Month: February 2013

Troubleshooting: Playing DRM Videos from Amazon

This is the second time this has happened.  I keep getting:

Sorry we were unable to stream this video.  This is likely because your flash player could not be updated.

I had just reinstalled my media laptop with Linux Lite OS (a flavor of Ubuntu), and I was trying to watch a video from Amazon.  It was one of the Prime Instant Videos.

To fix the issue, I followed McDougall’s instructions.  Basically, it was just installing the “hal” package and deleting the .adobe and .macromedia settings directories:

sudo apt-get install hal
rm -r ~/.adobe ~/.macromedia

Finally, I rebooted and retried.  It all worked fine after that.

Resources

Fixing Super Tux Kart

Super Tux Kart is a fun game that my son and I have gotten into.  It has recently improved quite a lot, and we have enjoyed playing it.

But, just recently, I found that it crashes a lot.  It’s not predicable, it will either freeze the X display or it will just close in the middle of a race.

So, I decided to do a quick Google search to see if there was a solution out.  I can’t find the article now, but something suggested that maybe it was a bug that was already fixed.  I found I had version 0.7, and version 0.8 was available.

On the download page, it suggested a repository.  So, I installed this repository:

sudo add-apt-repository http://ppa.launchpad.net/stk/dev/ubuntu

To get it to install, I ran the regular apt-get update…

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

After that, I had the 0.8 version.  In addition, the crashes seem to have gone away, so far.

Fixing NAT for Virtual Box on Ubuntu

For some reason, NAT quit working for me in Virtual Box.  Everything works fine, but the machines won’t connect to the Internet unless I change them to bind to a particular adapter.  The problem is that I use different adapters based on my location.  At the office, I have a docking station and the network goes through the USB connector.  At home, I use wireless.  So, when I bind, I have to remember to change the adapter for it to work.  If I use NAT, it doesn’t matter.

So, here’s how I found I could fix NAT to work again.

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Serverless Download

I have a little time-tracking tool that I have been using to track my billable time.  The program stores everything in the local storage within the browser.  The challenge comes when I want to export or backup the information stored in the browser.  I don’t want to force the user to send the data to my website just so it can turn around and download it back to the user’s hard drive.

Here’s the solution that I came up with:

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