Instructions for Ubuntu 11.10, 11.04, 10.10, 10.04: http://www.webupd8.org/2011/09/jupiter-applet-finally-available-for.html

Jupiter comes with a useful script to disable and re-enable the touchpad/track pad, it can be ran using the following command:

Now all you’ll need to do is add this command to a [...]]]>

Install Jupiter

Instructions for Ubuntu 11.10, 11.04, 10.10, 10.04: http://www.webupd8.org/2011/09/jupiter-applet-finally-available-for.html

Jupiter comes with a useful script to disable and re-enable the touchpad/track pad, it can be ran using the following command:

Now all you’ll need to do is add this command to a keyboard shortcut, below are instructions for several desktop environments.

In xfce:

Applications > Settings > Settings Manager

Click Keyboard

Click on the “Applications Shortcuts” tab.

Click Add:

Here you will be promped with a new window asking for the command you wish to run, enter the following:

Click OK and it will now ask for a keyboard shortcut. Simply press the key combination you want to assign to disabling the touchpad (for example, I used Alt+F1) the keys you’re pressing will show up and the window will close.

You’ll now see the command and shortcut in the list and you can now press that key combo to disable the trackpad and press it again to re-enable it.

In Gnome:

In Unity:

bish bash bosh.

http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/

The folders correspond to kernel versions and should also include the ubuntu version, for example I chose to update 11.10 (oneiric) from “3.0.0-14-generic” to “3.1.4″, this was in a directory called “v3.1.4-oneiric/“.

linux-headers-*_all.deb

Open up the openbox config file, it should be located in /home/username/.config/openbox/ but if it’s not you might have to do a little digging.

Find the following lines and remove or comment them out, you can use Ctrl+W in nano to find:

Let’s say you’ve got a text file, of any size, big or small, and you want to remove every other line of that file, well here are a few commands in Linux that allow you to do this.

Example, you want to get from this:

Okay, so you have Arch Linux installed and let’s say you’re wifi isn’t working and you need the package “iwlwifi-3945-ucode-15.32.2.9-2-any.pkg.tar.gz” to fix this but you don’t have a wired connect. What do you do? Blast in your Arch cd, mount it, mount the packages sqfs file and install using pacman.

Mount cdrom:

Errors:

$ dmesg usb rtl819xU:FirmwareDownload92S(): failed with TCR-Status: a rtl819xU:ERR!!! _rtl8192_up(): initialization is failed!

Solution 1:

To get this wifi dongle working I simply had to download the above firmware and place it in /lib/firmware/RTL8192SU/ and then reboot my computer. You should check that location [...]]]>

Errors:

Solution 1:

To get this wifi dongle working I simply had to download the above firmware and place it in /lib/firmware/RTL8192SU/ and then reboot my computer. You should check that location before hand and make a backup of anything inside of it if you’re not sure what you are doing. If it’s empty you can use the following commands to make the directory and then download the firmware directly.

Solution 2:

Alternatively download the source and build it:

Downloads:
Firmware: http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/kernel/dists/trunk/firmware-nonfree/realtek/RTL8192SU/rtl8192sfw.bin

Source: http://launchpadlibrarian.net/33927923/rtl8192se_linux_2.6.0010.1012.2009.tar.gz

One of the most annoying things about PDF files are their fixed font size, the only real way of getting a better view at the text is to zoom the whole page in. This isn’t really a fix for that annoyance but it’s a way of getting more info to screen ratio by removing [...]]]>

One of the most annoying things about PDF files are their fixed font size, the only real way of getting a better view at the text is to zoom the whole page in. This isn’t really a fix for that annoyance but it’s a way of getting more info to screen ratio by removing the wasted white space around the body of the file for each page, this really comes in useful when displaying PDF files on your Kindle, Nook, Smart Phone or other eBook Readers.

It’s really simple to use and by default it crops all the white space from around an image, it does this per page rather than for the entire document which allows for the best results (as long as you don’t mind changes in font size when you’re reading it).

Change input.pdf to the name of the file you want to crop and output.pdf to the output cropped file.

Some PDFs have better results than others and some PDFs will look the same on eBook readers if they crop the whitespace, but it’s a useful tool to have for some of those old pesky JPEG PDF files with massive borders all the way around.

Example: Left = input, right = output

Some PDF files seem to bring up the following error:

I’m currently not sure what causes this, possibly something to do with the encoding type of the PDF? or maybe just some missing dependencies..

For more info about pdfcrop check out the Ubuntu Manpage: http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/gutsy/man1/pdfcrop.1.html

For Christmas I got a Kindle 3 and it was instantly filled with Free eBooks (http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page) and research papers (PDFs). I found myself wanting to be able to automatically synchronize it with a folder on my desktop when it was plugged in and found no one else had posted online how to do [...]]]>

For Christmas I got a Kindle 3 and it was instantly filled with Free eBooks (http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page) and research papers (PDFs). I found myself wanting to be able to automatically synchronize it with a folder on my desktop when it was plugged in and found no one else had posted online how to do this, so I began researching into udev and rsync to get something working.

Setting up udev rules to run a script when the Kindle is plugged in.

Firstly, we need to find some parameters of the Kindle which are unique to it so that udev can identify that it is the Kindle being plugged in and not another USB mass storage device. We’ll need to find out where the device is mounted in /dev/ which can be a little tricky because this folder is pretty full.

An easier way to do this is to first, without the Kindle plugged in do the following command (list the directory and pipe the output to a file called dev1 in the home dir):

Now plug the Kindle in and redo the command, changing the destination output:

The difference between the two files will show what has changed in the /dev/ directory:

The output for mine (show in the image below) shows that 3 things changed when I plugged in the Kindle, sdb, sdb1 and sg2 directorys were added (shown by the > sign to the left). The folder I am looking for is the sdb1, this is where the mass storage device is found.

Write down where it’s found in /dev/ and then you can clean up those two files you previously made:

The next thing we want to do is use udevadm to collect some useful information about the device which we can do by the following command (I have chosen to pipe the output to a file called kindle in the home dir, because the output was pretty big. If you don’t want to remove the > ~/kindle from the end of the command):

WARNING: This can look pretty daunting but, (in the words of Douglas Adams) Don’t Panic.

While this many look daunting, what you want to do if find some attributes from the output which mean only your Kindle will be found when looking for them all, the problem I have found is that, with udev rules you cannot go too far down in the parent tree which stops me being able to use the Kindles serial to identify it. This could mean that my computer will sync any Kindle that’s plugged into it but I don’t have 2 to check. The following are the attributes I chose:

Now you’ll want to write the udev rule in /etc/udev/rules.d/

According to the readme the numbers represent the priority of the rule (higher overriding lower) followed by a descriptive name and it must end in .rules eg (xx-description.rules).

The following is the whole line I used for the udev rule, the only addition to the above is the RUN+=”/home/alex/.scripts/kindlesync.sh” which will run the script in that directory, this script contains the rsync command.

Save and close the file and then restart the udev service:

Writing a script to sync a folder on the Desktop with a folder on the Kindle using rsync:
Change the first directory from “/home/alex/ebooks/kindle_sync” to the directory on your computer where you want to keep the files that will be synced onto your Kindle and the second from “/media/Kindle/documents/sync/” to the location on your mounted Kindle where you want the files to be stored, save this file as kindlesync.sh. This is the script you call from the udev rules so for mine it’s saved as “/home/alex/.scripts/kindlesync.sh”.

Go to the location of the script and make it executable with the following command:

Now try plugging in your Kindle and make sure it syncs up!

Problems

In the udev rule, ACTION==”add” can be used to specify when the Kindle is first plugged in, however when trying to use this Ubuntu’s auto-mounting service mounts the drive after the script is ran so the sync becomes useless. Without this it runs the script 3 times, twice before it has mounted and then once it has mounted – this is currently the best I have found but it’s extremely messy.

With the latest update of Android “Froyo”, it’s now possible to take screenshots/screen captures without the need to be plugged into a computer, mess around with the Android SDK or Root your phone. You are easily able to take screenshots of the home screen and while in any app. I have only been [...]]]>

With the latest update of Android “Froyo”, it’s now possible to take screenshots/screen captures without the need to be plugged into a computer, mess around with the Android SDK or Root your phone. You are easily able to take screenshots of the home screen and while in any app. I have only been able to test this with a Samsung Galaxy S (I9000-GT) running

Froyo so comment on your results.

Here’s how to take a screenshot in Froyo:

Hold down Back and then press the Home button.

You should now see a pop-up near the bottom saying “Screen captured. Saved as image file” as in the following image. The files will be saved to a folder named ScreenCapture in your home directory as a .PNG.

By holding down the Back button it doesn’t actually go back if held down, it waits for you to press Home. After a few seconds of holding it down however(I can’t quite figure it out) pressing Home will continue the “going back” operation as if the Back button was tapped.

After installing an update to WordPress I received the error:

“Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.”

I was unsure if this was down to my hosts servers being temporarily down, going down during the update or if WordPress had simply failed to update whatever it was updating. Turns out it [...]]]>

After installing an update to WordPress I received the error:

“Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.”

I was unsure if this was down to my hosts servers being temporarily down, going down during the update or if WordPress had simply failed to update whatever it was updating. Turns out it was the latter and it’s really easy to fix, first log on to your ftp, file manager or whatever for your hosting and browse to your wordpress install, in the root of this there should be a .maintenance file, just delete this and everything should be back to normal. Once back in the WordPress dashboard you may be asked to reinstall whatever failed however sometimes it will have completed the install and just not managed to delete this file.