The story of how I find cool stuff, inevitably break said cool stuff, and (hopefully) end up fixing whatever I did

I have a Macbook Pro which has a large touchpad that is really sensitive so its always clicking on stuff while I am typing, which is extremely annoying. I have tried going the syndaemon route to disable the touchpad while typing, but it is very unreliable in my experience and I’d rather go about doing this without another process running in the background. This is a Linux specific tutorial, so if you want to know how to do this on Windows or OS X I apologize as this will not work for you. I do most everything in a terminal except web browsing (and even then I use elinks unless I need flash or fancy javascript), DWM is my window manager and I use vimperator with Firefox so I hardly use my mouse as it is.  Who needs a mouse when I already have 100 buttons at my disposal?  Anyway, I was looking for a way to quickly toggle my touchpad driver on and off so I can use it when I need to and then quickly get rid of it again.  While this guide is specifically for DWM and my Macbook touchpad, if you alter the scripts for your particular drivers and set up the keyboard shortcuts with whatever window manager you use, this guide should be fairly universal.

Here is a simple bash script that will determine whether a module is loaded and insert/remove accordingly:

I have this script located in /usr/local/bin/toggletp.  bcm5974 is the name of the macbook’s touchpad driver and swarp is a program that will move your cursor to specific coordinates on the screen.  Unfortunately there is no way to disable the mouse cursor in X so my solution was to move the cursor to the very bottom right corner of the screen where it can’t be seen when the module is disabled.
Now we are going to need a simple sudo wrapper since modprobe/rmmod require root access:

Now in order for you to be able to execute this script requiring root access without a password, you will need to edit the sudoers file to allow this. I tried using setuid originally until I realized that setuid doesn’t work on shell scripts

Here is the line I use in my sudoers file:

Wheel is just a group that my user belongs to. This is just the bsd style way of managing root access. This line allows you to execute the toggletp script as root without a password. Make sure that you set the executable bit on these scripts and lock down access since they can execute commands as root without passwords.

Now, these are the relevant lines from my DWM config.h so set the keyboard shortcuts for my scripts:

The third line and the last line are the chunks relevant to this guide. Copying these lines into your config.h will make it so that every time you press MODKEY+Z, it will execute the sudo wrapper for toggling your driver (mine is located in the build directory in my home folder). Now recompile dwm, reload, and , if everything worked out correctly, you should be able to toggle your laptop touch pad on and off at will with a simple keyboard shortcut!

Leave comments if you have any questions, I’m happy to help. Also, I cannot take credit for the touchpad driver bash script, a friend of mine came up with it and I modifed it for my use.

As an Arch Linux lover, I love all things minimalist. I have recently fallen in love with MPD (Music Player Daemon) due to the fact that I am prone to dropping out of X, working on something (usually something that I broke :p), and then jump starting X once more. MPD allows me to do this and keep on jammin’ to my tunes. Unfortunately, I have encountered a problem where, when updating the database (and sometimes at other times), MPD procedes to eat both of my cores and then all of my memory and swap, resulting in a segfault. This is highly upsetting. Turns out, the culprit is an ancient version of libid3tag in the Arch repos that is causing all of the issues. libid3tag gets hung up on certain id3 tags and then just gets confused and goes on a cpu and memory stealing rampage. I found an bug post just earlier this month on the Arch site documenting this issue and I was glad to find out that I was not the only one with this issue. The gentlemen was kind enough to post a PKGBUILD that included some patches that, ironically, came from Debian repos. I thought Arch was supposed to be the bleeding edge one??!! :p I have posted a link to the bug report which has the PKGBUILD attached near the bottom of the page and I am proud to report it has solved my issue. Kudos to honki for fixing this for us!

http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/18595

While it is just as easy to go to twitter.com and update your status, it is just way freakin’ cooler to do it from the command line.  Now I will have to disappoint you Microsoft loyalists and say that this only works in Linux.  My bad.  Anyways, I take no credit for this script at all, I am just informing you of it because it doesn’t show up many places and I thought it was a pretty useful script.  The downside to this little piece of code is that you have to imbed your username and password inside the script itself, which most of the time is a bad idea, but if you’re willing to take the risk, it’s pretty damn sweet.  To do this, just paste this code into /usr/bin/twitter (which you will need to create):

Obviously, you will need to replace the capitalized letters with the info required. Then you will need to make this script executable via chmod +x /usr/bin/twitter.  Now to reap the rewards.  Bust out a terminal and type in the work twitter, then write anything you want, that happens to be less that 160 characters long, and it will update your twitter account with whatever you typed after the word twitter.  You are now so much cooler than you were before that it is actually making my brain hurt but, unfortunately, as cool as this may be, it will not get you any chicks.  Enjoy![cc lang="bash"]

Amarok is an awesome music program that any tunes junkie should get there hands on.  While I realize that there are a ton of awesome Open Source music players, I just really think that Amarok rocks so I am going to show you a way to make it work even better.  Amarok supports SQLite out of the box, which does its job, but it is not nearly as fast as MySQL in handling large music collections.  I myself have a giant collection, so I need a database engine that can handle the load.  Amarok 2.0 has since been released and it has built-in MySQL support, so no extra setup is necessary.  While this is convenient, the standard repository version of Amarok for most distributions is still, and probably will always be, 1.4 ish.  With that in mind, I am going to give some instructions on how to utilize MySQL for this version.  First off, this guide is for linux users only. Again, my bad.  Secondly, you will need the MySQL server and client packages, which can be obtained with the simple line “apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client” without the quotes of course.  Now that you have the packages you will need to create an Amarok database within MySQL and create a user “amarok” that the program will use to access and maintain the database.  This can be done with the following lines:

$ mysql -p -u root   <<this will get you into the MySQL prompt (you will need to enter the root password that you set up during the isntall process)

now use these lines to set up the database:

That should get you all ready with a shiny new database and database user that amarok will be able to exploit.  Note: obviously you will need to change the password abaove. I used the obnoxious capital message to catch you attention on purpose.

Now that you have a database, you will need to configure amarok so it can utilize it.  Open up amarok and go to Settings > Configure Amarok > Collection.  You should now see a dropdown box that says “SQLite”.  Change that to MySQL and then the hostname should be localhost, the username should and database should be amarok and the password should be whatever you decided to replace the password with in the code above.  Now hit apply and ta-da!, amarok will be using MySQL as its database engine.  Enjoy!

If you are a windows user there is something you should know, you are not getting all of your maximum bandwidth capacity out of your computer.  Windows had this nifty little setting that reserves as much as 20% of your bandwidth for QoS (Which stands for quality of service.)  This should make you angry, at least it made me angry.  I will now teach you how to get that bandwidth back.  As a last note, this only works on XP Professional.

1. Click Start

2. Click Run

3. Type in “gpedit.msc”  and hit OK

4. In the Group Policy window, expand Computer Configuration, and then expand Administrative Templates. Expand Network and click on QoS Packet Scheduler.

5. Click on limit reservable bandwidth in the right window

6. Select the Enabled option and then type zero in the bandwidth box then hit apply and click that OK button

7. Go ahead and restart the computer for good measure and all should be good

You may be wondering why not disable the bandwidth?  Well the stupid thing about this setting is that the only way to get your bandwidth back is to enable the setting and set it to zero.  I know what youre thinking, that’s stupid. I thought so too.