Recently I've seen a lot of screencasts in the Planet Ubuntu RSS feed. A screencast is an embeded flash video of your desktop, often used in tutorials instead of screenshots. I wondered if I could make these online flash videos myself; turns out, it's pretty easy! So in this article I will cover how to install the video capturing tool, how to use it, how to convert the video to a flash video (flv) file, and finally how to embed a flash player in your site just like YouTube. Create your own screencasts in 5 easy steps!

If you're like me and you're interested in the stats of your website or blog, you might also want to know how many Diggs all of your articles have received. But that can become quite a pain when you have more and more articles, pages or blog posts. So why not let PHP retrieve the Digg count of your articles so you can use it in graphs or other statistic tools?

It's no secret I like Ubuntu the best. But what strikes me as odd, is that it does not come standard with a good tool to change the display settings. Sure, you can change the Screen Resolution, but what about cloning to another device, extending the desktop to a second screen, changing the driver, or adjusting the refresh rates to enable more resolutions? There currently is no graphical way to do this in GNOME, so for this you had to manually change the X config file, or run a third party tool like nvidia-settings. But now I found a great GTK tool that can do it for you.