Skype fonts too big after KDE4 install?

On Ubuntu Gutsy, if you have installed KDE 4.0, as per this page on Kubuntu.org, you might notice that in Gnome , your Skype font is much too large.

The solution is to

sudo apt-get qt4-qtconfig

then, from the terminal , type

/usr/bin/qtconfig-qt4

You will notice that the QT window has fonts about the same size as the big Skype ones. Change them using the QT Config interface, select File -> Save.

Your Skype fonts will then be back to something more normal in Gnome.

Ubuntu Gutsy - installing Compiz Snow effect

UPDATE: this post is out of date. Please look elsewhere on installing the Snow plugin

Create a compiz subdirectory in your home folder

mkdir ~/compiz

Install the packages required for compiling compiz plugins

sudo apt-get install compiz-bcop compiz-dev build-essential libxcomposite-dev libpng12-dev libsm-dev libxrandr-dev libxdamage-dev libxinerama-dev libstartup-notification0-dev libgconf2-dev librsvg2-dev libdbus-1-dev libdbus-glib-1-dev libgnome-desktop-dev x11proto-scrnsaver-dev libxss-dev libxslt1-dev libtool

Download Snow

wget -O ~/compiz/snow.tar.gz 'http://gitweb.opencompositing.org/?p=fusion/plugins/snow;
a=snapshot;h=01d0ff6ec71dae4699bc990e0114569c8ad4e083'

Extract , make , and install

cd ~/compiz/
tar -xvzf snow.tar.gz
cd snow
make
make install

Restart XOrg (logout/login).




Source:13 Compiz plugins for Ubuntu Gutsy

Freecom Musicpal

Over the weekend I bought a Freecom Musicpal internet radio from PC World. In terms of form factor it's light and small enough to fit on your kitchen windowsill. Installation was a breeze - all I had to do was enter my WEP key once - inputted by turning the dials to select letters - and I was onboard.

The Musicpal comes with a lifetimes subscription to Vtuner, and currently has approximately around 4,000 radio stations to choose from, under every genre imaginable. At present only mp3 streams are supported, but Freecom have said that they are currently working on Windows Media (wma) stream support. Expect that to be offered in any future firmware updates. ( In "settings", there's an update option to update the firmware)

Soundwise, the speaker isn't of enormous high quality, but for a kitchen radio its perfectly adequate.

Why go for an internet radio? Well, for starters , you don't need to power up a laptop. Plus the choice of thousands of stations means that you wont be short of choices of even the most eclectic music. This afternoon , for example, while preparing the Sunday dinner, we went from Irish trad to German Schlager, with a dose of Congolese dancehall ,Senegalese guitar-folk and a blast of Austrian classical, plus some cheesy French pop. Your listening habits are definitely changed with such a device, and it's a must-have if you are sick of the usual 24x7 commercial radio. And since it's now residing in our kitchen, and has an extremely easy to use interface, our musical exploration of the world is only starting. And once Freecom offer WMA support in a future update, the stations available will expand to thousands more.

I bought it for £79.99 in PC World , but no doubt it's probably cheaper online. Another thing to bear in mind as well , when it comes to learning a language - once you have one of these radios in your kitchen, it makes it so much easier to tune into a French, German, Spanish etc language station - and just having that in the background is a great aid to getting familiar with how a language is pronounced and spoken.

As part of making the Internet pervasive in consumer devices, the Internet Radio is a very interesting first step - I would expect it to be built-in to hi-fi systems in the future. But for now, to get a taste of the future, get hold of one of these devices. Your listening habits will change forever.

Important sidenote: You MUST have wifi enabled in your home for the Musicpal to work. However, it does have a standard network socket at the back if you prefer to run a network cable to it.

The donut capital of the world found on Google Streetview

Here's the Google Maps link

Hat tip: Tammo in the comments on Googlesighting

New StreetView cities and embeddable panoramas

Via Google Lat Long :

Today we're pleased to announce the launch of 8 new cities with Street View. Check out full spherical views of Boston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Detroit, and Providence.

Boston
Providence
Minneapolis and St.Paul
Forth Worth and Dallas
Indianapolis
Detroit


The Indianapolis and Boston streetviews also encompass several surrounding towns including Worchester, Marlborough,
Danville,Crawfordsville,Muncie, Bloomington, Morgantown and many more.

Ubuntu Gutsy post install script for your laptop

Ubuntu Guide is a valuable source of information on what packages you need to install after installing a base Ubuntu Gutsy system on a laptop.

So instead of manually doing lots of apt-gets based on the Ubuntu I just put all the relevant ones into a single bash script. This will get all the usual multimedia codecs, firefox plugins, and a lot of other stuff. Just chmod 700 postinstall after creating it in your favourite editor.
Then from a terminal type

./postinstall

to run it. If there is a software package that you don't want below, put a # at the start of the line to comment out.

Note: the medibuntu.org repository allows you to apt-get skype,googleearth,win32codecs and other packages that cannot be included in the Ubuntu repos for legal reasons. It is not supported by Canonical so use at your own risk.


#!/bin/bash
# postinstall script
#!//bin/bash

#this should be all on one line
sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/gutsy.list -O etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list

#this should be all on one line
wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -


#update your packages database
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install w32codecs libdvdcss2
sudo apt-get install mozilla-mplayer
sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-plugin
sudo apt-get install mozilla-plugin-vlc
sudo apt-get install kaffeine-mozilla
# astronomy programs
sudo apt-get install kstars
sudo apt-get install celestia

# genealogy
sudo apt-get install gramps

# plugin that allows you to type
#"apt:packagename" in the Firefox url bar

sudo apt-get install apturl

# bluetooth
sudo apt-get install gnome-vfs-obexftp

sudo apt-get install googleearth

# rar compressor/decompressor
sudo apt-get install rar unrar

# sticky notes
sudo apt-get install tomboy

#desktop system monitor
sudo apt-get install gkrellm

# allows you to tweak compiz
sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager

# lots of ubuntu tweaks in a handy GUI application
wget http://ubuntu-tweak.googlecode.com/files/ubuntu-tweak_0.2.0-1_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i ubuntu-tweak_0.2.0-1_i386.deb

# music player/manager
sudo apt-get install amarok
sudo apt-get install sox
sudo apt-get install lmms

# sound editor
sudo apt-get install audacity

# codecs
sudo apt-get install mencoder avidemux transcode
sudo apt-get install ffmpeg2theora

# video player
sudo apt-get install mplayer

# mysql database server and client
sudo apt-get install mysql-server-5.0

# ssh server so that you can ssh login via terminal to your laptop from another box
sudo apt-get install ssh


# php web development language
sudo apt-get install php5
sudo apt-get install php5-cli
sudo apt-get install php5-gd
sudo apt-get install php5-curl
sudo apt-get install php5-mysql

# more bluetooth stuff
sudo apt-get install bluetooth gnome-bluetooth
sudo apt-get install bluez-gnome bluez-utils

# listen to thousands of internet radio stations
# and be able to rip the streams to mp3 format
sudo apt-get install streamripper
sudo apt-get install streamtuner
sudo apt-get install xmms

sudo apt-get install skype

# more codecs
sudo apt-get install non-free-codecs

# lightweight spreadsheet alternative to OpenOffice
sudo apt-get install gnumeric

# loads MUCH faster than Open Office Writer
sudo apt-get install abiword

# top notch programming editor
sudo apt-get install kate

# KDE office suite
sudo apt-get install koffice

# KDE browser and filemanager
sudo apt-get install konqueror

# allows SoundJuicer to rip to mp3.
sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse

KDE 4 - Weather Plasmoid

An overview of the progress and beginning implementation of both the Plasma Weather data engine and applet.

SystemRescueCD

System Rescue is a Gentoo based live CD for recovering from a hard disk crash.

From the website:

SystemRescueCd is a Linux system on a bootable CD-ROM for repairing your system and recovering your data after a crash. It aims to provide an easy way to carry out admin tasks on your computer, such as creating and editing the partitions of the hard disk. It contains a lot of system utilities (parted, partimage, fstools, ...) and basic tools (editors, midnight commander, network tools). It is very easy to use: just boot the CDROM. The kernel supports most of the important file systems (ext2/ext3, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, jfs, vfat, ntfs, iso9660), as well as network filesystems (samba and nfs).

An epiphany about the Phantom Menace

I finally figured out Stars Wars 1 - The Phantom Menace

I remember when it came out , it was dismissed by die-hard Star Wars fans as being childish - especially when it came to Jar Jar Binks. A criticism that rose to such an extent that The Phantom Edit was created by one Star Wars fan.

Well, my 5 year old daughter absolutely loves it (just watched it on UK TV today), which lead to my figuring it out :

It's a kids film. Just as the original Star Wars was..

Mr Splashy Pants

Thanks to Boing Boing and Reddit, Mr Splashy Pants is in the lead in a Greenpeace "Name a whale" competition.

Converting Drupal to a social network

In order to convert your Drupal install to something more like a social network, install these modules:

-buddylist
-favorite nodes
-event
-signup
-guestbook
-service links
-private message

(via the facebook Drupal discussion group)

Linkdump

Retro Futuristic Soviet space art
Top ten terrible tech products
Posh CSS
Celebs as Star Wars characters
Sony reveals it's all flash notebook
Rex starts it's list of lists for 2007

Dallas Morning News review the Asus EEE PC

Datagate advert

In the wake of the latest government I.T. fiasco, I spotted this advert on a number of blogs:

tables versus css

Somebody blogs about 30 popular websites that are still using tables, and the age old debate on tables v css breaks out in the comments. It also breaks out over here on Digg

E8 explained

Via a comment in Slashdot

(I am not a particle physicist or a mathematician of the right sort, but I can kind of follow this sort of thing)

Okay, the context is that you've got particles, and they're fundamentally all the same, but they're "turned" in different ways. Think of a ball with 3-color LEDs inside: you can rotate it around three axes, and move it in three directions, and you can also cycle its color and change its blinking pattern. Particles are like that, except that the topology is weird: it's not back to the same orientation until you turn it around 720 degrees, instead of 360 like normal objects. The "gauge group" is the rules for how you can change things. For example, the total color of the universe is white: if you turn something from red to blue, you have to turn something else from blue to red; but you can also create a pair of a green and a purple (anti-green). They write all these rules up in math, and it's tricky because a lot of the features vary continuously (that is, you can rotate something an arbitrarily small amount). And due to the interaction of the rules for one property with the rules for other properties, there are only certain combinations of properties that you can get. They work out all the combinations that you can have and those are what you see as "different" particles that your experiments show. Of course, we don't know what the rules are, and we're trying to figure that out from what combinations of properties we've seen and which ones we're speculating are impossible. And it's hard and takes a lot of calculation to figure out what a candidate set of rules would even mean as far as results. And people are looking at known results and trying to describe them better than "we've done a billion things, and a billion things happened".

Now, the math of rules for how things can interact turns out to be sort of limited; there are basically 4 normal cases, which are boring, and then there are a few exceptional cases, which are interesting. Of these, the hardest to prove stuff about is E8, and it's just now becoming clear what combinations it allows. It's like one of those puzzles where you press a corner and lights change, and you have to turn off all the lights, but it's got dozens of corners and dozens of lights and every time you press a corner a bunch of things change at once, and there are different kinds of corners and it also matters exactly what angle you're holding it at, so there are hundreds of things you can say about each move.

And the mathematicians working on E8 recently said, "well, you can get positions like this and not like that", where "this" and "that" are big complicated lists. And this physicist read that paper and said, "hey, those lists are familiar; I made similar lists of particle interactions". So the proposal is that particles work like E8 in what kind of rules they follow. And it's a really nice theory, because E8 is essentially the most flexible set of rules you can have without it falling apart into just anything being possible (and some rules or properties just not mattering).

E8

E8 Theory of Everything

Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything
A headline worthy of the Onion.


Commentary on Reddit.com
Link to PDF of the paper
E8 wiki entry
Blog reaction to the E8 theory

Asus Eee PC review

Ars Technica has a review of the Linux powered EEe PC mini-laptop.

Linux is "too hard" to use... yeah , right

Feisty Fawn Ubuntu install. On my laptop.

Insert a CD, and this is what I get popping up automatically....



Hint - note the Extract button.