Create an immutable VirtualBox disk with changes to that disk written to a differencing disk in OS X. This is useful in the context of TimeMachine backups.
My shiny new Google Nexus One wasn’t connecting properly over USB to my Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) notebook using the Android SDK. Here’s how I fixed it.
Read more…
Updating an iPod Classic to use flash memory (a Compact Flash card specifically) rather than it’s typical hard drive can breathe new life into your dying device. Check out the rest of this post for descriptions and details of the process.
Scrolling using the Thinkpad Trackpoint (middle click/hold + mouse nub) is still not fixed by default in Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala). Here’s how I fixed it.
I’ve finally made the migration away from make and the horrible system of autofoo and Makefiles. A few years ago I discovered a build system called waf that does everything make can do, only better!
I has always bothered me that Gnome’s document viewer, evince, doesn’t show up in the Gnome menus or in Gnome-Do when I type evince. I did a bit of searching and discovered that this is because the evince .desktop files have the property NoDisplay=true in them. Apparently this tells Gnome to ignore this application for display purposes (in menus, dialogs, gnome-do, etc.). I changed this property to false and am waiting for whatever .desktop cache there is to update. I’ll update this post if this actually worked for me. I hope it does, being able to launch evince with one command in Gnome-Do would be wonderful.
I found this bug and this discussion of why NoDisplay is set to true.
Update (2009-9-27 19:13): After waiting for a while to see if evince would ever show up in the menus/gnome-do, it appears that this ‘fix’ doesn’t work. I’m not willing to put more time into this, so my current work-around is to open a directory with the pdf of interest and open the file that way. Not my preferred workflow, but it gets the job done.
Update (2009-10-7 08:46): A commenter suggested removing the NoDisplay line altogether. I’ve commented these lines out in the files /usr/share/applications/evince.desktop and /usr/share/app-install/desktop/evince.desktop. I’ll leave it like that and see if an entry for Evince shows up anwhere. I’ve actually gotten into the habbit of opening a directory in Nautilus and opening the document in question from there. If this works though, I’ll have multiple ways of doing what I want.
Update (2009-10-10 07:34): Removing the lines didn’t help. Looks like I’ll just continue using the ‘Open in Nautilus’ method.
I’m finally happy with my HTPC project. I’ve got all my movies, videos, pictures, and music on the 1.5TB hardware RAID5 that I setup (3x 750gb WD Caviar Blacks). I can watch, record, and timeshift TV. It’s working great! I’m actually quite happy with Windows 7 (surprisingly). Only a few problems remain…
I’m using my Windows 7 machine as a file server in addition to it being my Media Center. I’m mounting a Samba (smb) share using CIFS from my Linux server so I can synchronize files using rsync. However, I ran into a problem after using the mounted share for a small amount of time. I found a simple solution after a bit of research.
Read more…
I recently upgraded to Windows 7, mainly for the upgrades to Windows Media Center. One problem I discovered was with digital audio from HD channels and DVDs/Blu-Ray discs. I wasn’t able to control the volume using the media center volume (system volume). I could only adjust the volume on my stereo. I found an article on the Hack Windows 7 Media Center site that discusses how to pipe all audio through AC3Filter to enable adjusting gain and using an equalizer before the audio is output from the machine.
Read more…
I’ve recently started using Mozilla Weave. This is a Firefox extension that allows one to synchronize browser settings, including tabs, history, extensions, and passwords. Another feature of this extension is OpenID integration using Mozilla’s OpenID provider. All OpenID logins that are displayed on a page are replaced with ‘Sign in Using Weave’. However, I use this blog as an OpenID provider, so I don’t particularly like this feature. The settings dialogs don’t make it clear how to disable it. I’ve found a post that mentions an about:config setting called ‘extensions.weave.openId.enabled’. One can set this setting to ‘False’ if you don’t want the Mozilla OpenID support. Have fun and enjoy Weave, it’s great!
