David’s links of the week May 5th through June 14th:
- Top 10 Most Effective Job Search Websites – With the world economic climate still painfully low, more folks are losing their jobs than ever before. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. unemployment rate hit over 9 percent in May 2009. France unemployment jumped to 8.2 percent, Germany was at 7.6 percent in January, and the UK was at 6.77 percent in March. It’s imperative that job seekers have all of the tools at their disposal to find new work. High unemployment rates don’t necessarily mean that there’s no work, it often means that the fields where there are available jobs are changing. For this reason, I’d like to offer a list of the top 10 most effective job search websites to help MakeUseOf readers land that new dream job as quickly as possible.
- How to backup your MySQL tables and data every night using a bash script and cron – base64.co.uk
software development tutorials and code snippets covering : Apache, PHP, Perl, MySQL amp; classic Visual Basic 6.
How to backup your MySQL tables and data every night using a bash script and cronpublished : 01.Apr.2005
I now offer an off site MySQL database backup service, if you need a reliable a backup solution for your on-line database, please take a look.
Summary:
This tutorial will show you how to write a simple bash shell script which will extract your database schema, compress the data and email you the backup. Utilising cron, this script can be configured to run in the early hours of the morning when your web server is least active.After completing your database enabled web site, you need an automated method for backing up all that valuable data. Below is a bash shell script which can be used to backup all your clients databases using a nightly cron job.
- How to Backup And Install Your Linux Applications With AptOnCD – Make Tech Easier – Everytime after you have reformatted the hard disk and reinstalled the Linux distro of your choice, the one troublesome thing that you need to do is to re-download all your applications and restore all the settings. This is made worst when your wireless connection just don’t work with the newly installed distro. How are you going to download all your applications when you can’t even connect to the Internet?
- 10 Windows Command Line Tips You Should Check Out – Linux geeks are proud of their command line prowess and generally have some tricks up their sleeves. While the Windows command line is not considered as powerful as a Linux’s, here are some Windows command line tips and tricks not everyone might know about.
- Save money on your Mobile Phone bill – Save money on your mobile bills when calling 0800 and other non-geographical numbers
Most mobile phone providers in the UK still charge their customers for calls to 0800, 0808 and 0500 numbers, and normally at higher rates than they charge for calling a land line, but there is a way around this. Mobile Fun recently stumbled upon 0800Buster. They operate a service that lets you call these numbers using your mobiles inclusive minutes, by providing you with a UK land line number to dial instead.
- How to Get a Quake-style Drop-down Terminal in Linux – Make Tech Easier – A lot of games out there have some form of command prompt, often just for entering cheat codes. You know the type – you hit some function key and a bar drops down from the top of the screen letting you enter commands or codes or whatever else. Well some clever folks have taken that design and applied it to the command prompt in your Linux desktop. You can get a fully featured, skinnable terminal with split-screen views and all at the touch of a button. Yakuake is just such a program. It’s been around for a few years but has remained below the radar for most Linux users.
- Web life: Phun – physicsworld.com – Phun is a free, downloadable physics-simulation programme that bills itself as a “2D physics sandbox”. The programme’s limitless virtual space allows users to construct simple (and not-so-simple) machines out of levers, gears, motors and as many different shapes as they care to draw, then set them in motion. The results can be educational, bizarre or downright hilarious, depending on what you choose to do, but thanks to a sophisticated simulation engine, they will always be physically realistic — unless you decide to turn off friction and gravity.
- The unique universe – physicsworld.com – Many cosmological theories not only see our universe as one of many but also claim that time does not exist. Lee Smolin argues against the timeless multiverse
- Make Tech Easier – How To Compress A Video File with Virtualdub – Anyone who has played around with any kind of video knows how huge uncompressed video files can be. The huge size of video files is what has led to the proliferation of video compression algorithms like DivX, Xvid, MP4 etc, but how exactly do you compress an uncompressed video to one of these formats, to save space and maintain your sanity ?
- Make Tech Easier – Ubuntu: How to Mount iso, Bin And Cue Files Directly From Nautilus – We have covered the easy way to mount iso images in Windows. This time round, we are going to cover the easy way to mount an iso, bin or cue file in Ubuntu without having to hit the terminal every time.
With the use of fuesiso and nautilus-actions, we can easily create an option in Nautilus to mount the CD images right from the context menu (mouse right click).
- Make Tech Easier – Mastering the Bash History – The Bourne Again Shell, better known as bash, is the default for most Linux distributions. It’s extremely powerful as far as command shells go, and holds all kinds of nifty tricks for those willing to learn. One of the best features is, in my opinion, the command history system.
There are many options to use with the bash history, some of them I use nearly every time I open a command shell. Today I’ll be covering some of the most useful aspects of the history, but I certainly won’t be able to cover them all.
- Make Tech Easier – Gaming In Linux (Ubuntu) – Gaming in Linux is always a big issue. Many gamers are not willing to migrate to Linux (though they are not happy with Windows) because they are worried about the lack of support for gaming. This is really a big myth, since there are really plenty of great games in Linux.
In case you are wondering what choices of game you have in Linux (Ubuntu), here are my top 10 list.
- Make Tech Easier – Things You Need To Know To Become An Apt Guru – Quite possibly the most distinguishing feature of Debian-based Linux distributions (such as Ubuntu, Mepis, Knoppix, etc) is their package system – APT. Also known as the Advanced Package Tool, APT was first introduced in Debian 2.1 in 1999. APT is not so much a specific program as it is a collection of separate, related packages.
With APT, Linux gained the ability to install and manage software packages in a much simpler and more efficient way than was previously possible. Before its introduction, most software had to be installed either by manually compiling the source code, or using individual packages with no automatic dependency handling (such as RPM files). This could mean hours of “dependency hell” even to install a fairly trivial program.
- Make Tech Easier – The Ultimate Guide To Manage Your Audio/Video Files In Linux – Have you ever come across a situation where you wanted to convert a video from one format to another in your Linux machine and you have absolutely no idea how to do it? What about playing DVD on Ubuntu or rip your favorite VCD to mpeg file?
Below, I have come up with a great list of software that you can use to handle your video/audio files in Linux. All the software listed are compatible with any of the Linux distros out there. The installation instructions and screenshots are based on Ubuntu, so if you are on a different distro, you will have to change the command accordingly.
- Make Tech Easier – How To Control Your CPU Frequency In Ubuntu – Needless to say, conserving your battery power is the most important task when you are on the move with your laptop. Other than disabling all unused programs by shutting down them during the startup, one of the great way to save battery power is to reduce the running frequency of your CPU. The slower frequency the CPU runs, the less power it consumes.
In your Ubuntu, you can easily switch your CPU frequency via the CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor Gnome-applets.
- Using Spotify Links In Linux – The Atheist Blogger – I’ve yet to officially start my tutorials on Linux, but I’ve been playing around with Spotify recently and I’ve been annoyed by the problem of getting Spotify playlists to load from my web browser directly into Spotify. For those who don’t know about Spotify, I suggest you read my previous post, and if you still want invites, I am getting them on a daily basis, so please apply. Spotify playlists can be shared easily in the form of a link, and there have been several websites set up to publish these links. The problem of using these links in Linux consists of two issues:
- [Jaunty] synaptics driver needs to be updated to work with devices known as "ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad" and "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" starting with 2.6.28 series kernels – solved my non working touchpad by doing in terminal:
modprobe -r psmouse
modprobe psmouse proto=impsat this time the touchpad should be working
and add: options psmouse proto=imps
to: gedit /etc/modprobe.d/optionsbest of luck.
- Quick and dirty guide to rsync | The Sillican Files – rsync is a software application for Unix systems which synchronizes files and directories from one location to another while minimizing data transfer using delta encoding when appropriate. (Thanks, Wikipedia.) Since this is supposed to be a quick tutorial, we’ll skip the formal lecture and get on with some usage examples.
- How To Build a Social Networking Site using Wordpress | MakeUseOf.com – To create a social networking site, you can either register a free account with a ahird party social networks provider or install open source software on your server and be your own administrator. There are pros and cons in these two methods. The first method allows you to handle your social networks without any technical knowledge, but you risk losing all your data when the third party site close down. The latter requires you to have certain technical knowledge, but you get full control over every single detail in your site.
- Make Tech Easier – Useful Firefox Shortcut Keys (and Cheatsheet Download) – I like using the keyboard as much as possible because it makes me feel more productive. In my opinion, moving your hand over to the mouse is unnecessary the majority of the time because most applications provide very convenient keyboard shortcuts. Today we will discuss the most useful Firefox keyboard shortcuts that will allow you to navigate the Internet faster, thus getting more work (or play) done.
It all boiled down to running out of storage quota on my server. My server account had crept over its quota limit without me knowing. Things were still working like this, but since Wordpress 2.8 (the software that runs this website) came out on Thursday I ran the upgrade, and then we hit problems.






