To run the script, you need to place it in the ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts directory and give it execute permissions.

You also need to install the following packages:
enca
libnotify-bin

#!/bin/sh
#
# Filename: Enconv Tool
# Date: 2008/02/02 15:10:34
# Licence: GNU GPL
# Dependency: enca, libnotify-bin
# Author: Jonathan Lumb 

# Do the conversion
enconv "$@"

# Display success / error message
if [ "$?"-ne 0]
then
notify-send -i /usr/share/icons/Humanity/actions/48/gtk-cancel.svg "Error" "Files were not converted"
exit 1
else
notify-send -i /usr/share/icons/Humanity/actions/48/document-export.svg "Success" "Files were successfully converted"
fi
exit 0

I found that there are (at least) three ways of converting files using these character sets on Ubuntu – using the iconv, the recode and the enconv utilities. The iconv utility preserves the original text file and creates a new output file, the recode utility overwrites the original text file with the new encoding whilst the econv utility tops them all off by detecting the encoding of the source file automatically and then converting it to your local native encoding (UTF-8 on Ubuntu).

Below I will demonstrate how each of these utilities can be used:

The iconv method
The iconv utility should be installed by default on Ubuntu

In a terminal, browse to the directory where the target files are located and use either of the commands below, the former for converting from GB18030 to UTF-8 and the latter from BIG6 to UTF-8.

iconv -f gb18030 -t utf8 src_filename -o output_filename

iconv -f big5 -t utf8 src_filename -o output_filename

The recode method

You may need to install the recode package on your system before preceding:

sudo apt-get install recode

In a terminal, browse to the directory where the target files are located and use either of the commands below, the former for converting from GB18030 to UTF-8 and the latter from BIG6 to UTF-8.

recode GB18030 src_filename

recode BIG5 src_filename

The enconv method

You will probably need to install the enca package on your system before preceding:

sudo apt-get install enca

In a terminal, browse to the directory where the target files are located and use simply enter the following command:

enconv src_filename

The utility should automatically detect the encoding of the source file and convert the file to an Ubuntu compatible UTF-8 version!

Summary

The recode and iconv utilities are pretty powerful and handy if you know the original encoding of your source file. However, econv seems to be the pick of the bunch as it is a cinch to use and will automatically detect the encoding of most text files for you.

After comparing the old and new style.css files for this theme, I noticed that the following line was missing from the new one:

pre {display: block; overflow: auto; background: #f3f3f3; padding: 5px; margin: 20px 0; font-family: monospace; border: 1px solid #dadada;}

I enclose all of my code snippets in HTML “pre” tags – the above code (written by myself) wraps them in a nice little box on the page – using a horizontal slider to deal with the overflow issue experienced. It seems I made changes to the original Cleanr theme – but completely forgot to change the new code after performing the update.

Hopefully everything should look a little nicer now

https?://([^.]+\.)*(twitter|wordpress|blogspot|flickr|blogger|feedburner|youtube|dailymotion|bit)\.(com|net|ly)/.*

Install mimms:

sudo apt-get install mimms

Sample usage:

mimms mms://iss-video.leeds.ac.uk/smlc/audio/eas/east3031/03Chopsticks.mp3

Of course you can find out more command line options by simply typing mimms –help

Happy ripping!

First we need to add the Medibuntu repository for your version of Ubuntu:

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/$(lsb_release -cs).list  --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list

Next we add the Medibuntu keyring and refresh apt:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update

Next we need to install some multimedia packages and codecs:

sudo apt-get install non-free-codecs libdvdcss4 w32codecs vlc mplayer

Finally, run this script to enable encrypted DVD playback:

sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh

There we go, now sit back and relax!

你好 [nǐhǎo]

This is possible using the Ibus input framework that comes with Ubuntu. The support for pinyin romanisation is provided in the ibus-m17n package. This must first be installed.

sudo apt-get install ibus-m17n

Once installed, restart Ibus and add the input method in the menu as in the screenshot below.

You should now be able to activate the input method. Simply type the pinyin for a character preceded by the tone number (ranging from 1 to 4).

The below steps should allow you to get standard Java setup on your Ubuntu box:

Add the repository
First create a new .list file for the repository

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/java.list

Paste in the following

deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner

Now update all repositories and install Java

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-fonts sun-java6-plugin

Now you need to make sure that the version of Java you just installed is selected as the default Java installation on your system:

sudo update-alternatives --config java

Choose the version of Java you just installed.

Finally, we need to install the Java plugin in Firefox:

mkdir -p ~/.mozilla/plugins

Make a symlink to the Java plugin:

ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so ~/.mozilla/plugins/libnpjp2.so

Finally, you may want to implement the following fix which resolves the problem of Chinese characters displaying as 口口 boxes in Java applications:

cd /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib/fonts
sudo mkdir fallback
cd fallback
sudo ln -s /usr/share/fonts/truetype/arphic/uming.ttc .
sudo ln -s /usr/share/fonts/truetype/arphic/uming.ttc uming.ttf

Now restart Firefox and everything should be working OK! If you do run into any problems, you may want to consider uninstalling OpenJDK completely as well as the Icedtea Java plugin using Synaptic package manager.

Thanks to Felix Yan’s and Buckynasty’s original posts.

To save me from manually removing these citations from the essay, a tedious process, I discovered that I could use regular expressions to find and remove all citations in one particular text.

For most essays, the Harvard system of (author date) citation is used, for example:

(Chan 1991)

Therefore, to match this quotation, I needed a regex that would match any brackets in which there was a single word starting with a capital letter followed by a four digit number. I came up with the following:

\([A-Z][a-z]*[ ][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]\)

Using this regular expression in a find & replace operation in a text editor, quotes can be quickly removed in bulk from a text – whilst ensuring that other information contained within brackets is not removed.

Timesaver!

534 Protection level negotiation failed.

In this case, you need to add the following line to the bottom of your /etc/lftp.conf file

set ftp:ssl-protect-data yes

Now try connecting again and hopefully everything should work ok – it sorted my problems when I was trying to connect to the Leeds University SFTP servers using lftp on Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic).