Brian's Blog

I was looking for a way to sync my Firefox bookmarks between multiple systems and a quick search gave me Foxmarks. It's simple enough. You just make an account with them and install the add-on. After your first sync it keeps things updated when you close out Firefox.

Pretty cool.

The battery in my iAudio M5 is starting to die. Since it is no longer under warranty it would cost me about $60 USD plus shipping to have it sent to Cowon. That's not a crap load of money but I figured I could do this myself. I mean, how hard is it to replace a battery right?

I ordered a replacement today and it should be here in a couple of days. Even so, I wanted to know what I was getting into so I did a bit of exploratory surgery on my player. Of course, the battery is in the hardest place to get to. I mean, why make it easy for people to replace the most likely to fail component? Make it hard to do and people are more likely to just buy a new player. Also, it requires a bit of soldering. Not a biggie for me as I'm reasonably handy with the soldering iron, but the Average Joe would scoff at the idea.

In any case, the battery should be here in a couple of days and I'm going to give it a shot. I did some searching for a Do-It-Yourself guide but didn't find one. Maybe I'll post a few pictures if my attempt is successful.

When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary. -- Thomas Paine

OK, I have to be the dumbest geek ever to walk the planet. I've been going crazy trying to figure out what I need to do on this laptop to get the ambient light sensor to actually work. I even posted on LQ Forums. My answer was:

"Did you try Fn + F11? It works on mine."

And, sure enough, it works on mine too. Perhaps this is all I need to do on my work PC with Vista on it. When I had XP on it I actually needed a driver to make it work. HP never released a Vista driver so I assumed it just wouldn't work.

...

Well, look at that. It works on Vista too. I wonder why XP needed a driver at all? It sure seems to be a hardware level feature rather than something that requires software to make it work. Perhaps the XP bits were just to control the on/off status of the sensor via a GUI interface rather than having to use the physical keyboard?

Whatever. At least it is working now.

James (one of our devs) at work IMed me this like about cleaning up junk files after installing Vista SP1 to free up disk space. As I'm always on the hairy edge of running out of space due to running a handful of virtual machines I ran it and freed up about 2GB of disk space. Not a ton but every bit of space helps.

The command to run is vsp1cln.exe and makes Vista SP1 permanent so you can't uninstall it afterwords.

I've had this TC4200 running Kubuntu Linux for a fair bit of time. I've used it off and on for various things but never took the time to get all the tablet functions working close to as they would in Windows. Unfortunately it seems that much of the tablet specific technology that handles handwriting is proprietary, thus leaving Linux out. After some searching with little results I accidentally stumbled upon Cellwriter when I was just about to give up. I checked the apt repositories to find it isn't there. However, there is a deb package for Debian downloadable from their website along with the source. This deb installed just fine in Kubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy).

Previously I was using xkbd, which was sufficient but was only an on screen keyboard. Cellwriter is both an on screen keyboard and handwriting recognition utility. It did take some training to get it to work half decent. Basically it was about 10 minutes of writing each letter and common symbol 4 or 5 times to give it an idea of what your writing is like. After this it was fairly accurate. By default it tunes itself when you correct it's mistakes. Pretty slick.

If this interests you I'd just go to their site and see what they have to say about it. No sense in me repeated it over again here. But so far I'm pleased with its performance.

I was letting my daughter type away on my laptop today. She's only 3 so it pretty much consists of randomly pressing keys to make "stuff" happen on the screen. I noticed that she was tapping the touchpad frequently and causing all kind of crazy things to happen on the screen. Now, I'm pretty good about keeping away from the touchpad when I type, but for her sake I decided to find out how to disable the touchpad while typing on Linux. In my case, Kubuntu.

Refer to the article linked above for the full deal. In short it is:

1. Add Option "SHMConfig" "on" to the InputDevice section for your Synaptics Touchpad in your xorg.conf file.
2. Make sure that syndaemon -i 1 -d runs on login.

The guide at Ubuntu Geek is obviously Gnome centric but for me I just made a small script calling the syndaemon command in ~/.kde/Autostart and it runs just fine. You, of course, must chmod +x the script before it will run. I did run into one odd thing though. Apparently KDE won't run the script unless you put #!/bin/bash as the first line. Without that line it simply opens up the file in an editor every time to log in. No biggy, but odd.

What this does then is disabled the touchpad completely while you are typing and waits for one seconds after you stop typing to turn it back on. Why this option isn't a check box in some KDE dialog I'm not sure.

I was just poking about on Linuxquestions.org and saw a post signature that cracked me up. Here it is:

"Windows is NOT a virus. Viruses are small and efficient."

A couple of other good ones that gave me a chuckle from the past are:

"Windows, reboot. Linux be root."

and

"Avoid the Gates of Hell. Use Linux."

I just ran into an annoying behavior of a couple of things with compiz. What happens is OpenOffice Spreadsheet opens but without window decorations and none of the menus work. I found a fix for that but then it broke You Tube (and other sites) full screen mode.

To get both OpenOffice AND You Tube full screen working at the same time I had to disable "Legacy Full Screen Support" in the Workarounds Plug-in and also disable the "Unredirected Full Screen Windows" option in the General section.

I've been hearing about this compiz thing for quite a while now. Supposedly it has some really nice effects. Well, actually it does have nice effects as can been seen if one searches Youtube for the word 'compiz'. I'm usually a late adopter but I figured I'd give it a shot on my TC4200 Tablet PC running Kubuntu. The purpose of this post is really just for me to record what the heck I did to get it working. Maybe someone who stumbles upon this entry will find the info useful.

Here's what I did:

1. Followed the very good Compiz, Emerald, Fusion-icon in Kubuntu Gutsy How-to on the Ubuntu forums.
2. I found an odd problem with the window contents not drawing right, see the screen shot to the left here. To fix this odd think I had to add Option "XAANoOffScreenPixmaps" "on" in the Device section of my xorg.conf
3. Restart X and compiz.

The modified section of my xorg.conf file looks like this now:

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/GMS/910GML Express Graphics Controller"
        Driver          "intel"
        BusID           "PCI:0:2:0"
        Option          "XAANoOffScreenPixmaps"         "on"
EndSection

Things now work quite nicely and look pretty too. It's kind of cool watching the window you just closed go up in flames rather than just disappear from your screen.

Compiz is nice, but it is still a bit buggy I think. Every once in a while Emerald crashes when using Alt-Tab to change windows. It's easy enough to restart Emerald but it's still sort of annoying. To get around this I just disabled the Application Switcher plug-in and went with the Ring Switcher which does the same thing but with a cool "windows moving in circles" effect.