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.

I just set up one of my old computers up in the corner of the living room so that there’s nothing but the bare necessities there. I SSH into it and do my stuff and then get out. It’s a lot of fun, really. While setting up SSH, I discovered that you could login to that SSH server without using a password if you used a pair of keys to handle the login. I’ve already been using Seahorse for a while now to handle my GPG keys and I noticed it could create a pair of SSH keys too. So I went through the process and it was super simple. All I had to do was:

1. Go to Key » Create New Key…
2. Choose SSH key
3. Enter a description and go to the next step
4. Enter a passphrase twice
5. Allow it to set up the other computer by supplying my login details

That was all, and now I have paired-key authentication and don’t have to enter the password every time I log in to that computer. Hurray!

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.

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.

In the hope of being simple, the window manager for GNOME leaves out many features, and one among those left out is window matching, which was present in its predecessor in GNOME, Sawfish. So, to perform the window matching functions, we need another program, Devil’s Pie.

Devil’s Pie uses s-expressions to Match windows and perform Actions on them. You put the s-expressions in files with names like filename.ds in your ~/.devilspie folder.

Examples:
1. Move GkrellM to the fourth workspace, above all other windows, remove window decorations and skip both the workspace pager and the tasklist.
(if
(matches (application_name) "gkrellm")
(begin
(set_workspace 4)
(above)
(undecorate)
(skip_pager)
(skip_tasklist)
)
)


2. Put the OpenOffice.org splash at the bottom of everything. I like looking at it when the desktop’s blank, but otherwise it’s annoying.

(if
(matches (application_name) "OpenOffice.org")
(begin
(below)
)
)


Those are just examples. Devil’s Pie can do a lot of stuff and just gets better with each release.

Links:

• Devil’s Pie Home Page
• A Devil’s Pie Wiki (up to date as of 29/05/07)
• The Official Wiki