How to make your own YouTube kiosk

How to make your very own homemade YouTube computer stand, as a weekend project.

I had lying an old stand, sort of those who were used to hold brochures and paperlike information. The idea to make a computer stand was old, but it didn't have a look or concrete purpose.

The first thing i did was to find a computer and a friend of mine was to throw away an old laptop, remember those designed to run microsoft windows 95? It didn't have a working battery, but since this stand is to be stationary it didn't matter. I measured the screen size and used a metal cutter to cut out the right sized window into the stand. I then had to cut some space in the back to mount the laptop into it. It is the kind of laptop you can flip entirely up.

I bought a cheap wireless usb keyboard and mounted it in the front with two metal angels, the kind you would use to hold a shelf to a wall. I also had a barchair which had been taken up space in a room. I had to use an USB wireless dongle since the pcmcia slot became unavailable after mounting the computer on the back.

The theme i chose for my computer stand was YouTube. I could have chosen something completely different, but i guess YouTube have such an impact on everyones lifes, and most people know YouTube already. I painted the stand white, made a frame in wood and painted it red, like the youtube logo suggests. and made the YouTube logo in wood as well, cut out from some materials I had lying from old days, a homemade computertable lying around, waiting to be reused.

For the computer I naturally chosed Ubuntu linux, but could have used any operating system, as long it could run the Opera browser, which was the youtube frontend. Opera can run in kioskmode, fullscreen and disable all keyboard shortcuts. Opera can also be locked to run only youtube.com (or any other site). Know I had to find a place to show off the youtube-stand, and placed it in a local churchs caféarea.

I made everything look YouTube-ish and tried to stick to the black, red and white colors. And the results was stunning. A personal YouTube computer stand. This is perfect for a weekend project and should be fun to do with friends.

Making podcast with ubuntu part two

Last time i explained how to prepare the mp3 to use in the podcast. This time we will publish the mp3 as a podcast, using wordpress and a plugin called PodPress.
Im not going into details about how to set up wordpress. This should be straight forward if you are familiar with linux and. To install the PodPress plugin, all you have to do is to follow these steps:

1. Download this file
2. Extract it into the wp-content/plugins folder
3. Activate the plugins from your Wordpress dashboard
4. Go to the PodPress settings page and customize it to suit you

Next, you start off by making a new post. Write a nice title and text for your postcast, and upload the mp3 file created last time and copy that link. Scroll down a bit till you see the Podcasting box. Press "Add media file" and paste the mp3link into the Location field. Press the buttons named Size and Duration. This will set the information to use in the podcast.

Now, the podcast is ready to be published. Enter a category for the post named podcast and press the Publish button to create the post.

Now you can access your podcast by using the following url: http://yoursite.com/?feed=podcast

Making podcast with ubuntu part one

First of all, im using open source software only, even the content manager in which the podcast are made available to all people. And this tutorial is aimed at people hvave used ubuntu and is familiar the command line.

The software im using as we speak is this

• ubuntu hardy 8.10
• Audacity 1.2.6
• Lame 3.97
• Wordpress 2.2
• podPress wordpress plugin 8.8

This first part is how to record and prepare the audio for publishing in wordpress.
To the software we need, you install audacity with sudo apt-get install audacity.
If you want to use mp3 as your file format, you'll need the lame library. Get it using sudo apt-get install lame.

Start up audacity. For the main part of the podcast i get my content from a mixer and record it within audacity using the easy to use record button. Use the stop-button to stop recording. To make the podcast more professional I speak an intro to the main part and add some music overlay to get a nicer introduction to the talk. I have already made to mp3 files, one is presenting the speaker and one is a 20 second music file.

Now I import these two from the File menu, and get three layers in audacity. I use the track-coordinater to place the tracks where i want, starting with the music, then after 10 seconds i fade down the rest of the music file and start the introduction file, now after this the main talk is started, and the music is fading to zero during the first 3-4 seconds of the talk. Isn't that great?

All of this i export from the File menu using mp3 128 bits 22500 hertz. I enter in the id3 tag data as i please and I have a nice podcast ready mp3 to publish to the wordpress blog.

The publishing will be covered in the next part of this tutorial.

The Ubuntu Naming Convention

Joshua Henderson writes at knol.google.com: Each Ubuntu release has two names associated with it. One a name (such as "Warty Warthog"), and one a number (such as 4.10).

The name is made up of two words, with the first word always being a verb or noun, and the second always being some type of animal. Ever since the release in June 2006, the names have been released in alphabetical order.

The number associated with the name is a combination of the year and date that it was released. For example, the version with 4.10, was released in October 2004, or 2004.10 (the year, followed by a dot and the number of the month).

Read more about ubuntu at knol.google.com

Use Ubuntu to solve Sudoku puzzles

Slashdot is running a story about solving Sudoku puzzles with the dpkg utility included in all debian based distros, among them of course Ubuntu. You didn't know this about the highly useful program, dpkg, did you?

Here is the slashdot story and here is the python program written by Daniel Burrows.

Ubuntu-based distro out in new version

An Ubuntu-based distro is out in new version, gNewSense 2.1 and can be downloaded here:
http://cdimage.gnewsense.org. gNewSense is a "free as in freedom GNU/Linux distribution, that takes all the non-free blobs out of a rather popular distribution."
This version is built on Ubuntu Hardy and it uses Gnome as default window manager.

Make a linux kiosk of your old laptop

There doesn't have to be the EOL = End Of Life for your old laptop. You could for example give the old computer a new life as a portal for YouTube at a public spot.

If your're a handyman, you could build a dedicated kiosk and install the computer in it, locking it down to browser only and attach a set of speakers to the kiosk and either hook it up with cable or wifi. It could bring joy to anyone bypassing it, for instance at a café for students to watch the latest music videos or at the local nursing home for the users to watch old music videos/films.

Howto: Install Ubuntu linux or a lighter version, Xubuntu and use opera kiosk mode.

No limits for the use of it. Perhaps you could ask a friend you havent seen for a long time to help you build the kiosk and ask your sister or somebody creative enough to style the kiosk with YouTube.com materials at the top.