Nov/110
Photo autocopy from SD card
Copying photos from the SD card of my camera is a very common task. And always the same pattern. Take the card out of the camera, put it into the sd card reader, wait for the automount popup, browse to the picture directory, select all images, cut all images, browse to my photo directory, create a new folder, name the folder, move to the folder, paste the pictures into it, wait for the finished job.
Sound boring? Sure, it is!
Now, how to make this one a little smarter? Maybe scripting some of those steps is a cool idea. So how would this work in a perfect world?
Oct/112
Fixing “show desktop” shortcut (hotkey) in Ubuntu 11.10.
After updating my ubuntu 10.04 installation I had to recognize that the shortcut for minimizing all windows
to show the desktop has changed (It seem to be
Solving this is a real quickie:
Launch gconf-editor and browse to /apps/metacity/global_keybindings
Change the value of show_desktop from
Press enter, close gconf-editor and enjoy the results of pressing 
.
Oct/112
Ubuntu 11.10: A lot of problems …
I decided to update my notebook from Ubuntu 11.04 to the newest release Ubuntu 11.10. I did not expect any big problems since I had no real problem with the last updates. But it was different this time. The update went smooth, some questions about changed config files but no real problems.
One positive point: The login screen looks nice.
After the first login:
WTF, Unity desktop manager only? grml! I don’t like the unity stuff. I just want to have my console, browser, mail program open and switch between them fast. I don’t need that blingblinghoverfadesmoothscrollpop stuff. I tried the gnome fallback mode but it seems like a real fallback mode which appears like a stripped of version of the old gnome desktop. Also not very comfortable. So I’ll try unity now for some days but will switch to another window manager, maybe xfce.
The second and more annoying thing: When connecting to my home wlan the router crashes and refuses connections on WLAN/LAN. Yay! The new denial of service tool: Ubuntu 11.10. I have a buffalo router with OpenWRT firmware installed. The router is capable of broadband wifi (N). This seems to be a part of the problem. After disabling the N features in the intel driver of my lenovo w500 (03:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Ultimate N WiFi Link 5300) it works as expected. For details take a look here.
Why are the folder (sort, threading, …) settings of my thunderbird gone? I have no clue.
That is the score after three hours using the new version …
May/110
Simply amazing: Running Linux in JavaScript
I am really, really, really impressed: JSLinux
Aug/1012
German Umlauts on US Keyboard in X (Ubuntu 10.04)
The US keyboard layout is better for programmers since many of the needed special chars like brackets, semicolons and so on are easier to type than, for example, with the German keyboard layout which I used so far. Since I am programming a lot on my notebook I decided to buy a new keyboard with the US layout to make it easier to learn using the US layout.
Besides programming I often write German documentations, mails and other kinds of texts. When writing things in German the umlaut chars like ä, ö and so on are important. So I would miss these chars a lot when using the US keyboard layout. In fact there are some key combinations in linux and/or X11 to type those chars but they way too complicated to be used while writing a longer text.
After some research I found a solution by using the user specific Xmodmap file. See how I modified that configuration file to fit my needs…
Jun/100
Firefox offline mode vs. NetworkManager (Ubuntu 10.04)
Sometimes I need to set manual network configuration on my Ubuntu driven laptop. For this cases I ignore the network configuration of the NetworkManager. But I don’t want to disable the network manager at all. So I wait for the NetworkManager to finish it’s tasks for setting the IP configuration manually afterwards.
One annoying thing in this case is that the NetworkManager puts the Firefox in offline mode. I searched my system to turn off this functionality in NetworkManager. But since I did not found the configuration option I searched the Firefox configuration. And I found an option to turn off the NetworkManager influence to the online/offline state of Firefox.
To disable that behavior enter the configuration of Firefox browsing to about:config. Then search for the option
toolkit.networkmanager.disable
in using the filter field and set the value to true.
After restarting Firefox the option should be used and the NetworkManager will never put the Firefox in offline mode again.
Feb/103
Disable Trash/Wastebaket in Ubuntu Karmic
By default Ubuntu Karmic or more detailed the file manager Nautilus moves files which are deleted to a trash or wastebin like it is called in Ubuntu. Using external HDDs which are plugged in to other systems with different operating systems is kind of annoying cause the “deleted” files are moved to a folder named .Trash-. This was the reason for me to check out how to disable the wastebaket in Ubuntu Karmic for at least external HDDs.
Dec/090
Git merging with removal of one commit
Git grew up to my favorite version control system, I use Git on a daily base now. I like git because it is powerful but also simple for the daily usage. Git is a complex system so there are commands and steps which I do not perform every day. So I write about some more complex steps for later reference.
Today I needed to merge two git branches but remove the changes from only one commit where some files were deleted which should be left untouched in the target branch. I realized that using a temporary local merge branch where I removed the unwanted commit to later merge it with the target branch.
Nov/090
tar: Extract specific files from a large tarball
Unpacking single files from big tar archives which have been compressed with gzip (Often named .tar.gz or tgz) is annoying. For example you got a backup of a big filesystem packed in a tarball and just need to restore a single file which size is just a couple of kilobytes. Extracting the whole archive often takes a lot of time. This is time you can really save. Digging a bit into the man pages you will see it is possible to get single files from large tarballs easily.
You will see it is possible to extract single files based on the path, complete directories and even on wildcard based selections. I give you a brief overview about the ways I extract single files from large tar archives using GNU tar on linux / based systems.
Jun/091
Adding email hook script to sourceforge.net git
The NagVis project moved the version control system from subversion to git some days ago. In subversion we used several hooks scripts to inform developers and other platforms about our changes. Since we use a hosted git repository on sourceforge.net in this case I will describe the procedure adding git hooks for the NagVis project. For another project simply replace nagvis with your projects unix name.
You are interested? Take a look at the whole story …
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