saved under a name g7tvI6JCXD0.flv

The line I passed to youtube-dl is directly taken from my browser and pasted to console, the file downloading from youtube took me about 10 minutes but this is mostly because of some kind of youtube server speed restrictions …

In general at least I have this video for later, watching, so after a while I can watch it once again without loosing a lot of time trying to remember what was the video headline name

5. To use youtube-dl in a bit advanced way you can for instance invoke the command with options like:

debian:~# ./youtube-dl -l -w -c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7tvI6JCXD0
[youtube] Setting language
[youtube] g7tvI6JCXD0: Downloading video webpage
[youtube] g7tvI6JCXD0: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] g7tvI6JCXD0: Extracting video information
[download] Destination: BSD is Dying, Jason Dixon, NYCBSDCon 2007-g7tvI6JCXD0.flv
[download] 4.4% of 22.62M at 1.43M/s ETA 00:15

As you can see now youtube-dl was even able to detect the downloaded video file name and store it on the computer with a correct name 😉

I would recommend you also to check out the youtube-dl help page, to do use command: youtube-dl –help
 

FreeBSD Happy Birthday – FreeBSD OS turns 20 years old

Monday, June 24th, 2013

Happy Birrthday Freebsd / FreeBSD becomes 20 years old - Classic logo bsd avatar beastie mascot

On 19th of June FreeBSD had its 20 birthday! Its great joy for us the FreeBSD geeks 🙂
This is a bit outdated but as I'm a long years FreeBSD user I found myself obliged to mention the good news.

FreeBSD project was officially introduced for first time under the new name by David Greenman, Jordan Hubbard and Rod Grimes as fork of BSD (Berkley Software Distrbution 4.3).

Even more and less known is that big chunks of FreeBSD (kernel and userland) code are running on the shiny Mac OS X.

Below is mail which made up the name FreeBSD 🙂
 

To: interim@bsd.coe.montana.edu (Interim 0.1.5)
Subject: Re: “386BSD” trademark (fwd)
From: David Greenman <davidg@implode.rain.com>
Date: Sat, 19 Jun 93 17:26:02 -0700

> Okay folks.. taking new name suggestions.. we have:
>
> BSDFree86 – Rod, who is going with Jordans improved NON BSDI name..
> Free86BSD – Jordan, Rod likes this one two…
> – (F86BSD for short)
>
> vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
>                v                                                                     v
>                v          This is the hat to drop yours in!       v
>                v                                                                     v
>                vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

How about just simply “FreeBSD”? No confusion, no fuss, seems like a good compromise to me. 🙂

-DG

FreeBSD Berkley Software Distrubution OS new logo happy birthday FreeBSD

Now 20 years after, FreeBSD itself had numerous forks very much in tradition of Free Software – most notable ones are of course BSD for desktop DragonFly BSD and PC-BSD.
As part of FreeBSD evolution nowadays FreeBSD kernel is ported for Debian Linux, i.e.:

debian:~# apt-cache show kfreebsd-source-8.1|grep -i description -A 2

Description: source code for kernel of FreeBSD 8.1 with Debian patches

 This package provides the source code for kernel of FreeBSD 8.1, base of

 a GNU/kFreeBSD system.

Description: source code for kernel of FreeBSD 8.1 with Debian patches

 This package provides the source code for kernel of FreeBSD 8.1, base of

 a GNU/kFreeBSD system.

 

 and can be run onas substitute for Linux kernel on most GNU / Linux distributions 
 

FreeBSD has unquestionably played key role over the last 20 yrs for development of Hacker Culture of Freedom and Free Software.

 Congrats and cheers to all FreeBSD users! 🙂  

Improve your night sleep when using PC with Windows XP late at night with F.lux

Tuesday, February 26th, 2013

f.lux auto detect timezone geographic location after install screenshot microsoft windows XP

After testing F.lux on Mac OS X, I decided to install it and test it on a friend's Windows XP OS. Up is a screenshot from the program right after installed.

Just like on MAC OS X F.lux auto set the Geographic Location and started changing the Gamma of the screen to reddish at night. As you can see the change of Screen Color gamma can be set in various intervals with default of auto changing monitor backlid gamma every 20 secs.

On early day, when usually outside you see the day light because Sun Light shines on our planet, the color gamma is auto-configured to the normal light one.
I think in short future all computer vendors should think of embedding F.lux or some similar application to every Desktop PC, laptop, Phone and Tablet.

 

f.lux settings improve night sleep auto set monitor gamma ms windows xp

When F.lux is active a tiny icon with the F.Lux logo is visible on Taskbar like in below screenshot. From there you can view f.lux settings, see in what Color gamma mode the program works at present or to manually set custom color gamma. Enjoy

Improve night sleep with F.lex on Mac OS X, iPhone and iPad

Monday, February 25th, 2013

f.lux application change screen color gamma to sleep better when using computer late at night macOSX and iphone
Recently I blogged about how to reduce night sleep problems and diminish insomnia on Linux with little command line tool – redshift. Now I'm in a friend who is a Mac user and since he had lately problems with sleeping. I remembered about redshift and one other tool which I read about called F.lex. We give it a try and installed it on his Mac OS X Lion – ver (10.7.5). Installation is like other standard Mac OS X applications, download f.lux version for Mac OS then click  .DMG binary and you're asked if you want to install the program in Mac active Applications. That's all the program is installed and you don't even need to configure it as the program automatically determines Time Zone / Geographic Location  configured for OS X. Once installed you will notice the F.lux switching screen gamma icon on left of Mac panel:

sleep better when using Mac laptop at night with F.lux

In F.lux configuration, by using Search button the program can automatically determine Geographic Location, however if you it fails to determine proper location and improperly sets the screen color gamma, you can manually set location coordinates. F.lux tunes screen color gamma accordingly to day or night and time in day. If it is night it makes the screen reddish, so eyes our eyes relax strain (stress) and our organism prepares to get to bed so once you're in bed it is easier for your brain to get asleep.

F.lux screenshot on Mac OS X Lion improve night sleep insomnia

Now here it is 23:37 at Night and F.lux smartly changed the color gamma accordingly to night mode (reddish) gamma. I've noticed on F.lux's website there is version for iPhone and iPad

How to download books from Books Google with Google Book Download stand alone program and Greasemonkey with Google Books Downloader script

Thursday, February 7th, 2013

If you are student or just a researcher, you already know most of the good books you can find are on books.google.com. Google Books's is nice, but not all browsers support it well. Older mobile phones has big troubles with it, plus it is always nice to have a stored copy of book on your PC for later review or just to refresh your memory on books previously read.

Thus if you get to task to download Books from Google a quick research reveals few programs claiming to support downloading Books from Google in PDF;

1. Google Books Download standalone application for Windows and Mac OS X

Google Books Download is said to support Save of Google books in PDF, JPEG or PNG format.
This program works good whether you need to extract only certain book pages, however with complete books it often hangs. Other problem is it is  proprietary software, (freeware), so pages book pages it downloads in PDF had a big red color stamp complaining the program is trial.
There is a cracked version available on Piratebay.se's website. But as Piratebay is filtered from here. To test it I had to google it via piratebay proxy: –  with "piratebay  google books download"
.


Google Books Download
, standalone app from Piratebay is at current version 3.1.308.
As you can see from screenshot Google Book Download has two modes of work, one is;
Download Manually
– This is used for manual download a pages from a complete book and converting them to PDF.
Download Automatically – Is purposed to download a complete book from books.google.com and converting it to PDF. Downloading a complete copy of book using this mode is sometimes, hanging, plus it is really, really slow. The reason is each of the pages from the Book is first scanned using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology page by page and later after all pages are downloaded in pictures, they're converted to 1 PDF file.

Because Download Automatically loops at certain pages, this makes Google Books Download almost useless for people looking to store a full copy of books on Books.Google.com ….

2. Downloading PDFs from books.google.com with Firefox Greasemonkey and Google Book Downloaderjavascript

a. Install GreaseMonkey Firefox add-on

If you never before heard of Greasemonkey is a Mozilla Firefox Extension that allows users to install scripts that make on-the-fly changes to web page content after or before the page is loaded in the browser (also known as augmented browsing).

b. Install Google book downloader GreaseMonkey javascript

After a FF restart, you're ready to download any book from Books.Google.com.
To use it open the book you want to download and on the left upper corner you will see a Download this book button, press it and the book will be scanned in OCR and saved in PNG picture format. Below is a screenshot showing a sample book to download from books.google.com;

how to download book from google in firefox web browser screenshot


After each book page is succesfully download in page on the left pane you get a download status;

google book download firefox screenshot pictures - Scythian Monks download - how to download books to pictures from Google books on Windows XP, Windows 8

You should keep in mind that the download links of Google Book pages, will have a time expiry, so if you don't hurry up to save the pictures for later use soon links will become inaccessible and showing as broken from Google – I'm not sure how much exactly is google's max expiry time set of links but I guess it should be something 5-10 mins.

The pages of PDF, gets fetched as pictures one by one so it takes 20 secs or so to get all links to pages. Since Google Books Downloader only provides links to PDF pages it is necessery to either save each of the pictures manually (quite a lot of effort) or Install and use lets say DownThemAll! FF download extension. Using DownThemAll does not completely automates picture downloads, as you need to manually select all pictures for downloading, but at least selecting pages saves some time. To download all book pages with DownThemAll click with right mouse button on the left pane where links to pictures appears and choose download with DownThemAll!. After that tick on all links pointing to books.google.com……. to make them have the green tick as shown in below screenshot;

Once you have all PNGs saved on the PC you need to then convert them to unified PDF file. One way to do this is using ImageMagick's convert command line tool.
To do so install imagemagick for Windows downloading Win binaries from here
There are a bunch of binaries you will need to install named like ImageMagick-*-x86-static.exe

Run cmd.exe, change dir (cd) to folder where the just download book is saved in PNG and issue:


C:\Downloads> convert *.png pdf/my-book-from-pictures.pdf