Academic Earth

Academic Earth is a great site that hosts a large amount of educational lectures. I recently watched the series on building dynamic websites and I highly recommend it for anyone new to the subject. Currently, I am watching a physics series on vibrations and waves that is pretty interesting.

Fixing Remote Desktop with Compiz

I have a HTPC box running Ubuntu 10.04 which works great except for an annoying bug when using remote desktop alongside Compiz. If Visual Effects are set anything other than None in System->Preferences->Appearance the remote desktop session will never refresh (typically I am using TightVNC on Windows 7). The kicker is that when visual effects are set to None, some video sites (IGN Video for example) will cause strange behavior when fullscreened.

However, this website provides a great solution to the problem. With Compiz Visual Effects enabled, do the following:

1. Open a terminal o press ALT+F2, then run/type: gconf-editor


2. Go to /desktop/gnome/remote_access and enable "disable_xdamage"

Results should take effect immediately.