How to enable the VDPAU Hardware Acceleration in Flash player on Ubuntu

In this guide we will see how to enable the VDPAU hardware acceleration in flash player on Ubuntu and derivatives for any Nvidia, Intel and AMD GPU.
VDPAU (Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix) is the name of a library that allows to assign a part of the workload of decoding and post-processing a video to the GPU; this features can be used even for Flash playback.
In Ubuntu the native support for the VDPAU hardware acceleration is not active by default, but it can ben enabled with the following procedure:

Read more

Check for LCD dead pixels on Linux with LCD Nurse

One of the major problems encountered with LCD monitors is the “dead pixels”: all of a sudden we start to see white or black dots that remain visible regardless of what we are displaying.
Fortunately this kind problem is covered by any major monitor warranty and if we start to notice those dead pixels in time before the warranty is over, we can ask for a RMA. But there is one catch before we can send the monitor to the manufacturer: are we sure that those apparently dead pixels are indeed hardware-ly dead and it is not just a bug in the graphics card drivers or in the operating system itself?

Read more

How to Transfer iPhone iCloud Contacts to Android

You had an iPhone for years and want to switch to Andorid for your next smartphone? I bet that your first concern is how to migrate your data from one device to the other.
The migration may seems a daunting task, but for at least the contacts it can be accomplished easily.
The following guide assumes that you have backed up your Apple iPhone contacts on iCloud and you plan to use your main Google account on your future Android phone.
To export the contacts from Apple iCloud to your Google account:

Read more