Further Down the Rabbit Hole

It annoyed the piss out of me that irssi doesn’t have a list of nicks in a given irc room.  Granted you can just /who but this just seemed like too much work given that programs such as weechat (which I have since swtiched to) have a nicklist right out of the box.  If, for whatever reason, you decide that weechat just isnt for you and you wish to have a nicklist in your irssi, then follow these simple steps.

grab the nicklist script from irssi.org

then move said script into your irssi scripts folder

then fire up irssi and issue these two commands:

/nicklist screen

Presto!  now you have a nicklist inside of irssi.  Beware of this script however, it does not play well with certain terminal,mrxvt for instance.  There are ways to autoload scripts in irssi but I honestly didn’t use it long enough to be moved to figure it out.  I suggest you check out weechat.

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!

So one thing I miss about windows is the Active Desktop, or at least some features from active desktop.  You can just drop cool animated HTML files into the active desk and it just plain works.  Unfortunately, this is not as easy in linux.  Enter a small program called xwinwrap.  This nifty little bugger lets you run pretty much anything you can think of as a desktop background.  You can even run things like the Quake 3 demo as your background, how freakin’ awesome is that.  The instructions that follow I know for a fact works in Ubuntu Hardy and Intrepid.

1. Copy and paste this into your terminal to satisfy the needs of xwinwrap

2.  Now copy and paste this in order to get the xwinwrap source code

cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@cvs.freedesktop.org:/cvs/xapps co xwinwrap

3.  Now here’s how to compile, type these both into the terminal

cd xwinwrap

and then….

make

4.  This is optional but if you do this it makes the xwinwrap command easier to get to

sudo cp xwinwrap /usr/bin

Now you can do some really cool stuff with this program like play movies, games, programs, screensavers all as the desktop background

Run this junk in the terminal and witness its coolness. Check out the xwinwrap man page for all the command

This will run the matrix screensaver as your background.  Just fool around with the commands and you can run pretty much anything with this sucker.

I waited until the end to include this for you lazy bums who don’t want to compile yourself.  Here is a link to a deb package that will just install it for you.  I did this for your own good b/c compiling your own software is good practice.

Here’s a video to show you what the final product looks like

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!

Step 1: Backup all your shit

Step 2: Download this.

Step 3: Burn that to a CD or DVD, whichever you prefer

Step4: Change the boot order in your BIOS so you can boot from that new awesome CD you have

Step 5: Insert your CD/DVD and reboot your computer

Step 6: Click “Install Ubuntu”

Step 7: Follow very obvious instructions that my 12 year old sister could even understand

Step 8: Witness the awesomeness that will soon be your brand spankin new computer that will be way better than it was before

Step 9: Thank Alek

Step 10: Party (this step is not optional)

This was all a joke by the way, treat it as my way of lightening the mood for more advanced things to come.  Disclaimer:  this WILL erase everything you have on your computer so don’t do this unless you already know what you are doing or have consulted me prior to performing step 6

-al3k-

Let me begin first by describing what “screen tearing” is.  Screen tearing happens when you scroll, refresh a page, move to a new page, or something of the like and the screen sort of “tears” and doesn’t refresh all the way, or it artifacts and doesn’t move in some spots.  The screen will update as soon as you click in another spot but it is just extremely annoying when you are reading an article and part of the screen doesn’t scroll.  You will end up clicking several hundred times to get the screen to refresh and I can say that it is just really, really annoying. I am not sure if this is specific to a certain card, I have a GeForce 8400M by the way, or what but my Google searching seems to allude to the fact that it affects several different lines. The only way I have found to fix this problem is to downgrade to the 173.xx driver series, and then the problem will go away (at least it did for me).  I am one who loves having the cutting edge software and all the new bells an whistle, but the screen tearing is just too much to handle.  The direct link to the latest release of the 173 series is below, I hope this solves everyone else’s problem as well.

Nvidia Linux Latest 173 Series Driver (this is the x86 architecture version, so if you have a 64 bit chip you will have to navigate to that version)

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.

We have all been there at one time another.  We have a computer that needs reformatted but there’s a catch.  Either the CD drive doesnt work very well, or at all, there are no burnable CD/DVDs to be found, or the computer just plain doesn’t have an optical drive at all.  This is something that has the potential to throw a major kink in your project, and just really piss you off.  Well there is a very simple solution that even the most computer illiterate can handle.  This solution is called UNetbootin.  This little handy tool has the potential to take any bootable CD image and transfer the image to a USB drive and make it bootable as well.  Not only can you use CD images that you have, but it also has the ability to download images from their respective websites automatically and install them to the USB stick.  Even better, it’s available for both Linux and Windows.  The program creates a a Syslinux install on your USB stick, although it does not format the drive so you won’t lose the data that is already on the stick.  It supports tons of linux distros such as Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, CentOS, Debian, Gentoo, Linux Mint, Arch Linux, Mandriva, Slackware as well as FreeDOS, FreeBSD and NetBSD although it is not limited to the ones on this list.  It also has the ability to load utilities such as Ophcrack, BackTrack, Gujin, GParted and many more. I stuck the link below that leads to the Unetbootin sourceforge page.  The program is pretty self explanatory and has a Wizard that makes it pretty much impossible to get lost so I don’t think any guide is necessary.

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

Oh…and I take no credit for this program.  I am just using this to inform you as to how cool this useful little program is.

So you wanna be cool and have an awesome desktop for all of your friends?  You could just do the easy thing and install linux….but if not and you are just all nice and cozy with windows, I will cave and give you an easy way to do that.

Windows won’t let you just download any theme you want as is so you need a little patcher program to help yourself along.  I you have any service pack below Service Pack 3, then use this little guy here.  If you are the security guru and went ahead and installed Service Pack 3 then use this sucker.

Download whichever file applies to you and save it to a place that is easy to find.  Once this file downloads, unzip it with your favorite unzipper program.  Unzipping is built right into windows so if you’re lost just double click on the file you just downloaded and a wizard will pop up to ease your befuddlement.  (I really recommend Unrar by the way, but that is just my opinion).  Now find yourunzipped file and double click on it, a button should pop up with some info, you can read through if you want, and then hit the “Patch” button and wait a few.   There will be a window that pops up about “Windows File Protection” that will most likely freak most of you out, but its ok b/c I’m telling you to calm down and just hit cancel and everything will be alright.  It will then ask you, “Are you sure you want to keep these unrecognized files versions?” and you will now answer yes to this question.  Another window will then pop up, prompting you to restart so go ahead and save everything and close out and then hit ok to reboot.

Now that you are back from rebooting and managed to locate this page again, you are ready to install some brand spankin’ new custom XP themes to reall show your friends how awesome you are.  I can recommend two good sites for XP themes,  Wincustomize.org and Customize.org. (I can’t imagine that these are the only two sites but seeing as how I don’t use windows very much anymore I don’t go around looking for themes for it, please feel free to recommend better ones in the comments.)  Peruse these sites and locate a theme which you wish to install and then come back here once you have located one or two or seven.  Once you have found the themes you like, download them to a place that is easily accessible but one that you won’t readily delete a couple months down the road b/c you don’t remember what it is.  Now since these files are most likely located in a zip file, go ahead and unzip them with your favorite program into that special folder you have. Now open that folder and there should be a bunch of files in there that you have no idea what they are, just find the one that ends in .msstyles and double click on it.  A window will pop up that looks something similar (but not exactly the same) as this

.

Just hit ok, and your new theme will be installed in a jiffy.  If you decide you hate all your new themes and just wanna go back to plain old boring windows default, then just right click on your desktop, hit properties and click the appearance tab that is second from the left at the top of that window.  If you have any questions you can post them here or email me arollyson@gmail.com .

Unfortunately for you your desktop with windows will never be as awesome as this….