Editing PDF

pdftk will do all sorts of batch operations on your PDF files, extracting pages, merging, etc. All the features are on the home page.

Installing Gnocl

Gnocl is a Tcl binding to Gtk which provides access to most of the Gnome components and is an alternative to the regular toolkit called Tk that most Tcl programmers use. I am interested in Gtk (and thus Gnocl) because there exist a DirectFB backend for Gtk applications. However, installing Gnocl means compiling it, which means the installation of the following packages in ubuntu. You will have to install the development versions of these packages (and their dependencies):

• libgtk2
  
• libgnomecanvas2
• libgconf2
• libgnome-vfs
• libgnome2
• libgnomeui
• libpanel-applet2

DCS-5300G

I am trying to use one of these network cameras by d-link under linux. It sounds simple, it is not. The camera is MPEG4 compliant, so you should be able to connect to it via this url. However, I have not been able to make this work via mplayer or totem. mcamip seems to be doing a nice job on paper, but what I really want to do is to hijack the stream, not grab picture after picture and recompute a new stream from these.

Update: A little more research on the problem, and especially after this thread... Well it seems D-link provides a product that is standard on the paper only and very hard to work with from anything else than their software or from a Windows machine (with IE, not with firefox). The problem in the long run is even worse, since there seem to be a number of netcams that use the same type of programming and network interface. Apparently, some D-links are repackaged vivotek cameras.