I’m such a Linux fanboy but man do I ever love Linux.  YouTube was down for maintenance for a few hours tonight so I couldn’t upload any videos (see the Samuel Adams video below).  I needed a way to convert a .mov file to .flv and saw you can use the command line and use FFMPEG but who wants to do that?  Yeah not me so I found a great little program (open source of course) which sits on top of FFMPEG as a GUI to convert your videos to whatever format you want.  It even has the ability to compress your videos down for web use.  It took my original 8MB file down to just under 2MBs.  If you use Ubuntu, simply type “video converter” in your Add/Remove search.

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OK I won’t get on my open source soap box too much but this is yet another example of what open source allows us to do (innovate)!  Brad Fitzpatrick has a great post over on his site about enabling manual synchronization of your contacts between Facebook and Gmail.  It basically looks at all of your friend’s contact information within Facebook and then compares that information to what you have in Gmail and synchronizes it for you in just a few easy clicks.  The good news is you have to use Firefox so you can’t use Internet Explorer you Microsoft lovers you!  The other prerequisite is you need to have the Greasemonkey extension installed within Firefox in order for it to work (try doing this with proprietary software).  OK so once you have Firefox and Greasemonkey installed (Firefox restart required), click the link below from Brad’s site and GreaseMonkey should ask you to automatically install it.

http://bradfitz.com/greasemonkey/facebook_phonebook_export.user.js

Follow the instructions and then go to your Facebook Phonebook.  Then within Firefox click Tools > GreaseMonkey > User Script Commands… > and you’ll see Export Facebook Phonebook (you have to be on the Facebook Phonebook page in order for it to not be grayed out…took me a while to figure that out). That will then page through your phone book (you should probably start on page 1: it’s kinda flaky) and extract the data, and then POST it to AddressBooker for you, which will then guide you through merging it into your Google Contacts.  Be sure to thank Brad for his time over at his site via this link if you found this helpful (I did).

I am a big fan of open source software so at home I use Gimp which is an open source alternative to Photoshop.  One of my favorite features of Photoshop is its “save for web” feature which lets you downsize images so they will load more quickly on websites you support.  I found a plug-in today for Gimp which allows that capability so I thought I would share it in hope that those who also use Gimp could benefit if you happen to be reading this blog.  If you don’t have Gimp you can grab a copy over at gimp.org.  Also note that if you aren’t using Linux like I am it is OK because Gimp is also available for Windows systems.  The directions below are for installing the plug-in for Linux but if you have Windows you can download the zip file here.

If you are using Linux, follow the instructions below and let me know if you have any problems.

1. Download the plug-in here.
2. Open terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal)
3. Unzip the .tar.gz in ~/.gimp-2.6/plug-ins/ (note you can right click on it and select “extract here via a GUI and copy/paste it into the folder)
4. In terminal type $ “sudo apt-get install libgimp2.0-dev” (needed to compile the files)
5. In terminal type $ “cd ~/.gimp-2.6/plug-ins/gimp-save-for-web-0.28.6/” (navigate to where you extracted the files)
   1. If this doesn’t work for you, go to your Home directory and press Cntrl + H to show your system’s hidden files
   2. Double Click Gimp-2.6 directory
   3. Then double click the Plug-ins directory
   4. Paste the folder into the directory if you are more comforable with a GUI
6. Go back to terminal and navigate to the directory and again if you don’t like using command line you can drag the folder into your terminal window and press the enter key.  Once you do that type $ ./configure make and press enter
7. Next type $ “sudo make install” into the terminal window
8. Restart Gimp
9. A new option is created via File>Save for web!

I finally found a video editor I like which is open source and available for Linux called OpenShot.  You can download the files here and then perform the following steps (note it took a good 3 minutes to install on my PC).

1. Extract to a folder named ~/openshot_wizard/
2. Open a terminal window
3. $ cd ~/openshot_wizard/
4. $ python install.py

I don’t know if it is available where you are but I was just able to upgrade to Firefox 3.5!  This is exciting news for geeks people, exciting stuff!  I have been running release candidate 1 for about a week and am loving it.  It is much faster and they added in some nice features (I like the HTML 5 stuff).  I checked the websites and can’t find it but try checking for updates in your browser by going to Help > Check for Updates.