Youtube complains of a lack of local storage? Try this...

It seems youtube would really like you to (aka forces you to) enable enable flash storage for third parties and enable at least 10 kg storage for everybody by default. This is most certainly not a technical necessity, but to make advertizing work better. Otherwise you can't save your youtube 3d settings. But once you've saved your 3d settings, you can switch third party storage back off. ;)

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Fast, Cheap, Reliable VPN for Linux

I did some research into VPN services because even if I'm not in the US or UK for a while I don't want to be prevented from accessing certain websites there and signing up for services there.

You can sign up to the PureVPN shared IP services here. I have good experience (hulu with maximum quality streaming, iplayer work fine) with the cheapest version.

I recommend chosing the Monthly or Quarterly plan for tests ($14), but there is a three day test account ($3) available as well. It seems there is a bandwith limit now, and without you pay more.

Payment processing can take a few hours so be aware you can't start you fun and tests directly. Settings for network manager (gnome) can be found here. It works fine for me after installing network-manager-pptp-kde. Let me know in the comments if you need help. The most important part is to deselect everything in that one list except CHAP in the advanced settings and dselect MPPE. You can also try the nm-applet from Gnome, which you can of course also use in KDE. In my experience it often works better than the KDE version anyway unfortunately.

You may run into problems if your router doesn't support pptp forwarding. Then you either get a better router, or - in the long term probably the cheaper and better option for your speed - get a better router.

By signing up via a link from this blog you support the author.

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Circumventing Censorship - Evading the "20th Century's Berlin Wall"

The New York Times presents the status quo in censorship evasion with examples of Iran and China. A quite interesting read. Don't expect a how to, though.

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How to Speed Up your Website's Page Loading Times with Apache and .htaccess

http://bobcares.com/index.php/blog/?p=211

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Check for Viruses Online

There's not only the Kapersky Scanner(32-bit only, Java required), but also VirusTotal, which scans a file with several engines at once.

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Apt-Get Tipps

TuxArena put up a nice summary of some useful apt-get commands.

I have to correct them in one point: For dpkg -L to work, the package needs to be installed already.

I also have a few extra ones:

• apt-cache search (search packages)
• apt-cache show (show full package description)
• apt-cache policy (show available package versions)
• apt-cache depends (show package dependencies)
• dpkg -P (remove package completely, that means also configuration etc.)
• dpkg-reconfigure --priority=low (reconfigure package, show all options)

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Encyclopedia of Life

A website mapping (or trying to) all life on our cosy little planet Earth. Why go to other planets to find life if you need not go father than your backyard? Out now: eol.org.

Also check out this interview with the founder.

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Git Magic

If you ever run into trouble trying to do something that should be really easy with git but doesn't seem to be, if you want to learn git or think you already know everything important about it, and in many other cases, this article about git is a must read:

http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~blynn/gitmagic/

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