Google recently released a Linux version of Google Desktop. This is really good news, hopefully other companies will follow. What is even better is the fact that there is a Ubuntu repository for all this. Unfortunately no amd64 binaries here.
Quite a few people seem to have privacy concerns. Providing the source code for the application would definitely alleviate most of the concerns, but I am afraid this will not happen to soon. Or maybe it will?
For a while now I was using a simple command line utility in Gnome called gnome-open. As an argument you can pass a url, a file or a folder. Urls will be opened in your browser, files with the associated applications and folders in Nautilus.
This is great for applications or menu entries as well. If you want to open a PDF document you can use gnome-open in order to make sure that it is opened using the user's preferred viewer.
CheckGmail is a nice Gmail system tray notifier. You can find an older version, 1.10.1, in the universe repository, but probably you want to run the latest one (1.12 as of now). Downloading and running the basic notifier is quite simple, just unpack the tar file and run the script.
If you want all the functionality, encryption of locally stored password and hyper links in message bodies, then you need to manually install a few libraries. Here are the steps for Ubuntu Feisty:
Recently I wanted to save a Real Media video stream so I can see it later on another computer. I was using a amd64 Ubuntu and I could not even see the stream since there is no 64 Real Player (or codecs). After a bit of googling and some trial and error I managed to save the stream using mplayer. Here is the command:
$ mplayer -dumpstream rtsp://example.com/path/clip.rm -dumpfile clip.rm
Some servers allow http access to the same file, so first just replace rtsp with http and try this url in a browser or with wget.
The .rm url in most cases is wrapped in a play list with the extension .ram. Just save the .ram file locally and open it in an editor, you will see the rtsp .rm url there.
An excellent presentation by Zak Greant:
The Age of Literate Machines: A Visionary Look at Free Software
I think this is the best argument I have seen on why open source is tremendously important.
Some applications, especially editors and IDEs, allow you to add custom commands that will run an external application with the current document (or selection, folder, etc) as an argument. Also, file managers like Nautilus allow you to run arbitrary scripts against currently selected files.
I always found it hard to follow either new or updated Drupal modules. Since I could not find an RSS feed for published modules, I created a Python script that periodically scraps the modules page and generates an RSS feed.
Eventually I did find the official feeds though:
They are quite useful, but:
iCalendar files could be used for job scheduling, the same way crontab is. Instead of the five time and date fields you could specify an iCalendar file. Each event in the iCalendar file will trigger the execution of the corresponding command. Event attributes (like summary, location, description, duration, etc) could be passed as arguments to the command.
After going through several power outages recently I ordered UPSs for all our computers at home. The Linux boxes, running Ubuntu Edgy, ended with one APC ES 550 each.
APC UPSs are supported under Linux by the apcupsd daemon. Here are my notes on how I configured this daemon to work under Edgy. Make sure the UPS is all hooked up and that the USB cable is connected to your computer.
First install the package, its name is apcupsd. There is also a documentation package, apcupsd-doc, but the docs are incomplete and full of broken links. Just use the documentation from the official site if you need to.
