Koda

On the eve of GNOME 2.14, it would only seem suitable to do a little feature on two of the tray doodads that we’ll likely be seeing a lot more of in the months to come. Emphasizing dbus-powered hardware pluggability, both of these little apps provide useful and pretty information particularly useful to mobile users. Read on for a quick review/preview, and Ubuntu apt-get commands for those who are running Dapper.

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I did a little more exploration of compiz this afternoon, and have a few updates to share.

For starters, I stumbled upon the Gentoo Wiki XGL Howto, with a surprising amount of information regarding it. A few things to be gleaned:

Thing 1:
Mplayer can be run at reasonable speeds when the arguments -zoom -vo x11 are added to it. I’m really not sure why this works; I only know that on my system, it does. Intuitively, I would think that using the x11 driver would work worse, as it is supposed to be without acceleration, but it sure performs better than the broken xv support.

Thing 2:
The wiki mentions a neat little util called transset, which lets you set window transparency on the fly. apt-get install transset, run it with a decimal opacity between 0 and 1, and click on a window. Fun! Be careful though, don’t run it with transset --help like I did, or it will totally dissapear your window. Gee, um, not the greatest software design.

So, the logical conclusion from this, is that to have a really good time, you must make a bunch of semi-transparent mplayer windows and throw them around. Well, it worked for me.

I’ve updated the Howto with most of these goodies.

Finally, for some annoying reason, Google does not seem to be crawling this blog very well. Thus, if you came here looking for a Howto, and found a whole bunch of other silly things instead, it can be found here.

Today was spent mostly tweaking more fun CSS details, and around the house. I went to see Good Night, and Good Luck today - very interesting film. The quality of the acting and production was very good, and the message relevant and interesting. All about the importance (and the dissolution of) our media. A lot to think about.

Unfortunately a lot of the intricacies probably flew over my head, likely due to the CSS-induced lack of sleep from last night’s efforts. Definitely something I’d see again, to be able to catch those important details. The film was done all in black and white and really immersive - pretty arty. At first the lack of color started to annoy me, but I could see so much texture in the grayscale that I liked it after a while (and I knew it would stay that way).

Quick update on Compiz: after a few days of normal desktop use (art, internet, email), I have to say that I am still very satisfied with Compiz’s performance. Only a few minor crashes: every now and then gnome-window-manager dies, and window borders disappear - opening up gnome-terminal and starting it up again solves the problem. I haven’t seen Compiz on a whole do much mischeif. Idle performance is very good; the fans stay on the lowest speed on my desktop-replacement laptop/brick. It doesn’t seem to be eating a lot of memory, either. No surprises, other than the total bling of it all.

Good night, and good luck!

Last Updated: Jun 8, 2006
Want a more up-to-date compiz? Read a follow-up here.

Overview

Goal: Install Compiz and Xgl on top of Gnome or KDE.

Pros:

• No compiling, all packages downloaded from Ubuntu repositories.
• Userspace compiz startup configuration.
• Works with both fglrx/ATI and Nvidia cards.
• Cooler X functionality, more responsive GUI.
• Impress your friends.
• You know you’ve been aching to try it.

Cons:

• Recommended dist-upgrade to Dapper.
• Requires proprietary 3d acceleration drivers, reasonable card.
• Beta and somewhat buggy software.
• Video playback issues (mostly on ATI cards).
• Getting your feet wet.

An Oh-So-Skippable Intro

Compiz.
Maybe you’ve heard the buzz, the pictures and videos, and spent the past few weeks in absolute agony over the coolness of it all. Okay, maybe you haven’t - but I have. I could rant on and on about why this is the absolute coolest thing ever. An OpenGL powered desktop, Composite, OSX-rivalling effects, and works on ATI cards? At first I thought it to be too good to be true. Yet, there are the screenshots, the forum posts, and everywhere people seem to be talking about it. So why not give it a shot?

The problem is, I’m lazy. I don’t want to dirty up /opt/, don’t want to cvs X.org, don’t want to hack anything I’ll have to remove later. So when the first round of make-filled instructions came out, I waited. If you’re a little less excited than I am, perhaps you’re thinking of waiting a while until it’s working in Dapper. Here’s the thing: thanks to a few brave souls, it already is. What?! you say? Okay, it’s quite beta, but that’s part of the fun, right? And you won’t have to compile anything, so it’s like beta without the beta. In just 3 steps, we can do it. (more…)

Have a look at Scrapbook, a Firefox extension that will completely change the way you feel about offline browsing. This gem of an extension is a save page function on steroids, truly an archival tool for the masses. Stop leaving the web behind as you browse it.

So, surely by now we’ve all heard about the new and fancy Firefox 1.5… and how much it will totally rock your socks. It’s clear that a lot of good work has gone into this one.

Where do I start? There’s the new: SVG, Canvas, and CSS3 Column support, as well as better caching under the hood. On Linux, the GUI has become much peppier, with the tab bar and window resizing now redrawing quickly. DHTML seems to have been given a bit of attention too, as I can only recall how painfully slow moo.fx moved on Firefox 1.0 (click on the green buttons) even on my P4 2.8… I was pleasantly surprised to see it moving wonderfully smooth in this new version. Oh, and Firefox is not vulnerable to the recently discovered “Extremely Critical” Internet Explorer Vulnerability (discaimer: Firefox *will* crash from the exploit, but is not subject to the IE bug that allows remote code to be run)

Now, what if I were to tell you that you could even further the aforementioned rocking-your-socksage in this version? Here’s a few must-have extensions to start you out.

I’ve been using the wonderful Tab Preview for a few weeks… and it’s become so ingrained in my browsing style that I’ve stopped thinking about it. And yet, the 1.5-enabled thumbnailing frenzy doesn’t stop there! Do yourself a favor and pick up Viamatic foXpose. This deceptively simple Firefox extension will take all of your currently open tabs and tile them in your browsing space - perfect for finding that elusive page you made a mental note to get back to.

If you’re like me, and have always found Firefox’s sidebar interface a little bit clunky, you’ll be overjoyed when you first try out All-In-One Sidebar. This little wonder not only reorganizes all of Firefox’s existing sidebars into a pretty buttonbar at the left, but hooks into the Firefox UI and turns the dialogs for Downloads, Themes, Extensions, Page Info, and the Source Viewer (whew!) into sidebars as well. There’s more - All-In-One Sidebar doesn’t simply copy the interfaces verbatim, but improves upon them. For instance, text boxes in the sidebar have a handy “X” button, allowing you to clear their contents with a click. Each sidebar has it’s own Tools menu that provides extra functions. Possibly the best part about this extension is that every element of it’s organization and behavior is customizable.

Found a website that shuts you out for using Firefox? There are many user agent switcher interfaces available for Firefox. Named simply enough, User Agent Switcher is my personal favorite. It does all that should be expected from it’s name, and has a clean, customizable interface. There are several ways to access User Agent Switcher’s interface, which comes with three default modes: Internet Explorer 6, Netscape 4.8, and Opera 8. More can be added, if you please.

Looking good! That’s all I have for now - be sure to browse the whole collection on Mozilla’s webpage. Many more goodies can be found there.

Enjoy, and remember - Spread Firefox!

You just gotta love Ubuntu Dapper.

Sorry I’ve gone so long without an update… I came down with a rather good cold and a lot of schoolwork over the weekend. On the plus side, I came out of it with a 9 page story for my writing class, which I look forward to getting critiques on tomorrow. Of course, as fate would have it, I also have two tests tomorrow. One is a quiz on the Katakana Japanese syllabary.

In studying the character set, I found two excellent pieces of software for Linux that have made the memorization work a breeze. Here’s a little review of them.

I started by using the excellent langdrill (Ubuntu: apt-get install langdrill) software to get fluid with Hiragana earlier this month. This excellent little program also features swedish and basic french (though I haven’t tried those!) and a variety of methods for drilling yourself on the language. One nice feature is the ability to switch between matching the Japanese character to it’s english character, and vise versa. However, as I got to use langdrill more, I noticed the user interface is a little clunky. Katakana has a lot of little confusing details that are hard to read, and I never could figure out a way to increase the font size in langdrill. Today, I decided to take a look to see if there were any other programs available with a larger display. So, after a bit of digging in synaptic, I discovered…

…just what I was looking for. Kanatest (Ubuntu: apt-get install kanatest) is a wonderful little program that will thoroughly test you on both Hiragana and Katakana (104 characters per syllabary!) with a beautiful large caligraphic display and an excellently simple user interface. It does what it is supposed to and does it well. This little app comes highly reccomended if you ever need to learn the Japanese character sets.

As Kanatest does not include more advanced options or quizzes for Japanese numbers and words, I will definitely be using both it alongside with langdrill in my studies. I hope that this little review has assisted yours!