In Praise of The T60p

Really, really impressed... I have to say that, despite all the years, the wobbliness and the taped broken plastic chassis, the Thinkpad T60p is still an amazing lappie, specially its IPS LCD screen...
Since I've installed an SSD drive on it, the damn thing sort of breath a new found purpose in life.

Xenial Wallpapers

Guess I could say that any of those, I mean the stock ones, are my cup of tea...
On Trusty at least, there was one wallpaper (see screenshot) that IMHO was rather good, and I've used it a lot.
Now on Xenial I don't get to stay on any of the stock wallpapers, all of them are sort of boring.

Movies During The Weekend

• Legend

Boy was that a boring one or what...
Sort of a Goodfellas with fish and chips, but lousy.
The GF wanted to see this one...

• Fright Night

Amazing one, a bit naive, maybe, but a wonderful movie to re-watch, guess I saw that one on VHS some 30 years ago.
The GF loved it too.

• Christine

Another re-watch (obviously).
It aged quite well, entertaining to see it once again, after I don't know how many years.

The Unity Desktop

My trusty T60p, Stilgar, now with a new Xenial Xerus install on its SSD.
Running a long time icon companion here... The Moka icons, but this time with the OSX-Arc-Shadow theme.
I would say the thing looks rather nice.

Saturday 23-07-2016

Get Rid of (Notifications of) Updates, updates, updates & more updates...

So, it looks like I finally found the source of those annoying update Notifications I posted a couple of weeks ago...
Simply click on the Install button for the "OS Updates" entry (the other two will go away automagically later on) be done with.

Saturday 16-07-2016

Stilgar Got a Solid Drive

 Time to upgrade!
Yesterday got an SSD drive (the cheapest one I could find around here) for my old, trusty, clunky and beloved Thinkpad T60p.
Installed Ubuntu, Xenial Xerus, 32 bits of course.
Yeah, I know... I wanted to hold a minute or two until Xenial, but, what a hell, time for new things I guess!

105K and counting!

Yes! Another thousand up!
Music, music, music & more music!

Change Theme & Icons on XFCE From The CLI

So, this bug with the XFCE Appearance program is still busting balls around, not all the time, but most of the time... It simply crashes right after launching it.
Now, in order to change themes and icons without having to run the program as root, (and login out and back in) to see the freaking theme or icon change, I'm changing those via:

xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Net/ThemeName -s "Mint-X"
xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Net/IconThemeName -s "gnome-wise"

ffmpeg and yet more ffmpeg...

Ahhh... By now you certainly know the drill.. The Roku 3 and those pesky mkv files that simply refuse to play sound...
But no fear! Once again, this ffmpeg snippet from the past saves the day!
This time, without the burned in subs, like this:

./ffmpeg -i "My Great Movie.mkv" -c:v copy -strict experimental -c:a aac -ac 2 -ab 448k "My Great Movie.mp4"

Movies During The Weekend

Only one this weekend, we were really tired, and I was with a bit of menacing flu...

• High-Rise

What a boring piece of crap...
Yes, the art director and the production designer shine, but the movie is booooring, I read the book in the early 90's and I found it very, very, very good, but the movie sucks.

Not So Global Menu for VLC on Xenial

There is a glitch with the Global Menu and VLC on Xenial.
When you stop a movie (it only happens on video files), all the menu options are reproduced on the VLC window as well.

Tuesday 12-07-2016

Filename casing, or Is It Filename Casing?

Why, Oh Why????
Maybe I thought it was cool back then?
Maybe I wasn't thinking at all...
Anyways, paying the price of incorrectly filename casing my music files...
May Jeebus Have Mercy On Me...

The Unity Desktop

Well, a modern one, I guess...
Sort of a solarized palette... Seems like the cool kids nowadays replaced their Fuzzy Eco desktop backgrounds for these solarized, sometimes flat, images.
I'm Ok with that.
The image is, for what I Googled, from an upcoming video game or similar.

Monday 11-07-2016

104K and counting!

Another thousand up... Yeah!!
This time, Rhythmbox makes it back onto the Labels, as it is scrobbling once again.

Movies During The Weekend

Once again, we watched a shit load of movies during the weekend.
Winter and yet another ridiculous holiday helped a lot.

• The First of The Few

Actually, I watched this one alone, the GF was sleeping, and I feel a couple of times during the movie too.
Nice, but I was extremely tired when I saw it, the most remarkable items where the scale models & the little pond on the Spitfire's inventor garden.

• Eye in The Sky

Amazingly good movie, way better than "Good Kill", which has -somehow- the same subject matter.

• In The Line Of Fire

A re-watch for me, and a first watch for the GF, this time on FHD.

• The Gift

Fantastic thriller, mighty entertaining.
We saw the trailer a couple of months ago with the GF.

• The Pack

Once again, we saw the trailer with the GF about a month ago or so... It was good, but nothing fantastic...
Starts kinda slow, but then picks up... You might say it is a merge between Cujo and Razorback.

Saturday 02-07-2016

Rain, rain, ran & more rain... And then some cold...
But hey, I can't complaint... It is way better than summer around here...

Last.FM: It Works on Xenial's Rhythmbox

Another good hit!
Just after I found out -a couple of days ago- that Rhythmbox works with Last.FM on Trusty, now I see that it also works out of the box on Xenial.
Rhythmbox version on Xenial is 3.3, while on Trusty is 3.2.

In Praise of Trusty Tahr

Guess that I'll maintain my main rig (my beloved W530) running Trusty for a little longer...
I've tested Xenial on the X140E, and even tho it does work Ok, and looks quite well, there are few glitches here and there that might become a show-stopper, so, keep it simple stupid and all that...

Movies During The Weekend

• Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans

Really cool doc, goes hand in hand with "Leader of The Pack", the doc that comes with "Magnificent Seven" DVD extras.

• Joy

The best of the bunch.
Pretty damn good movie, the GF selected this one, and I was certain it would sorta of chick flick, but it turned out quite good.

• Easy A

The GF selected this one.
There is not much to say about it.

• The Invitation

We wanted to see the movie for quite some time... Slow, but good.
Tom Hardy's best performance since "Prometheus".

Got Clima?

Got a nice little script to pull weather info:

clima()
{
wget -q -O- http://www.accuweather.com/en/ar/buenos-aires/7894/weather-forecast/7894 | \
awk -F\' '/acm_RecentLocationsCarousel\.push/{print  "Buenos Aires" " - " $14 " - " "Temperatura: " $10"°"" - " "Sensacion Termica: " $12"°"}'| head -1;
}

Mostly because, like I said, I'm fed up of posting screenshots without weather info on them.
So, here is a little screenshot using it:

The idea came, originally from this post: Weather from terminal

Last.FM (Thru Rhythmbox) Is Alive And Kicking!!!

And so, one day, Rhythmbox starts working with Last.FM once again...
Don't ask me why, as I found out, just by accident, yesterday.
This is on the stock Rhythmbox that ships with Ubuntu 14.04.
Of course, as I noted before, since I'm using Numix Touch Flat, there a few thick (and some huge) black spaces to deal with...

The Unity Desktop

I've mentioned this theme before:

Numix Touch Flat

I love it a lot, but, there are two things that don't make this an amazing theme (for me, of course)...
It doesn't have top rounded corner windows, and it has the damn "black spaces" plaguing, most of all, Gedit.

103K and counting!

And another thousand up...
The race goes and on and on and on...

(Notifications of) Updates, updates, updates & more updates...

Getting this annoying updates notification all the time...

My Weather Indicator Story

So, the other day I was looking for something here on OE10, and I've noticed some of the old screenshots, most of those had an applet to show the temperature around here. I really miss those... Is nice to go back and be able not only to see an old screenshot of a desktop from halcyon days, but also get to know the temperature at that moment.
Getting one up & working became a necessity!
After a bit of Googling and after adding it repository, installed "My Weather Indicator":

colossus > sudo apt-get install my-weather-indicator
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree      
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  account-plugin-windows-live empathy-common folks-common gnome-contacts
  gstreamer0.10-nice gstreamer0.10-plugins-good gstreamer0.10-x
  gstreamer1.0-nice guile-2.0-libs libavahi-gobject0 libfarstream-0.1-0
  libfarstream-0.2-2 libfolks-eds25 libfolks-telepathy25 libfolks25 libgc1c2
  libgupnp-igd-1.0-4 libhdb9-heimdal libkdc2-heimdal libmeanwhile1
  libmission-control-plugins0 libnice10 libntdb1 libpurple-bin libpurple0
  libtelepathy-farstream3 libtelepathy-logger3 libupstart1 libzephyr4
  linux-headers-3.16.0-30 linux-headers-3.16.0-30-generic
  linux-image-3.16.0-30-generic linux-image-extra-3.16.0-30-generic
  python-ntdb signon-plugin-password telepathy-gabble telepathy-haze
  telepathy-logger telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following extra packages will be installed:
  geoclue-hostip gir1.2-geocodeglib-1.0 gir1.2-json-1.0 libgeocode-glib0
  python3-dateutil python3-requests-oauthlib python3-tz
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  geoclue-hostip gir1.2-geocodeglib-1.0 gir1.2-json-1.0 libgeocode-glib0
  my-weather-indicator python3-dateutil python3-requests-oauthlib python3-tz
0 upgraded, 8 newly installed, 0 to remove and 14 not upgraded.
Need to get 4,269 kB of archives.
After this operation, 17.2 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

Ok, so, 17 MB... What a hell!! But...
Anyway, installed it, and then problems started for good.

It crashed upon starting it a couple of times, not the best way of starting things...
In the end, it did started, but didn't update any weather at all, so changed the source of weather info to Weather Underground, and restarted the program... well restarted is just a saying... After that My Weather Indicator refused to start at all.
Digging a bit, I found this:

colossus > ./my-weather-indicator
(my-weather-indicator:12951): Gtk-WARNING **: Theme parsing error: unity.css:29:40: Missing opening bracket in color definition

#####################################################
System: Linux
Machine: x86_64
Node: colossus
Release: 3.16.0-76-generic
Version: #98~14.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jun 24 17:04:54 UTC 2016
Platform: Linux-3.16.0-76-generic-x86_64-with-Ubuntu-14.04-trusty
My-Weather-Indicator version: 0.8.1-0extras16.04.1
#####################################################

****** Requesting timezone identificacion
1
***** refreshing weather *****
--- Updating data in location 0 ---
****** Updating weather
****** Calculating rawOffset
-------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------
Underground Weather Service url: http://api.wunderground.com/api/87582/conditions/forecast/lang:EN/pws:1/q/-34.5873579,-58.3915699.json
-------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./my-weather-indicator", line 69, in
    mwi = MWI()
  File "/opt/extras.ubuntu.com/my-weather-indicator/share/my-weather-indicator/myweatherindicator.py", line 143, in __init__
    self.load_preferences()
  File "/opt/extras.ubuntu.com/my-weather-indicator/share/my-weather-indicator/myweatherindicator.py", line 369, in load_preferences
    self.update_weather()
  File "/opt/extras.ubuntu.com/my-weather-indicator/share/my-weather-indicator/myweatherindicator.py", line 158, in update_weather
    self.update_menu(i)
  File "/opt/extras.ubuntu.com/my-weather-indicator/share/my-weather-indicator/myweatherindicator.py", line 682, in update_menu
    weather = self.weatherservices[index].get_weather()
  File "/opt/extras.ubuntu.com/my-weather-indicator/share/my-weather-indicator/wundergroundapi.py", line 225, in get_weather
    weather_data = self._get_weather()
  File "/opt/extras.ubuntu.com/my-weather-indicator/share/my-weather-indicator/wundergroundapi.py", line 165, in _get_weather
    gvff('low', i, parsed_json)['fahrenheit'],
TypeError: string indices must be integers
And that's when I gave up on it:

colossus > sudo apt-get remove my-weather-indicator
[sudo] password for esteban:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree      
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  account-plugin-windows-live empathy-common folks-common
  gir1.2-geocodeglib-1.0 gir1.2-json-1.0 gnome-contacts gstreamer0.10-nice
  gstreamer0.10-plugins-good gstreamer0.10-x gstreamer1.0-nice guile-2.0-libs
  libavahi-gobject0 libfarstream-0.1-0 libfarstream-0.2-2 libfolks-eds25
  libfolks-telepathy25 libfolks25 libgc1c2 libgeocode-glib0 libgupnp-igd-1.0-4
  libhdb9-heimdal libkdc2-heimdal libmeanwhile1 libmission-control-plugins0
  libnice10 libntdb1 libpurple-bin libpurple0 libtelepathy-farstream3
  libtelepathy-logger3 libupstart1 libzephyr4 linux-headers-3.16.0-30
  linux-headers-3.16.0-30-generic linux-image-3.16.0-30-generic
  linux-image-extra-3.16.0-30-generic python-ntdb python3-dateutil
  python3-requests-oauthlib python3-tz signon-plugin-password telepathy-gabble
  telepathy-haze telepathy-logger telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  my-weather-indicator
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 14 not upgraded.
After this operation, 16.3 MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

And then the repo:

colossus > sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:atareao/atareao
 Applications from atareao
 More info: https://launchpad.net/~atareao/+archive/ubuntu/atareao
Press [ENTER] to continue or ctrl-c to cancel removing it

Theming Evolution

Well... It looks like nobody does it..
I'm actually pretty sure nobody uses Evolution any more, since just about every single theme I've tested fails miserably with the email client.
Problems with Evolution and some themes aren't new around here (Link 1, Link 2, Link 3, Link 4, Link 5 & Link 6).
Is getting hard to get a Unity theme that works Ok, on every single place, on Evolution.