Holzi’s Weblog

Since today, AOL seems to reject all connections that use an old ICQ protocol, even their own ICQ 5.1 client and unfortunately also Pidgin. This is really wretched, because Linux users (and also Mac/Windows users who don’t want to use a slow, ressource-hungy client with a childish design that is also full of ads) are now locked out.

Fortunately there is a fix for this:
If you’re using Ubuntu, you just have to add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/nicolai-spohrer/ubuntu hardy main
This can be done by using an editor like nano:
sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

After appending the line to your sources.list, you need to install the update by typing this into a terminal:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

After installing the fix, it’s recommended to remove the line you’ve added from your sources.list.

If you’re using Debian or ArchLinux, you can find fixed DEBs and TGZs at the Server of the University of Applied Sciences in Esslingen, Germany, all other Linux-Users find Patch-files for Pidgin and Licq there.
There’s also a patched DLL for Windows users, that need to put it into their Pidgin-directory.

Kopete users may try the patch at the KDE Bug Tracker.

Please note that these patches are NOT official and neither me nor the guys that made these fixes assume any responibility.

EDIT: Pidgin released Version 2.4.3, which fixed the Problem. You can get the Source from their homepage and compile it yourself, but I think it won’t take too long until your distribution will add it to its repositories.

Watching VeohTV-Videos on GNU/Linux (and also on BSD, OpenSolaris, etc.) is currently a big problem, because the guys at veoh.com currently only support Windows XP/Vista and Mac OS X. There is already a petition in their forum to create a Linux client, but the guys at veoh.com simply ignore it.

So there have been some other solutions:

You can install VeohTV in wine, but in my opinion, this is not a proper solution, because it needs a second copy of Mozilla Firefox installed in wine.

An alternative was using OpenVeoh, but that doesn’t work anymore.

Fortunately, I recently came across a new way to watch VeohTV-Videos by using VeohProxy.

Installation

You’ll need »python«. On Debian, you can install it by typing this into a console:
sudo apt-get install python
After installing »python«, you have to download VeohProxy:
wget http://veohproxy.googlecode.com/files/veohproxy-1.3.zip
Then unzip it by typing:
unzip veohproxy-1.3.zip

Usage
First, start VeohProxy:
python veohproxy-1.3/default.py.
Now you take the Video-ID from a Veoh-Link, e.g.:
http://www.veoh.com/videos/v1021877pQkpC7Hz?rank=13
With this ID, you can start downloading:
wget -c --proxy=off http://127.0.0.1:64653/v1021877pQkpC7Hz

Please note:
Sometimes the download seems to freeze, but that’s no problem. The download will continue after some time.

I just wrote a Gtk2-version of the console-based MySpace-MP3-Fetcher.

Please note that the Gtk2-perl-bindings are required.

DOWNLOAD!

If you need help during installation, read the INSTALL-file included in the archive.

I recently wrote a Perl-Script to directly fetch the MP3s from the musicplayer at a MySpace-bandprofile. You just have to enter the MySpace-URL of the band’s profile page and it automatically creates a folder where it puts all the downloaded MP3s.

I know the Sourcecode is not a masterpiece, but be lenient toward me, it’s my first Perl project

If you want to contribute to the code, feel free to send me an email.

DOWNLOAD!

If you need help during installation, read the INSTALL-file included in the archive.
Happy downloading

Hi!

As you can see, this is my first post to this blog. The aim of this blog will be to offer some useful tricks or scripts to use on a Linux system (most will work on other Unixes like BSD or Solaris as well).

Holzhaus