The idea of watching movies in a text console may seem weird at the beginning, but it’s not as weird as you would think. I actually used it recently two or three times as a fallback solution, that allowed me to continue watching in spite of crashed graphical environment. Because if you like to play with bleeding-edge software, things tend to blow up from time to time. And if things blow up, it’s good to have some kind of “plan B”.

Prerequisites

What I am going to describe, should work on different distributions and with different hardware configurations. I have used MPlayer (version SVN-r35920-4.8.0, but older versions should work too) with fbdev2 video output on Arch Linux, w…

I’ve been following Enlightenment for the last few years, hoping that it would finally stabilize enough to be suitable for daily use. And of course I wouldn’t be myself if I didn’t try to use it after a stable 0.17 has been released. But apparently Conky behaves differently on E17 and Openbox. And what would life become without Conky, may I ask?

There are actually two aspects here. We need to ensure that Conky looks and behaves properly, and we need to find a way to launch it after logging in.

Configuration

Essentially, you need the following configuration in your ~/.conkyrc:

own_window yes 
own_...

Since I like testing new stuff, and this website serves me very well as a nice small guinea pig for any kind of experimentation (mostly trying out web frameworks and different deployment options), I ended up needing to migrate website’s data to a new database schema. And this time I switched from Play Framework 1.2 to Ruby on Rails 3.2. Of course, I could have modified my models to use the old schema, but that would be less interesting and probably not worth the hassle for a not-critical-so-let’s-have-fun application.

Tools

The tools that are required for this to work are (some of them quite obvious):

• Heroku Toolbelt - all magical Heroku’s t…

After few years of using Gajim, the history of all messages, statuses, etc. can grow up to quite large size. In my case the logs.db file consumed 128MB of disk space.

Searching through the conversation history (in the Conversation History window) can take up to few seconds for each query. And after removing and adding various XMPP/Jabber (or Facebook Chat) accounts, there’s a lot of unnecessary Jabber IDs left in the database.

So let’s take a look at how to speed things up and remove unnecessary data form logs.db (but whether it will work for you or not, substantially depends on how you’ve been using Gajim and what you keep in Gajim’s history).

Make…

If you’re here, you probably want to know how to configure notifications for volume change actions, just like it is in most of current less-geeky GNU/Linux distributions and window managers.

So if you press the volume up/volume down button, you want to see some notification with a beautiful icon and current volume percentage, like this:

And if you press the mute button you are expecting something compa…

This is a little story about Play Framework, Google App Engine and Heroku. And it’s also a story about this very web page, because it is written in Play, was hosted on GAE, and is now being hosted on Heroku.

A long, long time ago…

…this site was written in Ruby on Rails. But after I had been forced to change my old hosting to something new, I was looking for cheap hosting options and I decided to try out Google App Engine (which is basically for free and is a well-tested major platform).

The main problem was that it looked like a no-go for Ruby on Rails apps. There is JRuby, but [ap…

Why the need of this?

Let’s assume you want to write a script that would allow you to navigate faster between your most frequently used directories. And let’s take my everyday problems as an example. I have a similar directory structure:

~/studies/
     semester1/
         subject1/
         subject2/
         ...
     semester2/
         subject1/
         subject2/
         ...
     ...

Every time I want to cd to one of these directories I have to write something like:

cd ~/studies/semester4/subject2

which is a little pain in the arse if I have to do this many times (and I have to). And no, using Nautilus or Thunar …

Configuring file associations is easy if you’re using a full-featured desktop environment, such as KDE, Gnome or Xfce. In such case, xdg-open delegates the task of opening file to kde-open, gnome-open or exo-open, depending on the environment. But with Openbox and similar environments it’s not that easy.

It’s likely that when you click on a just downloaded PDF file, it opens in Firefox and not in Evince or Okular (or your any PDF-reader of choice), because xdg-open defaults to Firefox.

One possible solution is to install a part of KDE, Gnome or Xfce environment, and use one of the *-open family. But we’ll try a more “pure” solution.

Creating list of default appli…