White Sands Wallpaper Pack

Images taken in southern New Mexico in a national park called White Sands.

Wallpaper pack can be downloaded from this site.

PLEASE mind the terms of use and do not re-host these images anywhere else on the web......
the images are for your own personal use only as desktop wallpaper imagery and other uses of these images without written permission is not tolerated.

Customize Firefox Scrolling

You can use extensions like Yet Another Smooth Scrolling or Smoothwheel, but there is another way without installing any add on.

Just go to the about:config page in Firefox : type about:config in the Location Bar (address bar) and press Enter to display the list of preferences.

Uncheck Show this warning next time

You can search in the Search bar at the top of the page to filter the preferences that you want to inspect. The search bar is case-insensitive, unlike the actual configuration variables.
Examples to filter results : mousewheel and smoothscroll .
                                                  

If you want to try out the settings I use, do the following :
Quit Firefox, navigate to ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default and create a file user.js with the following content :

// === Mouse Wheel Scrolling ===================================================
user_pref("general.smoothScroll", true);                            // boolean    enable/disable smooth scrolling
user_pref("general.smoothScroll.mouseWheel", true);                 // boolean    enable/disable smooth scrolling with mouse wheel
user_pref("general.smoothScroll.mouseWheel.durationMaxMS", 600);    // integer    smooth out the start/end of scrolling operations in ms
user_pref("general.smoothScroll.mouseWheel.durationMinMS", 400);    // integer    smooth out the start/end of scrolling operations in ms
user_pref("mousewheel.acceleration.factor", 10);                    // integer    sets acceleration factor if mousewheel.acceleration.start > -1
user_pref("mousewheel.acceleration.start", 0);                      // integer    when to apply mousewheel.acceleration.factor (after how many scroll clicks of mouse wheel)
user_pref("mousewheel.default.delta_multiplier_y", 85);             // integer    vertical step size

http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config_entries

Update : there is another setting in about:config you can play with :
mousewheel.min_line_scroll_amount  default setting = 5

Password Strength

http://xkcd.com/936/
http://preshing.com/20110811/xkcd-password-generator
http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html
https://www.grc.com/haystack.htm
http://www.baekdal.com/tips/password-security-usability

Commandlinefu

Commandlinefu is a simple repository for storing and sharing great shell commands.

MPlayer-gui

MPlayer is a free and open source media player, available for all major operating systems. It will play all types of free media formats as well as most non-free media formats.

MPlayer2 is a fork of the original MPlayer project, it contains few enhancements.

A GUI is available. To install :

sudo apt-get install mplayer2 mplayer-gui mplayer-skins

Package mplayer-skins contains three different skins, more skins can be downloaded from here.
I downloaded a skin from Deviantart, called simpliX.

Extract the downloaded file ( 7z format ) with Archive Manager. Move the folder simpliX to /usr/share/mplayer/skins :

sudo mv simpliX /usr/share/mplayer/skins

You can also create folder skins in ~/.mplayer and move the folder simpliX over there. ( link ).

Start MPlayer-gui and select your skin and set preferences ( right-click player or screen ) :

MPlayer2 is played from the commandline : http://www.mplayer2.org/docs/mplayer/ .

Example ( playing music from Sky.fm, Smoothjazz ) :
mplayer http://pub8.sky.fm:80/sky_smoothjazz_aacplus

User settings are in ~/.mplayer/config which from the first start contains only one line :

# Write your default config options here!

For settings and options look here :
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=77329
http://everydaylht.com/howtos/multimedia/mplayer/
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MPlayer#Configuration

Askubuntu/mplayer

Having a Nvidia GT 330 card my config looks like the one from here.

Cool things you can do with mplayer : http://www.linuxandlife.com/2012/07/4-cool-tricks-to-do-with-mplayer.html
http://everydaylht.com/howtos/eyecandy/ascii-movies/

Movie : http://www.sintel.org/download

Make Firefox Look Like Chrome

Install firefox :
sudo apt-get install firefox

Start firefox and install the Movable Firefox Button.
You have to restart firefox to make the Addon active.

Right click between the address bar and search bar and uncheck Menu Bar.

Repeat the same but then choose Customize... Grab the Firefox Menu button and move it to the far right side.

Grab the ( with Customize... ) Home, Reload and Stop buttons and move them to the left right next to the address bar. Remove the search bar...( drop it in the Customize Toolbar window ).

Install Fxchrome theme and you're done....

Pinboard An Online Bookmarking Tool

As said on it's website :

Pinboard is a bookmarking website for introverted people in a hurry.
The focus of the site is less on socializing, and more on speed and utility. Pinboard tries to offer useful features without getting in your way.
My highest priority is keeping your data safe over the long term.

Unlike some social bookmarking sites, Pinboard will cost you a one-time fee of around ten dollars.
The site follows a rather unconventional pricing strategy -- as more people sign up, the price increases.
The signup fee helps keep the site from growing too fast, and keeps Pinboard spam-free.

Thanks to the site’s clean design and focus on speed, saving bookmarks and browsing them is always super-fast.

There’s also an optional archiving service that, for $25/year, guarantees that articles you bookmark will still work even if the original link changes or gets deleted

Read the Getting Started page if you get interested.

Pinboard extensions for your browser : https://pinboard.in/extensions/

Alternative online bookmarking :  http://1r7.net/