Archive for February, 2012
Neeks Amp should not be lost in oblivion
Tuesday, February 28th, 2012 | Gadgets, Tech-savvy | 1 Comment
Remember the times when mp3 was brand new, sounded terrible and it took almost an hour to encode a 3 minute song? Those were the days 😀
The de-facto mp3 player of the time was Winamp – my favourite one was 2.81 (@see oldversion.com for some nostalgia). I’ve been using Winamp ever since on all my Windoze installations, now that I use Linux I fell in love with Audacious which supports Winamp themes. I just don’t like bloated media players …
Back in the days I had a favourite skin that was always a pain in the arse to search for. Neeks Amp. There are at least two versions out there and I used to have a hard time finding the right one. So here is a little blog post for me to never look for Neeks Amp again and maybe make somebody else’s day as well.
Audacious provides a few nice skins out of the box and because I did not have Neeks Amp at hand I chose Refugee as my new default skin. Today I like it even better than the old skewl Neeks Amp, yet who knows, maybe I will be looking for Neeks Amp at some point in the future again. Now I know where I have to look.
So here is the file: NeeksAmp.zip – just unzip it to /usr/share/audacious/Skins
and make sure you enable the option “allow loading of incomplete skins” in your Audacious settings. (Seems the original artist did not “implement” the full Winamp skin spec 😉 )
Five toys I’d like to call my own
Monday, February 27th, 2012 | Gadgets, Misc, Tech-savvy | 5 Comments
“Honey, we pretty much have everything now …”
I just have to share my thoughts on things I’d like to have yet cannot purchase for reasons such as money, time, sanity and the like. › Continue reading
Mint 12 (/Ubuntu): Set up Java alternatives
Saturday, February 18th, 2012 | Java, Linux, Tech-savvy | 2 Comments
Your modern Linux distro will provide you with a more or less decent Java setup by default. Mint 12 comes with a Sun JDK 1.6.0.26 pre-installed. To switch between installed versions of your Java runtime use the
update-java-alternatives --list |
command to list installed alternatives and
update-java-alternatives --set alternative |
to switch them. If you still want to have different versions of the JDK you can always download them manually, untar and use them directly. So far so good.
I wanted to be able to switch my downloaded JDKs as easy as the pre-installed ones, so I was looking for a way to add my JDKs to my system’s repository. So here is how it’s done (it’s basically a copy of a nice post I found, I just wanted to spread the knowledge) – it’s a bit painful but made me feel quite good when I was done 🙂 › Continue reading
eclipse essentials: Grep Console plug-in
Friday, February 17th, 2012 | IDE, Java, Tech-savvy | No Comments
Every time I set up a mint eclipse I am wondering why an IMHO essential feature is missing: a configurable coloured console.
I like stacktraces to be red and “JBoss started” messages to be bold. I like the important log entry you are looking for to be highlighted with a yellow background.
All this bliss is provided by a very nice plug-in I’ve been using for years: Grep Console.
Using it is very easy and intuitive. Just select the desired text part in your standard console output, right-click and choose “Add Grep Expression”.
You can add colour and format information for background & font of the matching expression or the whole line.
That’s basically it, there is not much more to say, yet sometimes it’s the simple things that make us happy, right? 🙂
Go get your Grep Console using this URL as your eclipse update site: http://eclipse.musgit.com
Mint 12: Hide unwanted devices in Nautilus
Friday, February 10th, 2012 | Linux, Tech-savvy | No Comments
My laptop consists of quite a few partitions, different OSs and file systems. Nautilus displays everything that will be mounted to /media as a device in the places sidebar. This became an annoyance, because I really don’t need to see my Win7 system partition and my old Mint 10 partitions on a regular basis. I tried the easy way: right-click on an item and say “remove” or something – naaat!
I was looking for an easy solution and came across some pretty old forum posts and workarounds that simply don’t work (any more). Here is how I managed to get rid of the unwanted device entries fairly easily: you simply have to explicitly mount the unwanted volumes and use a folder other than /media – basically /mnt will do. This way you don’t have the unwanted file systems listed in Nautilus directly yet can access them easily by navigating to /mnt/mountpoint.
Step by step:
- open nautilus
- mount all unwanted files systems by selecting them one after another
- open a terminal
- list mounted devices
nick@mintbox ~ $ mount
- look for the entries that resemble the unwanted files systems
- write down the /dev/sdx and type attributes
- create mountpoints for each device in in /mnt
nick@mintbox ~ $ sudo mkdir /mnt/exampleMountPoint1 nick@mintbox ~ $ sudo mkdir /mnt/exampleMountPoint2
- open fstab
nick@mintbox ~ $ sudo gedit /etc/fstab
- add a fstab entry for each device (first is a Win NTFS partition, second a ext4 Linux one)
/dev/sda6 /mnt/exampleMountPoint1 ntfs-3g defaults 0 0 /dev/sda7 /mnt/exampleMountPoint2 ext4 defaults 0 0
That should do the trick.
Treasures of the toolbox: SequoiaView / GdMap
Tuesday, February 7th, 2012 | Gadgets, Linux, Tech-savvy | No Comments
A few years ago I stumbled across a tool (SequoiaView) that graphically displays the contents of your hard drive using a so called cushion treemap. It’s a fast and easy way to get an overview of your (probably messed up) file system.
This is one of the gems I considered part of my Swiss “computer tools” army knife.
Now that I use Linux as my desktop OS I had to find an alternative to this Windows-only tool. Luckily there are quite a few similar tools available for Linux. I am pretty happy using GdMap.
So, whether you are using Windoze or Linux, try one of these cushion treemaps to get an idea how of your file system looks like from a distance. (…and get rid of these old ISO images in your temp dir 😉 )
Happy housekeeping!
A Studio Ghibli homage
Thursday, February 2nd, 2012 | Activities, Misc, Movies | 1 Comment
Today I invited Totoro to stay.
Ever since we moved into our “new” flat a few years ago we could not decide what to do with our living room walls. I suggested that we could try to draw the Studio Ghibli logo – namely Totoro – next to the TV. The other side of the telly got decorated with the beautiful postcards that come with the German Blu-ray edition of Arietty and Laputa. Now I feel like a true fanboy 🙂
And this is how I will enjoy my films from now on:
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