TheHippo

I am using different instant messager protocol. ICQ, IRC, sometimes MSN and Skype. It always bugged me to have 2 programs open. Pidgin for all protocols except Skype and Skype.

Today I found a really good working plug-in for Pidgin which allows you to use the most Skype features directly from Pidgin: http://code.google.com/p/skype4pidgin/

You still need Skype to be running, but you got all you contacts in you Pidgin list. If you make a call the standard Skype dialog appears, all message communication is done via the usual Pidgin conversation windows.

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How to download a video from Youtube and convert it into a mp3 file? (Or a mpeg video, or…). The most complicated part was to actually download the flv-movie. After you got this on your harddrive it is quite easy to perform more conversation to diffent file formats. Here the are my instructions for downloading and converting to mp3. continue reading…

In the last time I am back to a lot of server development. This also means a lot of database engineering. For the most the time I have used PHPMyAdmin for nearly every I have to work with a MySQL database. After a while a got a little bit disappointed, because PHPMyAdmin is a kind of bloated and sometimes it’s just take to long to perform a simple operation. continue reading…

I make no secret of that I am a big fan of the Firefox web browser. Except of a few things that I will name later I am/was always impressed by the speed improvements that are made over the past few years, which seems very important to me, because many pages you use in you daily life are more and more based on heavy JavaScript functionalities. A few days ago I decided to give a try to the newest development version of the Firefox – named Minefield – and make some tests. continue reading…

Today I tried to load a animated loading animation as a gif image into the Flash Player and discovered that he is not able to play them. It only shows the first frame.
My loading.gif:

So how to convert this gif animation into a swf file, which the Flash Player could play? (And of course I only want to use open source tools.) It was very easy: continue reading…