Free Burma

Use GNU Octave instead of MATLAB

Especially engineering and technical people out there, you might have used MATLAB. How did you get it?? Bought it?? Commercial version costs $1900. Even the student version costs $99. Or got it pirated? Well it's not good either..

Here's the alternative: GNU Octave. It's more than just alternative. Good thing is that it is fully MATLAB compatible, that means every code written for MATLAB also runs in Octave.

GNU Octave

The most important of all is that GNU Octave is Free and Open Source Software. It also runs on Linux so everybody who wanna move to Linux but holding back due to MATLAB, well, we've a catch here..

GNU Octave's web address: http://www.octave.org/

Watching Youtube (and other online videos) full screen

The best OS to have in your computer is Linux. In Linux, one of the best software to install is CompizFuzion (previosuly, Beryl). Well, I normally don't like to have flashy graphics as it gets boring and counter-productive with time, but the screen zoom feature always rocks!

Zooming screen?? Where could this be useful?? This feature is targeted for people with poor vision so that they can magnify part of screen. I do have good vision (after wearing glasses though) but this feature comes handy when watching videos from sites like Youtube.

Online video sites like Youtube and Google Videos have small sized videos. Now if you have CompizFusion, just press Win Key and rotate the scroll wheel and zoom it to full screen..

Normal Screen


Zoomed a bit


Zoom More..


Full Screen

Firefox font fix

My last post on decreasing dpi got my Firefox fonts so damn small. Tried a lot of ways to fix it, even changed /chrome/userContent.css and userChrome.css but nothing worked.

I later installed a plugin named NoSquint which permanently changes the zoom level for individual or all sites. While this worked fine for me, i was lookin for a permanent solution.

Finally i found out that firefox tries to sync it's dpi with system's dpi, which i've already set low. Now the fix for that is as follows.

• Go to address bar and type about:config
• change the layout.css.dpi value from -1 (or whatever) to 0 (zero)

My Firefox now shows normal fonts.

Linux fonts too big?? Try decreasing dpi

Every time i install any Linux distro, the first thing i do is decrease the size of font. I use GNOME in which the default font size defaults to 10 which i feel is quite large given the fact that i use the resolution 1024x768 over a LCD.

But instead of decreasing the font size, here's the alternative that works better. Go to System > Preferences > Font > Details. Now change the Resolution to 72 dots per inch (dpi) (or more if u dont like too small fonts). I chose 72 because it is the actual dpi present on the screen. The smaller fonts look sleek and provides more space too..

Give it a try..