Nozell, rhymes with Oh Hell » tips

Logitech USB headset & Ubuntu/Linux

Marc Nozell — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 18:11:28 +0000

My wife had an unused Logitech Stereo USB Headset 250 kicking around the house that I took into the office today. Joy of joys! Ubuntu/Dapper recognized it and both the headset *and* microphone work out of the box.

Just like Microsoft Windows ;-)

Democracyplayer on Ubuntu/Dapper

Marc Nozell — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 01:32:08 +0000

The good folks at GetDemocracyNow.com provide debian packages for Ubuntu/Dapper, but didn’t get the dependencies quite right. After intalling the two democracyplayer packages from their Ubuntu download page, I needed to also install the following packages:

$ sudo apt-get install libboost-python1.33.1 libgtk-mozembed-ruby mozilla-psm

There is a ton of great content!

Moving photos around behind f-spot’s back

Marc Nozell — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 01:44:45 +0000

I’ve been using f-spot since it showed up in Ubuntu/Breezy and have been keeping all my photos in a directory structure like this:
/PHOTOS/Photos/2006.06.30/ /PHOTOS/Photos/2006.07.01/
But sometimes I’ve forgotten to unclick the “Copy file to the Photos folder” box in the photos import dialog and end up with photos under ~/Photos/. Recently I checked and found there were almost a gigabytes worth of photos under there.

So this is what I did to move them to under /PHOTOS/Photos/ and keep all the tags and metadata correct.

Back up /home and /PHOTOS to an external USB. I love rsnapshot.
$ rsnapshot daily
make an extra backup of the f-spot database
$ cp ~/.gnome2/f-spot/photos.db photos-backup.db
Start poking around the f-spot database and updating it.
$ sqlite3 ~/.gnome2/f-spot/photos.db sqlite> .schema photos CREATE TABLE photos ( id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY NOT NULL, time INTEGER NOT NULL, directory_path STRING NOT NULL, name STRING NOT NULL, description TEXT NOT NULL, default_version_id INTEGER NOT NULL );
See how many photos are in ~/Photos…
sqlite> select count(*) from photos where directory_path like '/home/marc/Photos/%'; 260
Take a look at a few of them to see the path names…
sqlite> select directory_path from photos where directory_path like '/home/marc/Photos/%' limit 0,10;
Update the pathname to my prefered one. I’ve added an ‘a’ to the end just so I won’t overwrite an existing directory.
sqlite> update photos set directory_path = "/PHOTOS/Photos/2006.06.22a" where directory_path = "/home/marc/Photos/2006/6/22"; sqlite> .quit
Make the directory and move the files to the new location…
mkdir /PHOTOS/Photos/2006.06.22a mv -v /home/marc/Photos/2006/6/22/HPIM117* /PHOTOS/Photos/2006.06.22a

Repeat for each directory. I did it all within emacs’ shell so cut-n-paste made it a snap.

Another list of Ubuntu essentials

Marc Nozell — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 16:53:01 +0000

Mark Pilgrim has compiled his list of Ubuntu essentials — time to add some KDE goodness to ‘My Ubuntu/Dapper Configuration‘ page…

More on Dual Monitor with Ubuntu/Dapper

Marc Nozell — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 18:10:30 +0000

This is a follow on to last week’s post about Dual Monitor on Ubuntu/Dapper

I’ve been using the xorg.conf-ati.20060621 configuration at work with two monitors, but when at home the laptop didn’t degrade down to working with the one LCD monitor of the laptop. So, here is a new configuration that lets you switch between a single monitor mode (1024×768) or one large one (2048×768) that can be ‘slid over to’ by using the mouse. The key press is Control-Alt-+ (the + over on the side where the number entry is). On the laptop, it is Control-Alt-blue_Fn-?

Here the is xorg.conf file:

xorg.conf-ati-works-with-one-monitor.20060624

Dual Monitor on Ubuntu/Dapper

Marc Nozell — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 17:38:20 +0000

I’ve noticed a number of people asking about dual head support in dapper on #ubuntu, so here is my setup:

This hp/compaq nc6000 laptop/notebook that has an ATI card:

$ sudo lspci|grep VGA 0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV350 [Mobility Radeon 9600 M10]

I have two head monitors working with both the ‘ati’ and the closed source ‘fglrx’ drivers.

Here are the configuration files:

xorg.conf-fglrx.20060621 — works when booting without the second monitor

xorg.conf-ati.20060621 — when booting with out the second monitor attached, it still thinks it is there. Some windows may pop up on the unreachable monitor.

Before you start hacking around with your xorg.conf, save a copy somewhere safe.

w32codecs for ubuntu ‘hoary’

Marc Nozell — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 23:23:58 +0000

The stock Ubuntu repositories don’t include the w32codecs (wmvdmod.dll, etc) so xine, mplayer can play WMV and other formats. Basically the package puts 127 DLLs in /usr/lib/w32codecs.

So, I temporarily added the following line to my /etc/apt/sources.list

deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ testing main

And then did this:

apt-get update && apt-get install w32codecs

I then commented that line out since and apt-get upgrade would have picked up a bunch of updated packages from that repository.

Getting the bleeding edge iPodder on Linux (debian/sarge) mini-HOWTO

Marc Nozell — Tue, 04 Jan 2005 15:42:56 +0000

Lately, I’ve been using the bleeding edge version of iPodder from CVS (which confusingly is in the
iSpider directory) Here is how you can grab a copy for yourself:

$ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/ipodder login
CVS password: (press return)

$ cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/ipodder co iSpider

[tons of informational messages about downloading iSpider]

$ cd iSpider
$ export PYTHONPATH=/usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/wx-2.5.3-gtk2-unicode:$PYTHONPATH-unicode:$PYTHONPATH
$ python iPodderGui.pyw

… And fire up your favorite dev tools!

iPodder GUI on Linux (debian/sarge) mini-HOWTO

Marc Nozell — Tue, 04 Jan 2005 15:22:53 +0000

I’ve been using the ipodder beta on
my laptop that runs GNU/Linux Debian/Sarge in the command line only mode. But over the holidays there was and update to wxpython that gets the GUI working.

This is what you need to do:

$ alien –to-deb ipodder-1.1.2-1cl.noarch.rpm
$ sudo dpkg -i ipodder_1.1.2-2_all.deb
$ export PYTHONPATH=/usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/wx-2.5.3-gtk2-unicode:$PYTHONPATH-unicode:$PYTHONPATH
$ /opt/iPodder/iPodderGui.py

and enjoy…

comment spam

Marc Nozell — Fri, 26 Nov 2004 17:09:50 +0000

The daily comment spam is getting worse and worse — easily 100+ per day. It never makes it to the website because WordPress is setup so I need to approve all postings, but it is a PITA to weed
through the spam to find the occasionally real comments.

I’ve seen on Jeremy Zawodny’s blog that in order to post, you need to type *his* first name in one of the forms. Not rocket science if a human is making the posting, but perhaps just difficult enough for the spammer’s script to fail. The other nice thing is you can always change the question to something equally as trival. Say, “what the the color of the sky?” or “3141592 is my favorite number, what is my favorite number?”

Jeff Barr posted an entry on exactly how to do that in WordPress. The only thing that was a little tricky was the change to wp-comments-post.php was on line 22 in my copy of the file. The difference because the file is a DOS format and emacs displayed it with ^M^M at the end of each line (essentially halving the
number of line Jeff saw.

The changes work for me…