Suovainaja's tech swamp

Download previews from Magnatune.com

2010-08-02T06:03:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-31T11:36:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-29T04:01:00.000-07:00

Fluxbox with Conky & stalonetray:

Firefox with stylish:

Doing automatic backups

2010-05-25T03:03:00.000-07:00

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:

* Minutes (0-59)
* Hours (0-23)
* Day of month (0-31)
* Month (1-12)
* 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

2010-05-06T00:34:00.001-07:00

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

2010-04-27T02:29:00.001-07:00

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!

2010-03-25T07:50:00.001-07:00

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

HTML 5 sweetness

2009-09-22T03:44:00.000-07:00

I've been lately learning about new HTML 5 features and thought i'll demonstrate few of the nice ones. Of course the support in for HTML 5 in different browsers still differs.

Contenteditable

First i'll demonstrate new attribute contenteditable. In short it makes content of any text area of a page editable by user.

Syntax example:
<p contenteditable="true">Write something here</p>

Real time example:

If your browser supports it, this text is editable

Real life example:
myNOTE

...a simple example that I made, where you can edit the content of a section and save it with single click. Also I've used the new tags of HTML 5, such as article, header, section, code, instead of creating many divs with different IDs.

Drag operations

There are several drag-related new event calls in HTML 5:

ondrag
ondragend
ondragenter
ondragleave
ondragover
ondragstart
ondrop

Check live example. Try dragging and dropping the blue circle on the yellow one. The yellow circle should turn green and the blue one disappear. This only worked for me with Firefox 3.5

Required

Makes controlling mandatory input fields in forms MUCH easier! Just add attribute required inside the input tag. If browser supports this feature, it checks BEFORE sending the form that the required fields are filled.

Syntax:

Check the live example. Only worked on Opera 10 for me.

Canvas

This should work in most new browsers already. It makes possible to draw within HTML, usually via Javascript.

In this live example, move cursors over the canvas area and see the real time changes.

My Desktop 20/8/2009

2009-08-20T03:52:00.000-07:00

Desktop has 3 plasmoids now. Analog Clock, Lock/Log Out, and Folder View plasmoid showing 'xprss' folder (short for express). That is where I download urgent stuff that I intend to access soon, instead of 'Dowloads' folder where I usually download stuff like torrented movies etc.

I try to survive with 2 desktops only so no cube...only 2 sides.

My pimped Firefox (Swiftfox to be exact) opens in modified about:blank page now.

Googling...

Foxtabs...

Pimping my Fox

2009-08-04T00:56:00.000-07:00

So here is my normal desktop:

And here with browser opened with default home page, Google:

Browsing results:

I think its pretty cool :D! How did I do this? Well it took several (but quite simple) steps using some Firefox addons and some KDE4 settings.

First of all, I never use buttons for browsing, but rather mouse gestures enabled by Firegestures addon, so I dont need the default toolbar for anything really. Only thing I sometimes need is the address bar. So I moved the address bar to the menu bar and got rid of all the other bars. Next I installed the Hide Menubar to hide the menu bar when I dont need it (easily toggled by pressing ALT). Also I have Tiny Menu addon for converting the monstrous menu into a tidy little button since
I rarely use menu options either.

Here I have menubar with address bar visible by pressing ALT:

I can access my most relevant sites fast and easily without address bar or bookmarks menu just by pressing CTRL+Space and the the corresponding shortcut key. Thanks to Site Launcher addon.

To further maximize the screen space for the actual page instead of the browser, I used KDE's Special window settings -option to make rules for Firefox window:

I set the window size to be forced into certain size and vertically maximized. Also forced the window to be placed in center of the screen when opened:

The next step was to force the window to be opened without borders. That means no window decorations or title bar, just the actual content of the window will be shown.

Next relevant addon is User Styles. It enables using custom CSS styles on certain, or optionally on all pages. Several ready, professional looking styles are available with single click install from userstyles.org webpage. I never use scrollbars so I got a Userstyle to get rid of them on all pages. Mouse wheel is quite enough for scrolling. Also I downloaded a Userstyle to make Google dark and gray so that it fits my otherwise dark desktop theme perfectly.

The User Styles tab on Addons window:

The cunning plan!
Since I know what size my browser window is and where in the screen it is always located, I cropped exactly same size and position from the original wallpaper in GIMP, then darkened and blurred it a little and saved as a new file, ffbg.jpg

I then edited the Dark Gray Theme-User style for Google. I defined the background as the ffbg.jpg, which had uploaded to a web location, and defined the background as fixed:

By setting the inactive windows to be partially transparent in KDE's Desktop Effects -dialog, you get even nicer look for the desktop. Only the active window will be shown with full opacity.

Here no window is active:

Bonus pimp!
Final step was to pimp some addons that have optional background setting, such as FoxTab (3D tab previewer/switcher) and Cooliris (3D image browsing for image searches like Flickr and Google images etc.).

FoxTab:

Cooliris:

Woohoo ;D!!!!111!!1

Pure content without the browser hassle or taking up all the screen with full screen mode looks so much nicer and cleaner. I just love it! Besides leaving part of desktop visible lets me quickly use mousewheel to scroll through the desktops.

Silly me

2009-05-30T01:07:00.000-07:00

Just realized this morning that I could also of course bind several actions for the same hotkey. So here's my 'basic 3' bind that opens firefox, kopete and amarok by pressing just one keyboard shortcut.

Important!

2009-05-29T08:56:00.000-07:00

Nepomuk & Strigi in KDE

2009-05-23T00:32:00.000-07:00

Nepomuk is a semantic desktop. Basically meaning that after you enable it you are able to rate, comment and tag any file. This comes especially handy when you have large collection of photos scattered in different folders, or when you want to get all the files of a project no matter where they are located on your harddrive.

Strigi is more traditional file indexer. It indexes all the files on your harddrive or specified location so that you can do a search for them based on file name or content.

To enable both Nepomuk and Strigi, go to System Settings > Advanced > Desktop search:

It takes a while for strigi to finish the indexing but after that it records the changes on the fly.

Here's an example of Nepomuk usage:
I press Alt+F2 and type a 'minä', which is a tag I have assigned to a number of files. In finnish it means 'me'.

The search results open in a file manager:
All these files are actually in different folders so this is very handy indeed. You can see that I have rated, commented and tagged the selected file.

You could for example fetch all the photos of roses in a matter of a second from your harddrive as long as you have tagged them with 'rose'. Doesen't matter what the file name is or where the files are located. In a nutshell...Nepomuk rules :D!

Now here is an example for Strigi usage:
I press Alt+F2 and type 'passion' and I get files that contain 'passion' in their name or metadata.

Or if I forget my Stumbleupon password I just type 'stumble' and Strigi fetches the text file containing my password for me. Awesomeness! :)

Note. There is a slight problem in Kubuntu 9.04 which means the Nepomuk and Strigi are trying to use wrong backend-engine as default. To fix this I had to install OpenJDK -Java version and create a symlink for the Java-file that Nepomuk searches from a wrong place.

Here is the symlink I had to create because Nepomuk tries to find file 'libjvm.so' from folder '/usr/lib' but it's actually located elsewhere:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/lib/i386/server/libjvm.so /usr/lib/libjvm.so

This might only apply to Kubuntu but could help on other distros too since Nepomuk is farely new thing and as such not necessarily yet configured properly by default.

After adding symlink logout and login again for changes to take effect.

PS. Thanks to amazing power of Alt+F2 and KDE's configurable shortcut keys I'm still very content of having only system tray on my desktop :) Simple is beautiful.

To define your own keyboard shortcuts, go to System Settings > Input Actions.
Here you can see that I have defined Firefox to start with Control+Alt+F.

Two great GIMP features

2009-04-27T05:17:00.001-07:00

So here is the original 492x426 image:

Let's say we want to decrease the image width by 100 pixels but don't want to crop out any imporant elements from it. Also we want to simplify the wall by removing the plant growth and the hole on it.

Step 1: Select the plant with rectangle select tool:

Step 2: Go to Filters > Enhance > Smart remove selection. Poof! the plant is gone.

Step 3: Select the hole on the wall:

Step 4: Again go to Filters > Enhance > Smart remove selection, and the wall is fixed :)

Step 5: Create a new layer for specifying the areas that are important to keep. On the new layer fill with color these areas.

Step 6: Go to Layer > Liquid rescale. Define the new desired width and height. Also define the layer created in step 5 to be the 'preserve features' layer.

Final image :)

Note. Atleast on Ubuntu/Debian based systems you need to install packges gimp-plugin-registry and gimp-resynthesizer to have these features.

Ajax diagram

2009-04-19T05:00:00.000-07:00

This is a simple diagram of Ajax function. This example as such is not very practical but should give you an idea of what Ajax means and how it works if you are not familiar with it. Basically Ajax means getting new content from the server and displaying it on the web page without reloading the whole page. It's not a language but a practical combination of Javascript(brower executed code) and PHP(server side code).

In this example the response data is stored in an array in the PHP page, which obviously doesent make sense since it could have been written as an array in the HTML page using javascript. If the response is to be taken from database or some other more dynamic source, the server/PHP -side becomes a necessity. The basic functionality of Ajax however remains the same just the same.

Secure anonymous surfing

2009-04-14T04:39:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you might want to surf anonymously for various reasons...luckily this is very easy to achieve. First you need to install a web proxy server on your machine, such as Privoxy. Privoxy is available on any platform. On Ubuntu just install it from the repositories and add the following line as sudo to the file /etc/privoxy/config :

forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 .

(With the dot)

After reboot change your browsers network settings to use localhost:8118 for internet connection and your done! :)

The connection might be slower when using proxy but atleast for Firefox there are several addons for enabling/disabling proxy by a single click of a button. One of these is QuickProxy.

To check privoxy is actually working you can for an example visit http://www.ip-adress.com

Without Privoxy:

With Privoxy:

For an extra layer of security there is also Tor which works nicely with Privoxy. For a simple explanation about how Tor works, see this video.

On Ubuntu Tor can also be simply installed from repos (as always :) and Firefox has addons for switching Tor use on/off with a single click. See Torbutton.

And people who are too lazy to install stuff to surf anonymously...just use Yauba :) It's a nice search engine and has 'Visit anonymously' option for the search results.

My current *fox addons

2009-03-23T08:35:00.000-07:00

Some useful and handy *fox addons I currently use...

Since a short explanation of each addon is already displayed on the addons list, I just took a screenshot :) Click for full size image.

And if you are using Linux you might want to consider changing Firefox to Swiftfox or Swiftweasel to get the very best performance for browsing. They are both speed optimized versions of Firefox with specific packages for different sets of OS and processors. As an example if you have 64-bit AMD processor but use 32-bit OS...They have an installation package compiled just for that combination. I personally currently use Swiftfox.

Some nice little helpful KDE apps

2009-03-19T05:07:00.001-07:00

KRuler
As the name says its a ruler for your screen. Handy for measuring stuff when developing web sites etc.

KColoredit
Nice handy app for creating color palettes for web sites for an example. You start with any color and KColoredit can suggest other colors that'll match it nicely based on various algorithms. You can then save colors as palette file so you can load them later. Also copying color values to clipboard as RGB, HSV or HTML is simple as clicking on button.

Kompare
Easily compare and see differences in files. You can also compare whole folders which is handy when you need to see the differences between a web site on a server and a backup copy on your local machine. Another nice feature is adding/removing differences between files with a single click.

KJots
Note taking application par excellence. Easily organize your notes + other as books and pages. No need to save/load. Just open the program, make the changes or copy stuff and close the program. You can also export the books as book-files or as HTML so you can see the notes even when youre not on your own computer.

KFileReplace
Easily batch replace pieces of text.

FileLight
Want to see where your disk space has gone? FileLight creates a visual map of the drive/folder.

Elisa, The Open Media Center

2009-03-13T13:29:00.000-07:00

One of the marvelous apps that just keeps getting better and better is Elisa. Its a Media Center application that lets you make use of your local media library(images, video, music) and some internet resources in a very nice and fancy way. One of the nice things is that you can easily control it with both mouse and keyboard. In fact it claims to support touch screen too but I havent got the proper equipment to test that.

Elisa is available for Linux and Windows. But the Windows version is little behind the Linux version. You can download Elisa from their homepage.

Here is the start menu where you choose media type or configuration of Elisa or it's plugins. Not much configuration was needed since it had automatically added Video, Music and Pictures folders from my home folder as media sources. Nice :)

Let's take a look at browsing through images first...
Besides your own local photos and other pictures you can browse images from Flickr or deviantART.

Options for searching Flickr...

Browsing Last 7 days interesting...

Browsing while viewing...

Then the movie section...

Automatic thumbnail creation is a nice feature.

Watching Funny Games...
Elisa also lets you choose subtitles language and audio track if more than 1 available.

Some default internet resources...
more available by getting and installing new plugins (which you can do inside Elisa :) BTW Elisa also keeps the plugins updated so you'll always have latest versions.

Browsing TED talks while one is already playing in the background...
A nice feature of Elisa is that it keeps playing the files(movie or music or slide show etc...) even when you want to browse your media library. So you can listen to music while browsing Flicr etc :)

Search screen for Youtube videos...

And the results...

Then the Music section...
By default there are 2 very content rich resources available: Shoutcast and Yes.fm

Browsing Yes.fm categories...

Playing a song from Yes.fm with nice visualizations. Elisa makes the perfect jukebox for parties when ran in full screen. It's easy and intuitive to use and pretty as hell :)

Many options are available for browsing your local music files...

Browsing albums...Cover art is automatically fetched from internet :)
There are 3 browsing modes: list, cover flow(in picture below), and thumbnails. The best mode for albums is in my opinion the last of them.

My Desktop 13/3/2009

2009-03-13T09:35:00.000-07:00

Going simpler and simpler... now with only tray

My Desktop 6/3/2009

2009-03-06T02:10:00.000-08:00

Simple can be so beautiful....

I Wish I had a camera now...

2009-03-05T06:24:00.001-08:00

Every once in a while you run into a program that really impresses you. Recently an app like that for me was Digikam, the software for managing your digital camera and photos. Naturally you can import your photos from camera and do all the regular stuff with it. But I want to point out some highlights of this program that really makes me want to own a camera just so that I could take a proper advantage of these awesome features...

You can browser images easily by date it was created...

You can create and assign tags for images so you can find specific kind of images later on really fast and easy...

Digikam has duplicate search that works great because it does not only find exact duplicates but also highly similar ones... find the difference in the two images below...

Maybe the most impressive feature is a search by drawing a sketch...Here I painted some green and blue to find summer landscape images from my image database...How COOL is that?!?!! :D

If you like to share your photos with rest of the world, Digikam makes also uploading images a snap...

Upload dialog for PicasaWeb...

Seriously....I sometimes open this program just to admire and use its great features....maybe I should buy a camera... :)

Me...

2009-02-17T00:47:00.000-08:00

...in a demonstration against Lex Nokia 5th of february. Photo from digitoday

My Desktop 28/1/2009

2009-01-28T07:52:00.001-08:00

Kudos to the KDE group. KDE 4.2 Final was released and it came even with few new wallpapers. The one I'm using now is called Plasmalicious, and with Glassified -plasma theme it absolutely rocks! :D

Peeeerdy!

Why *nix for web developer?

2009-01-21T02:31:00.001-08:00

Because Unix, Linux and BSD's (Mac OS X is built on FreeBSD) have transparent networking built right into them. What that means? Well it means you can use files from on other computers via network just as they were on your local computer. There just isn't any difference really. The system basically doesen't care.

Here I have opened a FTP location in my file browser and clicked to open PHP file in default text editor. I can just make the changes and save normally, and the job is done. The new version is saved right where it was opened from. No boring file transferring in between. And yes the basic text editor that came with system knows about 50 scripting/coding languages so no additional web developement software needed either.

Or I can just open, say, an image file in any graphics related program just as the files were in my local folder.

Do the changes in GIMP and just save normally. The freshly saved version is now in internet :)

I just make some local backup copies nowdays. Mostly I just edit the files of the web site right on the server. Here is a handy way of making local copy of server content in KDE 4.x:

1) Make/Open a folder in file manager you want to save the backup in

2) Press F4 to open terminal view

3) type lftp

4) enter networkaddress -u username (like www.domain.com -u admin)

5) enter password if needed

6) type mirror

7) Done :D

Extra tip: To sync a server folder to match local folder, type mirror -R

Noobs in a nutshell

2009-01-10T07:08:00.000-08:00

Made this as a little sum up of people's usual logic.

3 ways to live without office suite

2009-01-09T06:13:00.001-08:00

You know how some people insist doing everything in microsoft word? Even when there is absolutely no reason they could not just make a simple basic text file. To open the .doc format one usually uses ms office or Openoffice. Personally I don't ever need to format text nor do I need spreadsheets or other office features.

So what to do when people insist on sending you text as .doc file and you don't want to waste half a gigabyte of your harddrive for office bloatware, or wait for a half a minute for the word processor to start? All the options presented here are equally available for both Linux and windows users.

Option 1: Use Abiword

Abiword is a fairly lightweight open source word processor. It understands the usual formats and can be extended by adding plugins as needed. For more information and downloads, go here or install from your distro's repositories.

Option 2: Use Antiword

Antiword is a command line program to display contents of a .doc file as plain text.

Basic usage: antiword name.doc

To save the output as text file simply: Antiword name.doc > name.txt

Or to save all the docs in a single text file: Antiword *.doc > all.txt

Antiword is available for just about any platform and can be obtained from here or from your distro's repositories.

Option 3: Use Zamzar.com

Zamzar.com is a great web site for converting the most common image,movie,text and packaging formats in another. Like .rar > .zip, .mov > .mpeg, tiff > png, or .doc to odt. No registration needed :) Just select file(s), select in what format you want them to be converted, insert your e-mail and click 'convert'.

Some Amarok 2 highlights

2009-01-08T01:51:00.000-08:00

Sure, all the music player apps have podcasts, last.fm integration, automated cover fetching and so on these days (at least linux apps ;). But here are some nice features of latest Amarok hard to find in it's rivals.

Screenshot 1: A lot of internet resources at your service:

Screenshot 2: Easily listen just the kind of music you want from last.fm.

Screenshot 3: Or listen to classic books as audio version from librivox. Just type 'frankenstein' in search bar and add to playlist :)

Screenshot 4: Listen to whole albums from magnatune. Browse easily by genre.

Screenshot 5: The middle part of the player contains 4 pages which can be modified to have just the widgets you need. You can even zoom out and look at them all at once:

Screenshot 6: 'Now playing' and 'lyrics' widgets on page 1.

Screenshot 7: Wikipedia widget on page 3. Great when you listen music from internet and have no prior knowledge about artist.

Screenshot 8: 'Albums' widget on page 2. Easily browse and add songs from the currently playing artist to the playlist. If there are no albums from the artist in your local library, it displays recently added albums.

StumbleUpon improves

2009-01-05T04:34:00.000-08:00

Yay! The wonderful StumbleUpon now works without the browser-plugin, available only for Firefox and the one I won't mention. You can now stumble by logging in to stumbleupon website and you get a similar toolbar with any browser. So I can now finally stumble with Konqueror which opens up 10 times faster than my Firefox with it's about 20 add-ons. So go ahead non-Firefox users and sing up for hundreds of wasted hours with StumbleUpon.

Edit: You can stumble right from the stumbleupon main page without logging in. But then it naturally does not take your interests into account.

4 must have ubuntu apps now obsolete

2009-01-02T05:53:00.000-08:00

I just realized today how much I needed to modify Gnome when I was still using it as my desktop environment. And that with all these changes I was basically making it KDE 4 :)

Gnome-Do

The best known quick launcher for Gnome desktop. I always installed this first after doing fresh Ubuntu install. I really felt handicapped without it. As I would feel without KDE's excellent quick launcher.

Gnome-Do:

KDE's Quick launcher:

Gnome-main-menu

Another app I used to love was the alternative menu for Gnome. I only use like 2-5 different programs per day, so having favourites coming up first when opening menu is a huge advantage.

Gnome-main-menu:

KDE's default menu:

Screenlets

Having important information right on desktop is useful. And every operating system has somekind of a widget system these days. My choise for gnome was Screenlets, which did not come enabled with system but had to be installed.

Screenlets:

KDE's native widgets:

Compiz

And finally the classic, Compiz. Compiz makes window managing much more easy, fun & eye-candish. Now also obsolete since KDE can natively handle it all without third party apps like compiz.

Compiz in cube, scale & expo modes:

KDE's cube, scale & expo mode:

Some mogrify examples

2008-12-31T04:47:00.000-08:00

For the last post of this year I wanted to do a little tutorial for mogrify, the command line image editing program. I picked up 3 images of Helsinki from the internet for this tutorial but naturally command line editing really makes sense when you have to modify like 66-666 images from your digital camera for example.

Note that these are just brief examples. For more complete manual go here:
http://www.imagemagick.org/www/command-line-options.html

Resize images

At first I resized all the images to fit 150 pixel height while keeping aspect ratio, so that they fit nicely in a row though I had both vertical and horizontal pictures. I only needed to define the wanted Y -size since X did not matter.

mogrify -resize x150 *

Add border to images

mogrify -bordercolor white -border 2 *

color specification for -bordercolor can be done by giving color name, hexadecimal, or rgb value. -border command defines pixel width of the border.

Colorize

With -colorize you can modify strength of channels in r,g,b.

mogrify -colorize 0,0,50 *

Define number of colors

To change images to 8 colors only...

mogrify -colors 8 *

Tag images with text

mogrify -fill 'white' -gravity SouthEast -draw 'text 5,5 "Helsinki"' *

Define the color of the text with -fill option (name,hex,rgb). The -gravity defines the anchor from where the position is measured. default is upper left corner, NorthWest. 5,5 here are the X and Y distance from the anchor point, lower right corner (SouthEast).

Frame the images

After the -frame option set values for width x height + outerbevel + innerbevel. The colour of the frame is set with -mattecolor.

mogrify -mattecolor 'brown' -frame 6x8+1+1 *

Adjust lightness, saturation and hue

Values are given as percentage of original values. So to keep lightness and hue untouched, while reducing saturation to half:

mogrify -modulate 100,50,100 *

Black & white

Not especially usefull as such, but might make a nice effect for thumbnails for example.

mogrify -monochrome *

Good old times

The color effect equivalent to lens flare, the Sepia tone!

mogrify -sepia-tone 80% *

Sigmoidal-contrast

The Sigmoidal contrast does not saturate highlights or shadows like normal contrast. Original images below for easier comparison.

mogrify -sigmoidal-contrast 5 *

Sketch

Play with the value untill the result pleases you.

mogrify -sketch 8 *

Tint

Tint images with specific color. Define color with -fill (name,hex,rgb). Value of -tint is given as percentage.

mogrify -fill 'blue' -tint 25 *

Tint works perhaps best on grayscale images. To make image first grayscale, use the -modulate option (brightness,saturation,hue):

mogrify -modulate 100,0,100 *

Then add the tint:

mogrify -fill 'blue' -tint 25 *

Vignette

Again, play with the value. I don't know what it does ;) Added here to the tinted images above.

mogrify -vignette 8 *

Charcoal

This may be nice for some purposes.

mogrify -charcoal 50 *

...Oh and great year 2009 for everyone :D!

I Can Has Alias?

2008-12-29T06:41:00.000-08:00

Aliases are words that you can define to substitute specific commands in terminal. Like this:

alias home='ls ~'

Now whenever you type 'home' in terminal it will list the contents of your home folder no matter in what folder you are right then.

Or:

alias backup ='cp -r /var/www ~/Dropbox/www'

Now I can copy the contents of my local web server to my Dropbox folder, which of course will automatically sync them to net, just by typing 'backup' in terminal

Also heard a fun tip from the Linux Outlaws -podcast:

alias icanhas='sudo aptitude install'

So to install, lets say Opera, I just type 'icanhas opera' :D:D:D

You can define aliases in terminal, but they will be lost once you reboot your machine. To make aliases permanent add the alias commands to .bashrc -file in your home folder with text editor. Or just echo them into the file in terminal: echo "alias something='blah blah'" >> ~/.bashrc

KDE 4.2 Preview

2008-12-29T04:21:00.000-08:00

I updated my KDE 4.1.3 which comes with Kubuntu 8.10 to a Beta 2 release of KDE 4.2. So far it looks very very promising even though some bugs of course still exist since it's beta.

The KDE can now handle natively a lot of stuff that you needed to install Compiz for before. Such as Cover switch, Expo mode and of course the classic Cube:

The notifications and system processes such as file copying or moving have been nicely unified to follow the same kind of dialog, which appears above system tray. There can be multiple notifications and dialogs at the same time. Each is shown only briefly though but by clicking the small computer icon you can make all the on going processes reappear.

The Quicklauncher has gained few nice features as well, such as:

Unit transform:

Typing recent brings up all the files that are marked as recently modified. Nice! :D

Calculation:

The KDE PIM(Personal Information Manager) suite's mail has nice new inbox view with clearly separated arrival dates.

Edit: Also KPatience has received some love.

When you start the app you get nice visual dialog of available games

With solver enabled you get a message in status bar telling in realtime if the game is still winnable.

To try out the beta version of 4.2 just add this to your software sources in package manager and then do upgrade:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-experimental/ubuntu intrepid main

Yule-tide spirit

2008-12-24T14:00:00.001-08:00

Just a little nice detail I noticed... The VLC Player was having a Xmas :)
These are the kind of nice little things that most programs don't have, yet they make you feel good.

What did I learn today?

2008-12-20T05:04:00.000-08:00

Well I learned the power of sed-command, which is used for replacing text. I needed to change the name of the mysql-database in various PHP-files. This was because the server did not allow the kind of name for database I had used locally on my own computer. At first I wanted to see in how many files the name to be changed is mentioned so in terminal window I typed:

grep database-name php/*

Which displayed the lines in all the files in php folder that contained the name. Then I thought there must be also easy way to change the lines without opening the files text editor and running replace for each. So after quickish search in the internet I found my solution: sed.

sed -i 's/oldname/newname/' *

Aaaaahhh the magick of command line!! :D The -i tells sed to edit the files instead of just showing them with the changes and the s stands for substitute. * of course means all the files.

I also accidentally discovered that these great tools and many others are also available for windows here

Experimental PR

2008-11-23T05:30:00.000-08:00

I uploaded my graduation work from 2005 (or 2004, not sure ;) as a torrent.

It is a DVD that has 3 short animations in it (plus 4 hidden ones). The interface of the DVD is not usual text-menu-stuff, but rather you control an avatar character in a movie theater environment.

Here are some screenshots from animations

If you don't want to download the DVD you can still watch the animations here

Test: A binary clock

2008-11-21T05:40:00.000-08:00

I made a simple binary clock with Javascript

See the code here

Sweet ass nature

2008-11-17T11:19:00.000-08:00

Screenshot from a web site :D

KLog

2008-11-12T05:53:00.000-08:00

I Made a whole new time tracking application with a single bash script that uses kdialog to render the GUI elements. This is a bit simpler the the previous PyLog app in a sense that it lets you only have one log. But for me for an example that is enough.

Main menu:

Entering a new task:

Tracking:

Showing the log:

Exit:

-> Download the archive from here.
-> Extract the klog-folder from the archive to yourhomefolder/bin
-> Make sure the klog.sh is marked as executable
-> Click klog.sh to run :)

-> Be sure to go through the configuration options before logging

Here is the plain script for viewing/modifying

Edit:
- Added klog.png in archive for prettier menu entry
- If you make an menu entry for KLog, be sure to set the correct working directory

PyLog

2008-11-11T09:32:00.001-08:00

I started missing the Gnome's Hamster -time tracking application. Instead of finding new one for KDE I decided to make my own to refresh my Python skills a bit. I tried to make it as simple as possible although I may be adding more features later.

What this program does is that it let's you track the time spent for whatever task you want to track, like blogging. It still let's you separate tasks by allowing to keep multiple logs if you need to.

The program only requires basic Python installation to run

Here is the main menu:

Tracking time:

Generated log file:

Download it from here. Code is free for anyone to edit or use.

Dropbox for KDE 4

2008-11-07T02:56:00.001-08:00

I accidentally ran into this great tutorial for installing Dropbox without having Gnome or Nautilus. Officially Dropbox only supports Gnome's Nautilus file manager but as it turns out, installing it in KDE is almost just as easy :)

Adding K to Ubuntu: First days

2008-11-06T08:36:00.000-08:00

The new Ubuntu 8.10 was release about a week ago and so was it's derivative distro, Kubuntu, wich comes with KDE as default desktop instead of Gnome. I decided to give the new KDE 4 branch a one more chance. I have tried KDE 4.x before but it has always been more annoying than usefull to me. Things have changed thou as Kubuntu's integration of KDE 4.1 and Ubuntu 8.10 is pretty much amazing :)

So I downloaded the brand new ISO image and burned it to an empty disc and booted the machine. As usual with live-cds the operating system loaded from CD to the memory and since all was working well, I decided to install it by clicking the 'Install'-icon on the desktop.

Here is the default desktop right after installation:

The desktop widgets in KDE 4 are called plasmoids, Some very useful, some not.

So far after two days of intensive use the plus sides of KDE4 have been:

It's loads faster than Gnome, even with Compiz
KDE based applications like Kmail, Konqueror, KWord, Krita load in a snap compared to their heavier counterparts like Thunderbird, Firefox, OpenOffice and Gimp. Basically any KDE based program opens in a second or so.
The Dolphin file manager is so far the best file manager I have used
Most default programs that come with Kubuntu win their counterparts in Ubuntu hands down
Really nice integration with kde-look.org. You can install almost anything straigh from the web site like: wallpapers, widgets, even bootscreens.

So here are some screenshots of usage of KDE 4...

The Alt+F2 quick launcher offers nothing new to the field of quick launchers but looks very nice (and works too)

Dolphin file manager. Favourite features so far: Terminal in folder with F4, Ability to select files by hovering over them and clickin on the green plus-symbol.

FTP is no problem to Dolphin either:

Nice 'Quick acces'-plasmoid for fast browsing, opening and so on...

Adding & installing new plasmoids is easy:

Some application highlights...

Handy feature in kopete, the instant messenger; It can automatically show the linked images right in the chat window :D Goodbye to opening browser to check the link.

KTorrent has torrent search built right into it, how very handy indeed :)

Installing Compiz on Kubuntu was also a very easy once I found out how. I just needed to install one package that provided Compiz configuration panel for KDE and the rest was done automatically from that panel with once click. It downloaded, installed and configured Compiz by itself, which is nice since I use some Compiz plugins like ADD, window tabbing and Expo quite frequently.

Downsides so far...

Some bits of KDE seem to be still a bit unstable.
The new Amarok 2 Beta is VERY unstable, use Amarok 1.4 or something else.
It promises to be a very nice player indeed thou once it's ready for some serious use. New features like improved last.fm integration and playing of video podcasts keep me drooling until it's out of beta stage.
The Adept package manager is way worse than Ubuntu's Synaptic for finding stuff. Installation on the other hand is many times faster. I use mostly Aptitude from the command line now to install software. As said the speed difference is remarkable.
Dont enable Nepomuk, the semantic desktop. It makes Dolphin cry blood. I don't frankly even know what Nepomuk is but it sounded nice and I enabled it. Result: Dolphin runs 3-13 times slower. So better wait until it's fixed.

So here is my desktop as I post this blog: Not much change since default install, haven't had need to modify it :)

Edit: The KDE map application Marble even knows my favourite bar :D

My Desktop 30/10/2008: Pimp it up!

2008-10-30T08:06:00.000-07:00

I Found a great dark/golden theme from gnome-look.org called Gold Slickness.

Naturally changed for more fitting wallpaper and downloaded a nice new icon theme called Allblack.

I further pimped it by changing the window shadows from black to golden yellow.

Even a simple thing like sound mixer looks amazing now :D

Also changed the ground reflection to golden as well in cube & expo mode :)

Various coolness

2008-10-24T03:47:00.000-07:00

This post is just promotion for some nice graphics stuff found @ gnome-look.org

First some nice wallpapers...

Planet Earth - Inversed

Alternative Ibex wallpaper: Earthen Ibex

And now for something completely different...

Login screens!

Intrepid Ibex GDM: Click to download

Wooden: click to download

And finally...

Some appealing desktop-themes to make your applications look nice...

BlackWhite: Click to download

Ubuntu Dust: Click to download

I currently the following combination...
Wallpaper: Plane Earth - Inversed
Login screen: Wooden
GTK & Metacity theme: Dust
Icon theme: Ubuntu Studio

Playing Knight Rider and K.I.T.T

2008-10-20T10:24:00.000-07:00

Today I also wanted to play with voice synthesizing. So I installed festival and finnish voice-library for it because I soon found out that finnish text read in english dialect sounds strange. Something like Mika Häkkinen speaking english but vice versa.

You can use festival as an output for pretty much any command, like:

echo "suovainaja" | festival --tts

After a short but intensive surfing session I managed to find help for how to change the default voice used to the finnish female voice.

Naturally the next 30-45 minutes I spent finding a mail-notification program that makes possible to execute any command on arrival of new mail. I tried like 6-8 different and finally found checkgmail. It's a nice little application for checking (unfortunatelly only) gmail. So I typed the following...

echo "Sinulle on uutta postia" | festival --tts

...into the field of checkgmail options to execute on new mail arrival. That's "You have new mail" in finnish.

.OGG Sample of new mail arriving, in finnish :)

I also had a lot of fun combining grep command with festival. Like for an example if I don't remember my Twitter username or password I can just do the following because I know I have passwords saved in text-files in my Documents folder:

grep twitter Documents/* | festival -tts

This will search all the text files in my Documents folder and output all the lines including phrase twitter through festival.
Then I can just type the username and password as they are being read to me :D

Moo moo here, Moo moo there

2008-10-20T04:38:00.000-07:00

So I wanted to generate a partially randomized signature to use in my e-mails.
Here's how I did it:

I have terminal screenlet(actually 2) automatically started when I log in to the desktop. Terminal screenlet has a nice option of running automatically command when it is started. Optionally you can save a script-file and have it run when you log in.

Step 1
Create a text-file wich holds your contact information and save it to your home folder. I called mine signature.txt

Step 2
To add current date use the date command:
date '+%d/%m/%y' > date.txt
This will output date information to a text-file called date.txt in a format 20/10/08

Step 3
Copy your personal information into the date.txt:
cat signature.txt >> date.txt
This will add the content of the signature.txt at end of date.txt

Step 4
Have a cow to speak out the new date.txt:
cat date.txt | cowsay > mysignature.txt
This echoes the content of the date.txt using the cowsay program, and output it in a new mysignature.txt file instead of displaying it in the terminal

Step 5
Add a random quote at the end of the mysignature.txt using the fortune application:
fortune -s >> mysignature.txt
The -s means that only one of the short quotes are used. You don't propably want to have 20 line quote in your e-mail signature.

So the whole command line to run at startup is:
date '+%d/%m/%y' > date.txt && cat signature.txt >> date.txt && cat date.txt | cowsay > mysignature.txt && fortune -s >> mysignature.txt

Step 6

Set the Thunderbird(or some other e-mail client of your choice) to use the generated file as a signature:

Step 7
Start mailing people just to show off :D

Or

You if you like to annoy people, have figlet draw the message into the signature file:
fortune -s | figlet > mysignature.txt

PS. If you don't have fortune , cowsay or figlet, install them with your package manager. If you use Ubuntu just click on the names above.

Sweet!

2008-10-15T01:15:00.000-07:00

I just love the new wallpaper for the upcoming Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex :D
It's the coolest default wallpaper ever shipped with OS!

Edit: Can't wait to see what they come up with for 9.04, Jaunty Jackalope

Softwear

2008-10-10T10:00:00.000-07:00

Yay! Got my Ubuntu Beanie Hat in mail today.
Can't wait for the winter now :D

Tuska 2008 Refound

2008-10-06T02:10:00.000-07:00

Finally found the photo that peopleoutstage.com -website took of me and my friend last summer @ Tuska Open Air Metal Festival :D

We got some contact cards back then to find the picture later but managed both to lose it somewhere, or it was self-destructive card.

Ibexed

2008-10-04T02:40:00.000-07:00

Beta version of the upcoming Ubuntu release 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex), is now available.

I very succesfully updated my 8.04 (Hardy Heron) to Ibex beta this morning using the update-manager. Only loss of functionality was that some Compiz -plugins that I had manually compiled (wich I didn't really use anyway) don't work anymore. And the NowPlaying-screenlet also stopped working (wich was merely for eyecandy).

If you are currently using Ubuntu and want to force OS to update to the next version before it's officially released, just press Alt+F2 or open up a terminal and type 'update-manager -d'. The whole update took about 40 minutes on my computer.

You can also just wait for the final release (end of this month) and the update-manager will automatically offer you the update of the operating system.

I personally could'nt wait to finally have tabs on the Nautilus -filemanager ;) Tabs kick ass!

Solar System wallpaper for 3x3 desktop

2008-10-03T10:05:00.000-07:00

So I was bored and had this weird idea of Solar System wallpaper that would spread across 9 desktops using the Wallpaper-plugin of Compiz.

Made with Inkscape & GIMP :)

Here is a small 1600x1200 version of the whole thing (Original image 4800x3600)

And here is a screenshot of the 9x1600x1200 version. On each desktop there is 1/9th of the whole image.

Here are the images for the 4800x3600 version:

Reasons to love command line

2008-10-02T08:46:00.000-07:00

Repeat after me: Command line is a friend :)

Now you may ask, 'Why? In Windows I can do everything I need to do by clicking buttons and menus, command line sucks like a black hole'

Yes you can do everything in Linux too by using a graphical interface. But the truth is that doing this you consume more CPU and have to usually go through several steps and use more than one tool to achieve your goal.

Example task:

I have a folder for wallpaper images which includes 179 files, mostly JPG but some PNG-and SVG-files too. First I want to remove SVG-files. Then I want to convert all the PNG-files to JPG-files and make 120 pixel wide thumbnails of them to a subfolder 'thumbs'. All this to make a web page for showing my wallpapers for example...Ok let's begin

Command line:

Open folder with images
Right-click and select 'open terminal'
Remove SVG-files: 'rm *.svg'
Convert all the PNG-files to JPGs: 'mogrify -format jpg *.png'
Make thumbs directory: 'mkdir thumbs'
Remove PNGs: 'rm *.png'
Copy images to the thumbs-folder: 'cp * thumbs'
Go to thumbs-directory: 'cd thumbs'
Resize all images here to 120 pixel width (constraining aspect ratio of course): 'mogrify -resize 120 *'

Done :) !

Process time: Exactly 2 minutes (Yes I timed it)

Graphical interface:

I used Windows XP and Photoshop 7

Open folder with images
Right-click and have folder sorted by file type to find the SVG-files "easily"
Remove SVG-files
Make new folder 'thumbs'
Copy-Paste files to thumbs-folder
Open Photoshop
Open some image to create an action
Record action: 'Fit image', 'Save as JPEG'
Select File > Automate > Batch
Select correct action and source folder (thumbs)
Select 'suppress save -dialog'
Click 'save' everytime the Save-dialog appears anyway while the batch is running
Remove manually the PNG files from the thumbs folder
Windows warns me about harddrive running out of space (Photoshop has cache on system folder)
Process stopped

Done :P !

Process time:Something like 14 minutes (Yes I did it as fast as I could)

Conclusion: By using the more straight forward and faster command-line method I can process about 7-8 times more pictures in the same time than by using the 'Professional' industry standard software...In your face 'terminal is scary'-people :P

PS: How to do this in GIMP?

You will need to install David's Batch Processor -plugin to follow this guide, if it's not already installed.

The plugin can be found from Filters > Batch Process

If you don't have it click here to install it (Ubuntu), or download it from internet

Step 1: Select input files

Step 2: Select resize tab and then check 'enable' and 'Absolute'. Then input the maximum size to fit the image in.

Step 3: Switch to Rename-tab and select the 'thumbs'-folder as destination directory

Step 4: Select output format and proper quality and click 'start' :)

Done :) !

The Batch processor in GIMP works way faster than running batches in Photoshop, even though Photoshops batching is more versatile because of recordable actions. Why is it faster? Well first of all GIMP's Batch processor does not load images onto display as it processes them, which saves tons of memory and CPU. All you see is progress meter as the batch is being run straight on the image files without opening them.

If Windows would work like Linux

2008-10-02T05:23:00.000-07:00

Just some simple mockups of how using Windows would be if it worked like Linux

1.0 INSTALLING SOFTWARE

Windows now
Here is a gif-animation of installing Opera, VLC and Skype for windows (25 frames). This of course includes Opening web browser, finding web site to download the software from, downloading installer, and finally installing it.

Windows if...
Here is how it would be if it worked like with Linux (5 frames). That includes selecting software you want from package manager and clicking 'Ok'

1.1 UPDATING SOFTWARE

Windows now
Repeat section 1.0, times software to be updated.

Windows if...
You basically never have to think about updates, the system will take care of that. Updater will find updates for any software you have ever installed using package manager, and you will receive them as normal system updates.
See here (2 frames)

1.2 SYSTEM RESOURCES

Windows now & Windows if...

There would be no more running 3-6 extra applications all the time just to keep your system safe. No firewall, antivirus or spyware software hogging your CPU and memory. Save the power of your computer for what ever you actually use the computer for.

Going from random to simultaneous

2008-09-30T05:55:00.001-07:00

Decided to check out how to have different wallpaper for each desktop. Turns out its really easy. All you lose doing this is ability to have files/shortcuts on your desktop (drawn by filemanager nautilus). But you can pretty much replace everything using screenlets (see first image)

Step 1:
Make sure you have compiz 0.7 (command: 'compiz --version') or greater and dependencies to compile plugins for it
To install dependencies type in terminal:

sudo apt-get install compiz-bcop compiz-dev compizconfig-settings-manager build-essential libtool libglu1-mesa-dev libxss-dev libcairo2-dev git-core

Step 2:
download this file: http://oreaus.googlepages.com/wallpaper.tar

extract it to somewhere, like '~/compiz' and open the folder in terminal

Now just type 'make' and then 'make install' to compile and install the wallpaper-plugin

Step 3:
Type 'gconf-editor' in terminal
Then select app > nautilus > preferences and uncheck the 'show desktop' option from the right to disable nautilus from being responsible of drawing the desktop

Now just start compiz settings editor to define the wallpapers plugin to use the images you want on your desktop.

If you do not have the advanced compiz settings manager install it by clicking here

Going randomly flat & black

2008-09-30T02:37:00.000-07:00

Ok so I found this great theme called Elegant Brit, so naturally I had to find cool wallpaper image to go with it. Turns out I found several and could not make up my mind which one to use.

Problem was finally solved when I installed the Wallpaper-tray application that chooses random wallpaper from selection for me everytime I log in. :D

Click here to install it...

...or type 'sudo apt-get install wallpaper-tray' in terminal.

Wallpaper-tray is dead easy to configure. Just select the image folders you want it use and the the proper display method if you have images different size than your desktop resolution (scaled,strech,centered).

You can also have Wallpaper-tray to change your wallpaper every X minutes which is great if you never need to boot your Linux XD

Below rest of the images from my random bank...

My Desktop goes Hamster 22/08/08

2008-08-22T09:23:00.000-07:00

Changed wallpaper again :D. Also changed visual theme from dark to light (back to oxygen again).
New screenlets: A nice looking analog clock and A Slideshow-screenlet that loads random images from Flickr and shows new image every 1 minute...

By the way the point of recording my desktop changes is a long term one, which is to demonstrate the fast development of Linux desktop environment (compared to Windows for example which have not changed much at all since windows 95 (13 years!))

And the Hamster...

I Found this great time tracking applet for Gnome. It is very easy to use too... Just select from the list (configurable of course) a task you are doing right now and it will save the time spent and show a neat graph as well (day/week/month)

To install add this repository to your package manager:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/hamster.support/ubuntu hardy main

...Then press reload when prompted, close the package manager and then click here to install

Or install 'hamster-applet' from the software list in your package manager , or type 'sudo apt-get install hamster' in terminal if you want to do it the cool way.

Wordsworth, the PHP word counter

2008-08-14T05:34:00.000-07:00

Thought this might prove helpful for someone. I personally have used this weekly for almost a year now.

This is a simple HTML form in which you can paste a text, and after submit the page tells you how many times each word appears in the text.

Currently it filters words shorter than 5 characters but you can easily modify it for your needs. You can also remove or add the character filters.

Hope my comments make sense because I had hard time figuring out the code myself since it has been almost a year since I wrote it.

Here's the code:


//the form
//change the wordsworth.php to the name you plan to save the file with
<form method="post" action="wordsworth.php">
  <textarea name="txt" rows="16" cols="60"></textarea>
  <br/>
  <input type="submit" value=">"/>
</form>

<?php

if($_POST['txt']){
    //get the sent text
  $txt = $_POST['txt'." "];
   //replace common characters with empty spaces    
  $txt = str_ireplace("."," ",$txt);
  $txt = str_ireplace("\""," ",$txt);
  $txt = str_ireplace(","," ",$txt);
  $txt = str_ireplace("!"," ",$txt);
  $txt = str_ireplace("'"," ",$txt);
  $txt = str_ireplace("€"," ",$txt);
  $txt = str_ireplace("$"," ",$txt);
  $txt = str_ireplace("/"," ",$txt);

  //make the text lowercase
  $txt = strtolower($txt);
  //separate text into array by spaces
  $t = explode(" ",$txt);
  //loop through the array with each word set as a value for the variable '$word'
  foreach($t as $word){
        //increase value of multiarrays '$count[$word]' and '$c[$word]'
      $count[$word]++; $c[$word]++;
      }
  //sort array '$count' numerically
  arsort($count, SORT_NUMERIC);
    //remove numerical values from that array
  $words = array_keys($count);
    //loop through that array one word at a time
  foreach($words as $p){
        //check that word has at least 5 letters, if so, print the 
        //number of instances found ('$c') and the word ('$p')
      if(strlen($p) > 4) echo $c[$p]."<b> ".$p."</b><br/>";
  }
}


?>

My desktop 11/08/08

2008-08-11T08:12:00.000-07:00

Just a minor change. Added atlantis2 plugin to make the cube more lively with some fishes swimming inside it :)

How to?

It's not in the official compiz plugins yet so you have to compile it yourself. But it's really easy...Note that this is for Ubuntu 8.04!

Step 1: Download and install dependecies needed to compile for compiz...

Copypaste following into terminal:
sudo apt-get install compiz-bcop compiz-dev compizconfig-settings-manager build-essential libtool libglu1-mesa-dev libxss-dev libcairo2-dev git-core

Or install them via Synaptic if you prefer the slow graphical way of doing things... :P

Step 2: Download the source code of Atlantis2

Paste into terminal:
git clone git://anongit.compiz-fusion.org/users/metastability/atlantis2

This will download the code into a subfolder called atlantis2

Step 3: Compile

Go to the new directory:

cd atlantis2

To compile it, write:

make

Wait until its ready and then install by typing:

make install

...And now you have it! :D

Ps. You may now remove the atlantis2 directory

Keeping files short and simple in PHP with $_GET and include

2008-08-11T06:42:00.000-07:00

This is in no way a recommendation for anyone else to build their website like I do but I just wanted to share this method I tend to use nowdays...

Especially when the website I am building is going to use both MySQL and PHP, I tend to break down each main link into a separate PHP-file while still automatically including them into the index-file as needed.

Let's say that the main level link is going to list latest news, not show the news but only list them. The link url would be something like '?mode=list&type=news', which opens the same page again (index.php) but also sends variables 'mode' and 'type' with values 'list' and 'news' with the link.

In the beginning of the index-page I have commands to fetch those sent values with the $_GET command as such: $mode = $_GET['mode']; $type=$_GET['type'];, which in this case gets the value='list' for $mode and 'news' for $type.

After that there's a simple line to include suitable php-file from from subfolder 'php' to the index-page:

include 'php/'.$mode.'_'.$type.'.php';

...Which means that file 'php/list_news.php' will be merged in the current page from current link. If the link url had been for example '?mode=view&type=news',the page would automatically merge file 'php/view_news.php' into itself.

Now in the 'list_news.php' can use the sent variables without any extra work because it becomes part of the file that got the values in the first place. So there's no need to send and return variables as with functions.

A simple 'list_news.php' could be like this:

$q = mysql_query("SELECT id,title FROM database WHERE type ='$type' ORDER BY DATETIME DESC LIMIT 25");
while($Q = mysql_fetch_array($q)){
echo "<a href='?mode=view&type=$type&id=".$Q{'id'}."'/>".$Q{'title'}."</a><br/>";
}

This will list 25 latest news titles and make them links for viewing the whole article using 'php/view_news.php'

My Desktop 10/08/08

2008-08-10T05:30:00.000-07:00

Changed the wallpaper so naturally I had to change the icon theme as well to fit it better... The little sparks in the picture are fireflies slowly flying around on the screen...

Also modified the cairo-docks appearance to a more toonish like and resized the terminal-screenlet to take the whole right side of the screen... (notice the amazing fortune-telling cow wich appears on terminal start-up :)

Furthermore changed the desktop-sphere in to a cylinder. It somehow seemed more elephant-like shape(!?)...

...

An idea: ClickLaunch

2008-08-07T04:05:00.000-07:00

While I'm at it, I just wanted to add this old idea of mine about new way of launching file-type-specific applications or functions.
Here is the link to a self-explanatory gif animation:
http://www.kde-look.org/CONTENT/content-pre1/51069-1.gif

An idea: Autolinker

2008-08-07T03:34:00.000-07:00

Just a quick thought:

I would like to see a program that would run in the background, or possibly be embedded atleast in the e-mail and IM-clients, that would automatically make specified words and their combinations in to a www-links.... let me explain...

Example 1, User predefined keywords: If I were to type 'remember to visit my blog' in an e-mail compositing window, the "autolinker" would automatically change the words 'my blog' into a link to a predefined URL

Example 2, Application database: Maybe there should be also a database of predefined words that can/should be linked (Preferably database would be located in internet for easy updating/fetching).

Like if I were to type 'I use Pidgin for instant messaging', the Autolinker would make the word Pidgin as a link to the official Pidgin website. This feature of course should be optional in the Autolinker settings.

Example 3, web-search: Another possibility could be that some words would be linked to a web search by choice.

As in if I were to write about sunfish(a.k.a. Mola mola), I could for example right-click on the word sunfish and select from the context menu 'Searchlink'. The Autolinker would then change the word sunfish into a link to a Google-search of the sunfish (Or some other user-preferred search engine like Google image search or Amazon)

...As I said this could be a part of individual applications, but preferably this should be a global, system wide process, running in the background of OS. That way all the other applications such as web browsers, IM clients, E-mail clients, word processors could all benefit from it

PS: If anyone knows such an application, please tell me :)

Next generation browser/internet?

2008-08-07T02:05:00.000-07:00

The Aurora project is trying to design a new way to handle and interact with all the data in the internet.

The videos demonstrate a whole new function rather than site based user interface

My Desktop 30/07/08

2008-07-30T09:36:00.000-07:00

OS: Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron
Desktop: Gnome 2.22
Window manager: Compiz-Fusion 0.7.6
Window decorator: Emerald 0.7.2

Icon theme: Oxygen-Refit 2
GTK-theme: UbuntuStudio
Emerald theme: Overglossed
Wallpaper: Oxygen contest winner

Dock: Cairo dock
Other: Pidgin-screenlet, Terminal-screenlet