You can skip to the closest key frame in a youtube video by supplying the time you wish to jump to as part of the URL. This is quite handy for sending someone a video where you want them to see a specific part. Instead of sending a link and saying jump ahead to 3 minutes and 14 seconds, you can just send them a link that does it for them.

The Battlefield Bad Company 2 servers were offline while the patches were implemented. Numerous multiplayer issues were addressed along with a few single player campaign not worth mentioning. While their servers were down, EA was directing everyone to check a twitter feed for the latest news.

Google Picasa is available as an rpm and deb for Linux. You can get it from google package repository if you already have that installed, but the latest version doesn’t appear to be available from there just yet. This app is run under a self contained wine installation.

Hugin is the GUI frontend for a bunch of image tools that allow you to stitch together multiple pictures with overlapping scenes to create a single panoramic images. The images don’t have to be the exact same color or from the same perspective. The image tools will manipulate the pictures in an attempt to smoothly blend everything into a single scene. You can create different kinds of stitched together images such as 360 degree fish eye and super wide angle views.

Cinepaint feels intuitive and relatively easy to use given the awesome manipulative power you have at your fingertips. If it seems familiar to you, that might be because it’s a fork of GIMP 1.0.4. Although it’s intended audience is video editors, you can use it for anything from gif, jpg, and tiff to cineon, hdr, xwd, xcf, and a long list of other formats. Cinepaint is for editing and touching up individual frames, not working with video files directly.

Pay off the credit card with the highest interest rate first. Ignore the balance when determining which account to pay off. What ever your situation may be, consult a financial expert to you and your particular financial situation. The goal is all the same, pay off your debt.

Changing your sleeping habits by adjusting your clocks to the destination time may be one way to help avoid jet lag but it’s not always possible. Other methods used in combination with fasting may do the trick. Try to stay hydrated, avoid alcohol, eat foods high in protein after you arrive at your destination, and avoid staying indoors if you arrive at your destination during the daylight hours.

When you base your decision to buy a game, in this case Battlefield Bad Company 2, on a question such as this, it’s a sure sign of failure. Pfheww… I was worried there for a minute. Call of Duty could have started a bad trend in FPS gaming on the PC. But alas, Battlefield is better than COD on so many levels.

I hate age the Month, Day, Year age verification on websites. Some kid is going to see that and enter their real age? Seriously? That’s more of an IQ check. And for you guys collecting the stats on how many people you turn away, you might want to think about how many people may have accidentally mistyped the year. Congratulations, you just turned away another customer.

I hate configuring things like GPS devices that run super restricted verisons of linux or some other OS. They never seem to deal with error handling very well. For example, here’s the oddball command for fetching ntp.conf and ntp.keys from a ntp server onto a Symmetricom GPS receiver. This is what you want to see, it just works. But in the many failures leading up to this configuration, it was finding problems fetching the files or having the correct access but it was happily coasting right along, overwriting its own configuration with jibberish and rebooting it self only to find the configuration was bollocks.