Category: Computers

Be it a discussion of software or hardware; it will be under here.

As has been noted on this blog multiple times, I use Linux. Specifically, I use SuSE Linux. For my desktop environment, I use KDE. There are several music players available for KDE but the one that is far & away the best is amaroK. It’s got some great organizational tools, a cover manager and can even copy songs to your iPod. It rocks and if you listen to music under Linux; you’re missing out if you’re still using XMMS.

Another thing I like is Magnatune. This is a website that allows you to listen to MP3s of all the albums they offer for sale as CDs, plus they let you podcast with their music without paying for some ridiculous license. They’ve got a wide selection of music (e.g. blues, ambient, rock, medieval, etc…) and when I’m looking for something new to listen to; they’re the first place I go.

In fact tonight, I started poking around their site for some new music when I ran across this post on their founder’s blog:

A few months ago, the developers of amaroK (the amazingly gorgeous music player for Linux and Unix, that really does give iTunes a run for its money) asked me about Magnatune cooperating on their new release of their version 1.3. Their idea was to make a self-booting linux image, that boots into a linux desktop, with amaroK running and some Magnatune music included.

It’s like Reese’s Peanut Butter cups, they’re getting peanut butter (Magnatunes) mixed in with my chocolate (amaroK)! Nice move people! 😀

Yesterday, I finished downloading a large file which had been archived in multi-part RAR format. I went to unrar the file but unrar for linux just wasn’t working and Ark1 wasn’t recognizing RAR files after I upgraded to the lastest beta for KDE 3.5. This was an unacceptable state of affairs as I really wanted to get a look at the complete file I downloaded. Then it occured to me:

  1. I dual-boot with WinXP on this computer.
  2. I have WinRAR installed under WinXP.
  3. I have wine2 installed under Linux.

I fired up a terminal window and typed in: wine /path/to/WinRAR.exe WinRAR started succesfully, so I told it to decompress the archive and it di so without error! I was most pleased. 😀

1 KDE archiving tool
2 Wine version#: 20050830-0.1

Firefox Privacy Options

Have you been using Firefox for several months? And during that time noticed that it’s taking longer & longer for the Save File dialog box to come up? Then likely, you’ve got the same problem that I’ve had. Fortunately, there’s an easy (but slow) fix for this.

 

Instructions:

  1. Open Firefox.
  2. Go into Tools -> Options (or Edit -> Preferences).
  3. Click on the Privacy icon in the left-hand pane.
  4. In the right-hand pane, click on Download Manager History.
  5. Click the Clear button. At this point, Firefox may appear to have crashed but in reality it should be going through and clearing out all of the items from your download history. On my home machine, this took several minutes to complete but I’ve been running Firefox since v0.9 and have never cleared the download history before.
  6. Optionally, you may wish to change the “Remove files from the Download Manager:” from “Manually” to “When Firefox exits”. To help prevent this slow down from happening again.

This fix works on both the Linux & Windows versions of Firefox. I would presume it also works for the OS X version, but I (sadly enough) do not have a Mac to try it out on.

Ever since I upgraded CoffeeBear to the newer version of WordPress and my fancy new theme; I noticed that mozcc wasn’t displaying any Creative Commons info for my site. I’d thought it a bit odd but figured I’d broken the extension somehow and have been a bit too distracted to really look into it until this evening.

First, I made sure I had the current version of mozcc installed and that I’d freshly restarted Firefox so I knew I had the lastest version running. When that didn’t work, I checked the source code of my pages and realized that I’d completely forgotten to add in the license info when I did the upgrade. Whoops! I’ve since rectified the problem and now you can see that this site is covered by the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. The missing license info has been added in by using the WP-CC Plugin developed by Firas. So many kudos to him for this nifty plugin!