Incorrect colouring while playing videos on linux with nVidia driver

Recently, I noticed that all videos that I played, whether through mplayer, totem, or vlc, all played very blue.  However, video played in the browser was all fine colourwise.  At first I was inclined to think that this was due to a bug in the video driver.

However, it turns out that there is actually quite a simple fix for it all.  I remember playing around with the video card settings a while back, and I must have forgotten to reset some of them.  The problem was caused by the fact that the hue was turned all the way down.  For some reason, normal graphics weren't affected, only video playback.

Resetting everything to the hardware defaults fixed this problem.

Microsoft Access was unable to create an MDE file

I've just come across a very (un-)informative error in Microsoft Access:

Microsoft Access was unable to create an MDE file

I'm posting this here so that if any one else comes across this error, they will know the very simple fix for it.

The error is caused by a VBA error.  The simple fix is to open up the VBA editor (Alt-F11) and choose Debug->Compile.  This should fail with a compile error, and show you where your error is.  Then you can fix your error, compile, and then save as an MDE file.

Synchronizing an mp3 player

For a while now, I have been looking for a nice, efficient solution to keep my mp3 player synchronized with the library on my PC. There are a number of ways I can do it with brute-force.

Perhaps the simplest way is to wipe the mp3 player clean and then copy everything across. However, it is clear that this is a very in-efficient way to go about things. After some searching (and question asking on superuser), the method I am now using is as follows:

rsync -rlpuv --progress --include "*/" --include "*.mp3" --include "*.ogg" --include "*.wma" --include "*.flac" --exclude "*" ~/Music/ /media/E100/Music

Basically, this copies only the music files from my library to my mp3 player, and ensures that the creation time is set to the current time so that the mp3 player reload the database correctly.

Now I don't have to wait for half an hour for all my files to copy over, and the database on the mp3 player updates much faster as well.

How to fix a corrupted RPM database

When I originally tried out Fedora 7, I experienced lots of problems. One of the biggest was that ACPI didn't work. ACPI is the component that lets you know (among other things) when your laptop is on battery power, plugged in, how much time you have left on your battery, etc. So one time, I was plugged into the network, downloaded half a gigabyte worth of updates, and started updating my system. Halfway through the update, my laptop crashed! Why? Because I had plugged it in but forgot to turn the switch on :( The net result, of course, was that I corrupted lots of files, including my rpm databases. If this ever happens to you, you are probably wondering exactly what I was - what can I do to fix my RPM database without reinstalling my OS?

After some googling, I have found the answer for you. All you need is a bit of command line wizadry, so first of all open up a terminal (you will need root privileges for this). Following this, run the following 3 commands:

• rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db*
• /usr/lib/rpm/db_verify /var/lib/rpm/Packages
• rpm --rebuilddb

This first of all removes your old, corrupted databases. Then it procedes to work out exactly what is installed on your computer, and rebuild your RPM databases with these packages.

Hope this is helpful to someone (note that I haven't tested this with newer version of Fedora, but it should still work just the same).