Tag: tips

Switching off the notebook

This must be on of the most hilarious things I’ve heard in some time…

My mother just called me and said that she has a problem with her newly acquired notebook. The bloody Windows XP got stuck while booting up and there is no way to shutdown the computer. She pressed the Power button, but it didn’t work. She did than the next logical step – pulled the power plug from the socket. To her surprise, this didn’t help, because notebook’s battery was charged and the damn machine didn’t react in any way.

It’s been a while since I talked to regular computer users. Most of the people around me are professionals and have other fun problems. This one though reminded me of all those technical support jokes, but in a new, refreshing way. It also reminded me my frastration with ATX motherboards, when I first met them. I remember wondering why the Power button doesn’t work and who was the idiot who came up with this idea.

P.S.: If you came across this post trying to figure out how to switch the damn thing off, it’s actually easy: just press the Power button and hold it for ten or fifteen seconds and it should do the magic.

Multiple sound carding with Linux

Yesterday and today I have been trying to solve a little problem o’mine. Since I started using the single computer for everything, there was a small dillema with sound. The thing is that I wanted to use the speakers to listen to mp3s and ogg, while use TV sound when watching movies. Having two sound cards in the same computer looked like a logical solution.

Luckily, both sound cards (Creative and Intel) were detected and configured by system-config-sound. Test sounds played nicely on both of them and I could even select the default sound card.

The question was how to use one card with some applications while using another with others. The answer was pretty simple – Advanced Linux Sound Architecture also known as ALSA.

aplay -l will show a list of detected sound cards. From than on it’s a breeze. Here is an example for mplayer to use a non-default card:

mplayer -ao alsa:mmap:noblock:device=hw=1.0 -fs dvd://1

The key here is the “device” argument and substituion of “:” with “=” and “,” with “.”.

Now, let Google cache this post for me to never have this problem again.

Engines for Mozilla Firefox search bar

Most of you probably already know this, but I have just found out myself, so I’ll share just in case some of you missed it too…

Recent versions of Mozilla Firefox have a feature called a search bar. It is usually located to the right of the address bar. By default, this search bar is configured to use Google. That is, instead of going to Google, you can just type your query in that search bar, hit Enter and you will get the search results. This is very convenient and saves a lot of time and clicking around.

Now, if you click o the small Google icon in the search bar, you will be presented with a list of other search engines, that you can use instead of the default Google option. There is also a menu item marked “Add Engines“. If you click on it, you will be taken to this page, where you can find hundreds and hundreds of other engines that you can use. Two that I have been missing the most were Google Images and IMDB.

Check this out and you will most probably save yourselve a lot of time.

P.S.: On Linux, these engines are installed into some global directory, so your Firefox will need root access.

Mozilla/Firefox bookmark keywords

Both Mozilla and Firefox browsers have a nice feature that is not so well known. One can assign unique keyword for the bookmark and then use this keyword in the address bar to quickly navigate to the bookmarked site. For example, go to http://images.google.com and bookmark it. Then go Bookmarks menu and select Manage Bookmarks. Right-click on the newly created bookmark and choose to edit Properties. In the Properties window put ‘gi‘ where it says Keyword, click OK and close the bookmark manager. Now, whenever you type ‘gi‘ and hit Enter key while in the address bar, you will go to http://images.google.com.

This is a nice way to minimize the number of clicks you need to perform in order to get to your favourite sites. But it can be troublesome finding unique keywords for your bookmarks. Solving this particular problem is the aim of the “Mozilla/Firefox Custom Keywords Directory” project. They also cover a bit more on what you can do with your bookmark keywords. Check them out.

Unicode in Linux

Installed RT bugraq/ticketing system for our developers. Seems to work as good as it does for our support team.

Another step to the victory with Unicode support in both X and console. Today I’ve managed to fix the pseudographics (think mc) in console. It looks much better now. Even displays russian characters in mutt. Does not let me input them yet, though. Most updated /etc/sysconfig/i18n looks like this now:

LANGUAGE=en_US.utf8
LANG=en_US.utf8
LC_LOCALE=ru_RU.utf8
LC_CTYPE=ru_RU.utf8
LC_MESSAGES=en_US.utf8
SYSFONT=ruscii_8x16