I have just finished v0.1 of notify-more a command line tool to display GNOME notifications using libnotify. libnotify comes with a command line tool, notify-send, but it cannot add buttons (aka action) to the notifications. notify-more does. Please see the notify-more for more information, download links and usage guide.
Since OSX doesn’t believe in the control button, they have invented the command button. It’s that weird clover leaf thing. In the Apple HIG the command key is to be used instead of the control key. However Just about all other OSs use the control key heavily. The Mac OSX control key on an iBook is tiny and in a weird place, and there’s only one of them.
To map the command keys to send control in X place the following lines in your /etc/X11/Xmodmap:
keycode 115 = Control_L
add Control = Control_L
I dislike when shell applications beep.
I use gnome-terminal, and there’s an option in the profile to disable the beep. Edit -> Current Profile. Deselect ‘Terminal Bell’
But the line:
set vb t_vb=
in your ~/.gvimrc. This tells gvim to use a visual bell and sets the t_vb variable to empty. t_vb is what is used to make the screen flash, setting it empty disables flashes.
Add this line to your ~/.screenrc to disable visual bell
vbell on
I’m not sure why this disbaled a visual bell… All I know is that it works.
The iPod nano is fat32 formatted out of the box. Thank you Apple! (source) This makes it easier to use an iPod nano on Linux, since the HFS+ filesystem (which ipods normally come formatted as) is dodgy under linux. Fat32 is much more stable and reliable.
XChat is a very nice IRC client for unix systems. One thing I like is the ability to write plugins in Python. So far I have written the following scripts.
To use these plugins you’ll have to have the xchat python plugin support. In ubuntu just install the xchat-python package. Then put any .py file into the ~/.xchat/ directory and they will be automatically loaded when xchat starts. If you edit any of the files, enter the command “/py reload $name” to reload the plugin. A good guide to writing python plugins for xchat.
A silly little plugin. Adds the command “/slap $username”, which reads the file slaps.txt in ~/.xchat/, selects a random line and send the command “/me slaps $username $randomline”. For example some of the lines in my slaps.txt are “with a wet trout
and how!
like a fox!
cause he’s a bad person.”, so entering “/slap larry”, can result in “/me slaps larry with a wet trout”
Another silly-ish plugin. You specify a list of channels and users and if any of those users aren’t a op on those channels, and you are, it’ll op them. Kinda like a decentralised NickServ. I wrote this because sometimes my friends and I would get a little silly with deoping and kicking people. Also I’d find myself oping my friends anyway out of politness, this automates this task. By editing the file autoop.py you can specify what channels and users to autoop.
Uses the libnotify package in GNOME to display a simple notification when someone joins a channel. Use this if there is a channel you and your friends frequent and you want to be alerted when they join.
When I got my iBook, I used Mac OSX for a while. There were some things that annoyed me, and I managed to fix most of them. I wrote my tips and tricks up here, however to keep with the theme, here they all are.
Put this: “lang en_GB” in ~/.aspell.conf
Install the closed source RealPlayer codecs from http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/rp9codecs-macosx-20041107.pkg.zip. Open a terminal and execute: “sudo ln -s /usr/local/lib/codecs /usr/local/lib/mplayer”. You will have to put in your password. This is necessary because the RealPlayer codec installer, installs it in the incorrect place. A bug has been filed. You can open this in MPlayer. The default application to open .rmvb files is with Microsoft Excel, scroll down to the end of this page to find out how to change this. I don’t think these codec are very efficent. If the video is choppy and sluggish, try running mplayer from the command line with the “-framedrop” argument, ie “mplayer -framedrop film.rmvb”
The OSX filesystem is case insensitive (unlike most unices). However the bash shell’s filename completion is case sensitive. Put this in your ~/.inputrc and restart terminal: “set completion-ignore-case on”.
Source
When you logout of a terminal with Control-D, by default the window will not close, one must manually close it with Command-W. To make the window close automatically on logout, open Window Settings under the Terminal menu bar. Select ‘Close only if the shell exited cleanly’ under ‘When the shell exists:’. Press the ‘Use Settings as default’. Source
Apple’s idea of a UK (and hence Irish) keyboard layout is wrong. @ and ” are swapped place ~ and ` are swapped. Download this uk keyboard mapping, unstuff it (Tiger users need to download StuffIt). and put it in /Library/Keyboard Layouts/ (you might need to do this in a terminal and sudo it). Then restart your mac (I know, I know). Change the keyboard layout to British - Windows in System Preferences -> International -> Input Menu. I found that this broke the forward delete hack for terminal. You may need to do that hack again. This is not a proper UK keyboard layout, though. \ is still in the wrong place. I’m still not sure about that. Source
On recent iBooks, by moving two fingers on the trackpad, one can scroll up, down left and right in a window. In firefox ’scrolling right’ moves forward, left moves back in the history. To disable the forward/back (but keep the up/down), go to about:config, set mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action to 1, set mousewheel.withnokey.sysnumlines to false, play around with the mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.numlines and mousewheel.withnokey.numlines values until you’re satisfied with the scrolling speed, I have mine set to 3. Source
OSX 10.4.2 comes with Java 1.4.2 by default. Download and install Java 1.5 from Apple here. This includes java prferences under /Applications/Utilities/Java/J2SE 5.0, which can be used to change the default java cirtual machine, not the default compiler. To change the default compiler, open a terminal and become root with ’sudo su root’. Enter your password. Then ‘cd /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/’, ‘rm CurrentJDK’, ‘ln -s 1.5.0 CurrentJDK’, ‘exit’. Your java compiler will now be version 1.5.0. To allow eclipse to use the 1.5 java compiler, enter preferences with Cmd-, then select java -> compiler, select 5.0 as the compiler compliance level. At the bottom of the window text warning you that you need java 5 install. Click on Configure there, you’ll get a window about install jres. Click Add. Type is Mac OSX VM. JRE name can be anything, I recommend ‘Java 1.5′, JRE home directory must be ‘/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home’ Then click ok. Click the checkbox beside the new java 1.5 and deselect the JVM 1.4.2 (MacOSX X Defaut). Source
Edit the file /etc/hostconfig. Change the line HOSTNAME=$HOSTNAME. Note: You must put the new hostname in /etc/hosts eg “127.0.0.1 $HOSTNAME” or jdb (the java debugger) will not work. Source
Add the following to chrome/userChrome.css:
.bookmark-item > .toolbarbutton-icon {
display: block !important;
} Source
Open Terminal’s Terminal menu, pick Window Settings, and then choose “Keyboard” in the pop-up menu. Double-click on the ‘del (forward delete)’ key, and in the sheet that pops open, activate the input box just below “Action.” Type Control-Option-D, and you should see ‘\004′ in the box. Click OK, close the Terminal Inpsector window. Source
After discovering libnotify, which can be used to display notification message in the gnome desktop, and finding that it has python bindings, I wanted to start playing with it. However the documentation for it is poor. Here are some examples of how to use pynotify.
On a default install of many Linux distributions, pressing Control-Alt-Backspace will kill the current X server. On my laptop (an Apple iBook), control and delete are right beside each other. Furthermore Control-Backspace is used to delete a word, so I very quickly found out how often one can press Control-Alt-Backspace.
Luckily, one can disable this feature by adding the following to one’s /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Section “ServerFlags”
Option “DontZap” “yes”
EndSection
When you are running low on battery power in GNOME, a little dialog box appears telling you how much power you have left. As far as I can tell this is done using the libnotify package. There’s a command line tool (notify-send) to display a little pop up on the bottom right of the screen. There’s python bindings available for it, and gaim intergration, which I have yet to get compiled.
What I would like to do with this package:
If you want to see a list of all available modules, then execute help(’modules’) from the interactive python interpreter. To see all modules whose name matches ‘notify’, enter help(’modules notify’)