Adding flags to Gnome keyboard layout switch

One of the little things that has been bugging me for a few years now is the Gnome keyboard layout switch.  I am using two layouts – English and Russian – and instead of having two nice flags, like in KDE, I had to live with ‘USA’ and ‘RUS’ letters in my task bar.  Not that big of a problem, but annoying.  Icons are much easier and faster to understand than text.  And all the other things in my task bar are graphical, so the text stands out too much.

Today I finally decided to do something about.  Thanks to this forum post I had a solution in hand which almost worked.  The steps were:

  1. Download en.png and ru.png icons into ~/.icons/flags/ folder.
  2. Run gconf-editor.
  3. Change the value of /desktop/gnome/peripherals/keyboard/indicator/showFlags to true.

The only thing that went wrong for me were the actual images.  Gnome scaled them to 24×24 pixels and they looked rater ugly.  So I created my own icons using Gimp.  I created a new image 24×24 pixels with transparent background and then dropped in the center of it the flag icon that I got from the FamFamFam icon set.  Saved the results back into the ~/.icons/flags/ folder and vuala!

FxPro Cyprus Rally 2010

This year FxPro Cyprus Rally is not the part of the World Rally Championship (WRC).  Instead, it’s a stage of some Intercontinental Rally Championship (IRC).  Not only that, but also it’s the last stage of IRC, by which both the winning driver and the winning manufacturer have already been decided.  Needless to say, there wasn’t much to see, so I decided to skip the even altogether this year.  And I almost did.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oS17SePRFoM]

Yesterday though I went to spend some time with son at Yermasogia dam, which became somewhat traditional for us, before going to Pehnidotopos kids entertainment center.  While driving to the dam we were passed by a few rally cars, which gave me a suspicion that the rally stage was somewhere up the road.  That was surprising, because I thought the event finished on Saturday.

It turned out the suspicion was right.  There was some stage of the rally up the road and it had its finish line exactly on the dam itself.  Left with no choice, Maxim and I went to watch.  We were late, of course, but still managed to catch a few cars on the asphalt road.

Most Cyprus Rally stages are on gravel and I was wondering how much fun is it to watch the cars driving on asphalt.  Surfaces with less traction – gravel, snow and ice – provide a full range of spectator entertainment.  Asphalt, of course, is faster, but is it as much fun?  The answer is no.  While the cars still drift and skid, the pass you by much faster, and there is no aftermath, such as dust and flying stones.  Boring.  Even though the scenery is beautiful.

Having no camera with me, I shot a few short videos using my mobile phone.  You can see them at my YouTube channel.