I installed a couple of Gnome applets that I find real useful today. The first one is music-applet , which got me hooked to using Rhythmbox, which got me hooked to using Last.fm and its neat recommendation feature. I love that the Cover Art is also automatically displayed, even for songs that you can get off Amie.st like State Radio’s music. It’s in the repositories, so a simple sudo aptitude install music-applet from the administrator user gets it.

The other cool applet I got is the timer applet, sudo aptitude install timer-applet which gives you a timer that you can set to various tasks. Being one of those unofficial ADD sufferers I lose track of time when I get on the internet and it’s useful to be reminded that I need to do some stuff now and then. It has a neat pie chart that gives you an idea of roughly how much time has been used up since you started out, useful to tell you how much you’ve slacked off.

If you have a default install of Ubuntu and you enabled Desktop Effects you’ll have trouble when you try to play a video. The video itself will play just fine normally, but if you try to combine that with a couple of Compiz effects, like trying to make it a bit transparent or trying to move the video while it’s playing, or rotating the cube while the video is on you’ll get a blank screen, sometimes green, sometimes grey. The way to fix this is:

Totem:

The inbuilt player. Open a Terminal and copy paste the following command:
gstreamer-properties
Then change the default output plugin to X Window System (no xv)

mplayer:

The process is essentially the same, you change the output plugin to x11. It’ll be okay so long as you’re not using xv. If you’re using the command line interface just add -vo x11 to the end. So a command to play abc.avi would be:
mplayer abc.avi -vo x11
If you’re using the GUI, you can change the settings there.

I noticed that I’d gotten a couple of search requests on how to clear up the menus in Gnome. After you install a lot of applications you can get quite a lot of entries in your System » Preferences menu, and because of Gnome’s guidelines of only having two levels of menus (except for Accessibility, strangely) you get to have a cluttered Preferences menu.

The easy way is to right click on System and click Edit Menus. Then you just uncheck the entries you don’t want in the menus. You can always enable them later, if you so wish.

Okay, so that may not be the goal of Fyre, but it does serve that purpose well for those interested. It’s really simple to do get a fancy looking image with Fyre, by running through a bunch of random parameters (Ctrl-R) and changing the background and foreground colours all over the place.

Fyre renders Peter De Jong maps, and since I don’t precisely understand what those are you had better read their about page. Basically, the image is a map of the probability that the point lies at the pixel, and the probability is defined by a funny equation. You change the parameters in the equation and you get many different looking chaotic graphs. It’s actually pretty cool to play with.

Fyre also has a nifty animation feature which animates the difference between two maps. It’s fascinating to watch the images morph into each other, but the animation produces an uncompressed .avi, so you might want to try ffmpeg to encode it into a reasonably sized file.

HDR Images allow you to show a larger range in the colours and intensity of different areas in your subject. Done well, they can yield some really beautiful pictures that showcase a large number of colours. To get a HDR image, you need to have a camera that can take shots at different exposure settings. You’ll also need a steady enough hand to get the shots properly, unless you have a tripod. Once you’ve taken the different shots (bracketing makes this much easier) you just need to transfer them to your computer and fire up qtpfsgui.

There, you just import the files and (if you’ve got some slight movement of the camera) activate the anti-ghosting feature. Don’t set the number of iterations too high or it’ll take way too long. Also, if the pictures have all been jerked around, then the anti-ghosting feature will not work very well, and you’ll get some double images. Once you’ve got the composite image, hit Tonemap, and play around with the settings. Some of the choices will be good for skies, and some others for vehicles and roads. The best way to find the nicest tonemapping operator is to set a low size for the preview and to try each of the operators, move the sliders around a little bit until you’re satisfied and remember there’s only so much a program can do, the rest is up to you

Spring (formerly TA:Spring) is a full 3D RTS. The game is played by getting one or more mods for the engine (which is completely GPL). The original goal was to run all Total Annihilation mods and 3rd party stuff. It seems to have passed that long ago and is now a damn complete game.

The best part of the game is the ability to control specific units from an FPS perspective. Selecting the unit and pressing ‘C’ puts you into FPS mode and you can control that unit directly. This is really cool when you try it out on aircraft in fierce dogfights and adds a really clever element to the gameplay, especially since full 3d air combat means you can fly underneath and above other aircraft (unlike most other RTS games) . There can be thousands of units in the game at the same time, but micromanaging isn’t a problem because some units have a rudimentary AI inbuilt which you can set. The terrain is great and deforms with sufficient damage causing craters and the like.

There are units in every medium and with the BA and other similar mods you’ll have units on sea, air, and land. The mods are usually well constructed and the sides balanced, so the multiplayer aspect of Spring (which is the most important part) is rarely neglected.

Getting the AIs to work seems to be non-trivial, so single player missions may not be extremely easy to setup, but the Random Enemies scripts should keep you busy while you learn. The Setup Guide is well written and easy to follow and they even have a Debian package repository to make installation of the binaries simple. There’s also a section for Ubuntu in the Setup Guide, so things can’t be much simpler.

I still have a large NTFS partition and was wondering how I could write to that drive. It was exceedingly simple. First, login as the administrator user (if you’re the only user on the computer, that’s you), and type in the console:
sudo aptitude install ntfs-3g ntfs-config

And if you’re one of those GUI junkies, just use Synaptic to select the two packages ntfs-3g and ntfs-config. Then accessing the Applications » System Tools » NTFS Configuration Tool will allow you to set what drives should be mounted with write permissions. That simple, and it can all be done from the GUI if you so wish.

To change your settings, you have to go to Applications » System Tools » NTFS Configuration

Syndication feeds are the easiest way to keep track of content that updates frequently, like blogs, news sites or your inbox. Most feeds are either a version of RSS or of Atom. You subscribe to the feed in your

Liferea is a feed reader for GNOME that supports the common syndication methods and less common ones through conversion filters. The interface is the same that most readers employ, a left and a right pane with the right pane divided into top and bottom panes. When you close it, it minimises to the notification area where it will display a number of unread feeds on its own icon (this can be changed)

Liferea stands for Linux Feed Reader (wonder why they didn’t name it Liferead, pronunciation would be so much easier!), and appropriately descriptive name. It occupies something between 12-25 MB of RAM, with the higher end of the range appearing when it uses the Mozilla rendering for pages that you open within the reader instead of in the browser.

I have to use a proxy to get online and because many programs have their own independent proxy settings, I have to set each up individually. So, in addition to setting the $http_proxy variable, here’s the config files I have to change: (replace the numbers)

wget, /etc/wgetrc

Switch on Passive Mode by default:

passive_ftp = on

Set the Proxy Servers:

http_proxy = http://username:password@10.5.2.46:80/
ftp_proxy = http://username:password@10.5.2.46:80/

Enable the proxy:

use_proxy = on

apt/aptitude, /etc/apt/apt.conf

Set the proxies

ACQUIRE {
http::proxy "http://srdmorhper:password@10.5.2.46:80/"
}


Synaptic

Also, Synaptic doesn’t seem to share apt’s settings. Synaptic’s proxy settings are in Settings » Preferences » Network and should be entered as:
Proxy:username:password@10.1.3.23 Port:80

Note: Some programs like Google Earth, work under Gnome 2.14 and Ubuntu 6.06 with the proxy if you start them from a terminal but not from the menu entry.

Nautilus actions are these little scripts that function on files and folders from within Nautilus, you can write (or download) a nautilus script that can do quite anything on a file you have. And you can do these with minimal experience and with little danger of doing anything horrible to your files as long as you’re careful. Here are a couple of the Actions I have:

Sudo Open:

• Path: gksudo
• Parameters: “gnome-open %u”

Mount this:

• Path: mount
• Parameters: %d/%f or %M

Play with mplayer:

For some reason, this is a set of three actions. The first one simply plays the file with /usr/bin/mplayer %M , the second plays a playlist with /usr/bin/mplayer -playlist %M and the third plays all the files in a folder. Due to my inexperience with bash, it looks rather ugly, but here it is. As usual, no warranty. Just one parameter: The folder name.