Thanks to a tip I picked up at Tombuntu about nautilus, after following up on a trick to add files to mocp through nautilus scripts trackback link from Hilltop Yodler (great article), when doing a google search for GiS for nautilus-actions (apt-get install nautilus-actions). I learned about 3 kick ass additions to the nautilus menu. I realized Fedora Linux and Linux Mint had some of these in their context menus but didn’t make the connection to ubuntu until now.

On with the Show

sudo apt-get install nautilus-open-terminal nautilus-image-converter nautilus-gksu

for some kick ass options in the context (right click) menu of nautilus (your default file manager in ubuntu). For more information, check out the tombuntu article I linked above.

pkill nautilus

to restart nautilus and have the new packages in your context menu

More

If you’re interested in this, you’ll probably also like my article about nautilus-actions.

close nvidia-settings

in terminal:

sudo mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup
sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

paste the following:

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Configured Video Device"
    Driver         "nvidia"
EndSection

save and close.

back to terminal:

sudo nvidia-settings

and save the file.

It struck me today that I needed a simplier more streamlined solution for my simple needs. I needed a console application. Through a little research, I found moc, which happens to play shoutcast streams as I’ve become accustom to.

I then proceeded to set myself the following way:

sudo apt-get install moc
mkdir -p ~/Music/internet_radio && cd ~/Music/internet_radio
wget -r -l2 -nd -Nc -A.pls http://www.di.fm/index.php
for file in *.pls; do mocp -a $file; done
mocp

1) Installed moc
2) created a directory to download all the playlists from di.fm (since this is the station I listen to most often)
3) wget all the playlists
4) add them all to moc
5) start moc and [tab] to the play list side, enter to play

  enter  -- starts playing
  s      -- stops playing
  n      -- plays next item from the playlist
  b      -- plays previous item from the playlist
  space  -- pause
  p      -- pause

  S      -- plays at random
  R      -- repeats the same song in a loop,
	    Next (X button below) must be OFF
  X      -- switches to play sequentially
  o      -- plays a file from the Internet
  u      -- moves playlist item up
  j      -- moves playlist item down
  Ctrl+u -- adds the URL to the playlist
  g      -- searches marked string in file names
  /      -- searches marked string in file names

  r      -- rereads the directory
  T      -- switches to the theme selection menu
  f      -- toggles display mode of song titles
  TAB    -- switches marker bar between the playlist
	    and the file manager panels
  l      -- switches between displaying the playlist
            or the file manager panel
  P      -- switches full path in the playlist
  H      -- toggles hidden files view
  Ctrl-t -- toggles song duration time
  Ctrl-f -- toggles format file view
  m      -- moves to directory entered in config file
  G      -- moves to directory with currently played file
  i      -- moves to marked directory
  U      -- moves to upper directory
  a      -- adds a file to the playlist
  A      -- adds a directory recursively to the playlist
  C      -- clears the playlist
  V      -- saves the playlist
  d      -- removes marked item from the playlist
  Y      -- removes all empty items from the playlist

  < -- decreases volume by 1%
  ,      -- decreases volume by 5%
  >      -- increases volume by 1%
  .      -- increases volume by 5%

  x      -- toggles the mixer channel
  ?      -- shows help

  !      -- goes to a fast dir 1 (set in config file)
  @      -- goes to a fast dir 2
  #      -- goes to a fast dir 3
  $      -- goes to a fast dir 4
  %      -- goes to a fast dir 5
  ^      -- goes to a fast dir 6
  &      -- goes to a fast dir 7
  *      -- goes to a fast dir 8
  (      -- goes to a fast dir 9
  )      -- goes to a fast dir 10

  F1     -- executes ExecCommand1 (set in config file)
  F2     -- executes ExecCommand2
  F3     -- executes ExecCommand3
  F4     -- executes ExecCommand4
  F5     -- executes ExecCommand5
  F6     -- executes ExecCommand6
  F7     -- executes ExecCommand7
  F8     -- executes ExecCommand8
  F9     -- executes ExecCommand9
  F10    -- executes ExecCommand10

Above commands from polish linux’s article on moc audo player, great resource.

Cross platform applications that didn’t effect my switch to linux:
Web browsing: Firefox
Email: Thunderbird
(S)FTP: Filezilla
Web browsing: Opera (used for testing)

Applications I used on Windows and their alternatives I’ve found for Linux:
Text Editing: – Notepad++ | Geany
IRC: mIRC | Konversation (tried kvirc for a while but it’s too buggy)
Music: MusikCube | Amarok 1.4 / Exaile

The other programs I use are either minuscule or obvious (e.g. AIM to pidgin).

Today I’d like to share with you another great application that has replaced uTorrent (which I ran in WINE for a while and disliked), Deluge. What I love about deluge is that it is a native application with an interface that looks and behaves much like uTorrent does. Right click open folder in uTorrent in WINE is very face palm because it would try to open it in the stripped down windows explorer type thing :shudder:.

Anyway… I started using deluge at version 0.5 or so and since then it’s had a major code rewrite and feels more solid and (appears it) is now more extendible. Below is a screenshot of how nice it looks.

It even has a web-ui (if you install the package). You need to run this manually with the following command:

deluge -u web

The only thing it’s missing (that it had in earlier versions) is a good RSS plugin. There are some “solutions” like the FlexRSS plugin or Feeder (web ui only; good luck, have fun with installing that) but they are inferior to uTorrent. However, that is not enough to send me away and I highly recommend this as a Linux torrent client.

To install the latest version in Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope, I added the following PPA to my software sources >> https://launchpad.net/~deluge-team/+archive/ppa

I present to you my first two pieces of work released under the creative commons, 100% XHTML/CSS valid resume templates.

Resume Template – Modern v1 by Tyler Mulligan

View Live

Released under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License you may freely use and modify this resume template as long as you leave in the credit to me in footer, don’t sell it and release it under the same or similar license (see the link for details).

To use it Download the zip from the Resume link in the footer, extract the files, edit them for your liking and information, upload them to your server and then upload the zip so others may easily download the template from your footer.

Resume Template – Neo v1 by Tyler Mulligan

View Live

Released under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License you may freely use and modify this resume template as long as you leave in the credit to me in footer, don’t sell it and release it under the same or similar license (see the link for details).

To use it Download the zip from the Resume link in the footer, extract the files, edit them for your liking and information, upload them to your server and then upload the zip so others may easily download the template from your footer.

If you make any changes to these, I’d be glad if you told me. The XHTML is pretty solid but I was pretty conservative when it came to the CSS to keep the classic look and feel of a document.

So, to convert pngs to jpgs, I created a bash script which uses mogrify to convert, compress and thumbnail them and sed to assist in generating the forum code.

#!/bin/bash
#
# Convert pngs to jpgs, thumbnail them and generate forum code
# Created by Tyler Mulligan - www.doknowevil.net
 
condir=converted
if [ ! -d $condir ];then mkdir -p $condir;fi
pagename="http://www.nexuizninjaz.com/pics/howtos/map_link_a_ninja/"
 
# Convert to jpg and create thumbnails
echo -e "backing up originals...\n"
cp *.png originals
echo -e "converting to jpg...\n"
mogrify -format jpg *.png
echo -e "copying to converted directory...\n"
cp *.jpg $condir
echo -e "creating thumbnails...\n"
mogrify -resize 50% *.jpg
for file in *.jpg ; do mv $file `echo $file | sed 's/\(.*\.\)jpg/thumb_\1jpg/'` ; done
mv *.jpg $condir
echo -e "cleaning up\n"
rm *.png
 
# Generate forum code
for file in $condir/thumb_*.jpg ; do 
	tempname=`echo $file | sed 's/thumb_\(.*\)/\1/'`;
	echo "[url=${pagename}${tempname}][img]thumb_${tempname}[/img][/url]"
done

Future plans call for adding flags to support different image types, and including the ability to take screen shots and generate the forum code on a per screen shot basis.

Sorta Off Topic: I’ve taken a swing at frameworks be developing a new layer of organization on top of cfg files in nexuiz. I’ve thoroughly documented this scalable, fully customizable package I’ve dubbed the Ninja Pack for Nexuiz

Some features I found that make it similar to notepad++

- The hotkeys are very similar if not identical to notepad++ (gedit has different ones)
- It supports regex find/replace
- It supports ‘find in files’ – by using grep
- It’s a lightweight and efficient IDE

Some features Geany has that notepad++ doesn’t

- Status window with a history
- Scribble pad
- Built in terminal
- Color picker
- Support for projects
- Tight integration with my window manager
- The functions menu is expanded to contain all sorts of clever information that I can fold in a non buggy tree

Some features notepad++ has that geany doesn’t

- TextFX (neat macros that help you with string related pattern updates)
- GUI for changing theme colors
- Tabbed find/replace and find in all (nit pick)

Why I’m quickly choosing Geany over Notepad++

With tight integration with gnome (as opposed to notepad++ which I have to run through wine) and a package of dark themes which I was able to find quickly through the Geany’s FAQ.

I haven’t tried it on Windows yet but I’d imagine it’d run pretty well.. though you are missing out on a lot of things you can take advantage of in linux. If you’re a windows user and would like to give it a whirl, this will help you.

Give it a whirl, it’s free!

And if you like the game, please Digg it!

The UI was a little strange to me a first but it started to make more and more sense. Here’s an opening shot for first impressions.

The navigation buttons have been streamlined a bit, putting more emphasize on the back button, combining the history into one drop down and moving the Home button to the bookmarks toolbar.

One of the first things I noticed (and love) is the google suggest style address bar that queries your history based off titles and URLs.

They’ve also added a star that signifies whether you have bookmarked the page or not and it allows for a quick uninvasive way to edit your bookmark for the page.

While I find this a nice feature, I don’t believe it solves the problem of organizing your bookmarks… but rather encourages sloppiness by requiring a second click to pick a folder. I’m not sure how this will fair on the ‘mom test’.

Something I ~love~ though, is the ability to search addons without going to the mozilla site.

In conclusion, FF3 is a vast improvement that certainly increasing my web browsing efficiency. Great work guys, I look forward to the final release.

To clarify, I don’t like the downloads box to pop-up when I start a download and I want to choose where to save my file. To achieve this, I go to Firefox options:

and select your options as noted below:

To access the infamous download box in the future, use the ctrl+j hotkey combination: