Download previews from Magnatune.com

It's really very easy. Just 2 steps:

1. Browse the website and when you find an album that you want to download, click to download the .m3u playlist-file (where it says 'Play all tracks...'). You can choose hifi, lofi ogg etc...

2. Now open terminal in the directory where you downloaded the playlist, and type:
wget -i hifi.m3u
(If you downloaded the hifi)

Wget will now automatically download all the urls in that file on to your computer :)

Or...
One can also write a simple script that creates the appropriate folders and downloads the music there, as I did.
Here is my magnadown.sh, that I have saved into /usr/bin for global use:

ARTIST=`cat hifi.m3u | head -2 | tail -1 | cut -d "," -f2 | cut -d "-" -f1`
ALBUM=`cat hifi.m3u | head -2 | tail -1 | cut -d "," -f2 | cut -d "-" -f2`

mkdir -p "/home/artharchist/Music/$ARTIST/$ALBUM"
mv hifi.m3u "/home/artharchist/Music/$ARTIST/$ALBUM"
cd "/home/artharchist/Music/$ARTIST/$ALBUM"
wget -i hifi.m3u

My Desktop 31/7/2010

   Linux Mint 8 Fluxbox running Several Conkys displaying:
- Application shortcuts/running state
- Facebook, Twitter & identi.ca feeds
- Time
- Weather
- Todo list of Gnote
- Torrents (if running)
- Mail
- Google calendar
- Messenger buddies online(if running)

If music player is running shortcuts are replaced with Song information, Last.fm recently played, Cover art (if found) and artist image (if found)

My Desktop 29/06/2010

Fluxbox with Conky & stalonetray:

 

Firefox with stylish:

Doing automatic backups

If you have a synchronizing service like Dropbox or Ubuntu One installed (I have both), it's fairly easy to set up automatic backups that can be later downloaded from the net if something wicked happens to your computer.

The solution is to set up scheduled Cron jobs that run automatically on selected times, such as:

50 12 * * * tar -czf /home/m/Dropbox/bup/Workshop.tar.gz /home/m/Workshop/

This command will create a compressed archive into under the 'Dropbox' folder named 'Workshop.tar.gz' from the contents of the folder 'Workshop' every day at 12:50. Naturally since the newly created archive is in the Dropbox folder, it will be uploaded to the Dropbox online storage seamlessly.

Scheduling syntax is as follows:

1. * Minutes (0-59)
2. * Hours (0-23)
3. * Day of month (0-31)
4. * Month (1-12)
5. * Day of week (0-6)

So as an example to kill the Firefox every monday at midnight (So you won't surf all night xD):

0 0 * * 1 killall firefox

To add or edit the scheduled jobs type in terminal:

crontab -e

Or to edit jobs via graphical interface install the package 'gnome-schedule':

Note! Even with the GUI, you still need to know the commands you want to run :P

There are of course myriad backup applications available for Linux, which are handy if all you want to do is to backup folders. For most benefit you can use them too with Dropbox or Ubuntu One, or simply set them to upload backups to a FTP server.

Some simple but good ones:

Déjà Dup

http://freshmeat.net/projects/deja-dup

Back In Time (has KDE & Gnome versions available)

http://backintime.le-web.org/

LOL! Nice Try xD

I was happily surfing with my Google Chrome running on Linux Mint, when I ran into this website:

Trouble ahead :(

Oh no!!11! I haz malware and stuff :O Even 'My Documents' folder had evil code in it...But I still haven't found where do I have this 'My Documents' folder x)

After the 'Scan' the site offered an .exe file to run on my computer to fix all this...hmmm xD

Spring time: Smells like Mint spirit

I have to confess that I have always liked Fluxbox - the simple and lightweight window manager. Ironically it just always felt too complicated to do any of the daily stuff without proper desktop environment, like Gnome or KDE.

However since (K)Ubuntu lucid didn't work for me any more after beta 1 (I lost sound and computer froze randomly), I decided to try something new. So I downloaded Linux Mint 8: Helena, And not the default Gnome version, but the Fluxbox Community Edition. Maybe it's just the spring time but I fell in love with it.

The boot time from boot loader to desktop is around 12-15 seconds, and after the system is up, memory usage is _only_ about 80mb(!). I could in fact have no swap partition at all since memory usage has never gone over half of my 1gb, no matter how many apps I have opened. Mind you since the Fluxbox CE is aimed for older and slower computers it comes with a selection of lightweight apps.

In example: Sylpheed e-mail client and Thunar for file managing.

All the default apps are not only quick and light, but I also actually like using them. The only exception was the default audio player Decibel, which I quickly replaced with Audacious:

I also don't really need OpenOffice package so I removed that too and installed just Abiword, incase I need to open/write .doc files. So far the whole system and all the applications take _only_ 2,3gb(!) of disk space ;)

File manager Thunar and picture viewer GPicView:

The Mint's configuration center is quite straight forward, and comes with numerous options that make configuring Fluxbox easier:


Since I also found out that there is a package for making Dropbox work with Thunar, I don't really miss anything from Gnome or KDE. I will quite happily live with only a Window Manager instead of full featured Desktop Environment :)

Post Edit:

The MintInstall - App installer is simple, pretty and functional. You can browse apps by category and arrange them by user rating, score or date. Also you can read the ratings from users and see a screenshot of the application. By clicking the screenshot you get a bigger version. Nice!

KDE 4.4 power!

A Short while ago I updated my operating system to the beta version of upcoming Kubuntu 10.04.

Along with amazingly fast boot time and other cool stuff, 10.04 comes with the latest version of KDE, the desktop environment. KDE 4.4 has numerous new features, like tabbing any windows together and also some new desktop modes, or 'activities'. New modes are called 'Search and launch containment' and 'Newspaper activity'. These are probably aimed more for netbook use, but are very handy indeed on regular desktop computer too.

The Search and Launch-mode transforms your whole desktop into application menu with a bar on top for your favourite apps. The browsing of apps/files is animated and intuitive, and of course beautiful ;) Naturally there is also an input field for queries, incase one needs to find application, file or bookmark fast.

On netbook mode you get a handy activity switcher on the panel by default.

Screenshot of the Search and launch mode:

Browsing Konqueror bookmarks, click and open  :)

The Newspaper activity is close to the basic desktop-mode, except if the widgets need more space than you have space on your desktop, the desktop becomes scrollable.

Browsing files with 'folder view'-widget on the Newspaper-mode:

Naturally the Konqueror's search engine keywords work in the query field. To open a Flickr search for 'kde' i just type 'fli kde' in the field:

Nepomuk, the semantic desktop thingy has also matured a lot.  For an example to find any file on my driver with rating above 7, I just type 'rating>7' in the find field of the file browser (or query field on the desktop):

Searching the drive for files tagged with 'tuska':

Screenshot of Konqueror web browser and Kate text editor tabbed together. Extremely handy for editing web pages :)

In short, Kubuntu 10.04 with KDE 4.4 equals my best computer using experience ever! :D