Disable webcam in Ubuntu

I was looking for a way to disable the built-in webcam on an Acer-laptop. Ubuntu, well Linux Mint actually, tried to identify and use the webcam during boot, over and over again. This caused a huge delay in booting time. Since I don’t want to use the webcam, I searched for a way to disable it. Adding “blacklist gspca” to the file “/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist” did the trick. Now the thing boots in 1 minute :-)

FrostWire chat server

FrostWire, the filesharing application based on LimeWire, has a built in chat system. The built-in functions are very basic, and I’m not a big fan of the layout. So I asked wyrdjax in the #Support channel if it’s possible to connect to the FrostWire server using a normal IRC client like mIRC, Konversation or ViRC. Just point your client of choice to chat.peercommons.net and you’re good to go!

VLC media player 0.9.2

VideoLAN is an excellent multimedia player with it’s own plugins for playing different formats, so it doesn’t need any codecs to be installed. It works great for previewing partially downloaded files too as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network. Continue reading

Pidgin 2.5.1

More than ten days too late, but here’s Pidgin 2.5.1! Pidgin is an instant messaging program for Windows, Linux, BSD, and other Unixes. You can talk to your friends using AIM, ICQ, Jabber/XMPP, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, QQ, Lotus Sametime, SILC, SIMPLE, and Zephyr. Pidgin can be extended using plugins. Continue reading