After getting Android Notifier working on my machine by installing OBEX, I installed Blueman on my Ubuntu 10.10 machine. I’m not sure why, but Blueman seems to work better with Android than Gnome Bluetooth. I like the interface of Gnome Bluetooth better than Blueman, but I could only get file transfers to run from Android to Ubuntu and not the other way around. Additionally, it’s fairly easy to change the download directory for Bluetooth file transfers to Ubuntu using Blueman. If anyone has a solution to either of these two issues, I’m all ears.
Anyway, back to Android Notifier. Once I installed Blueman, the notifier stopped working. Everything was still paired correctly and all that, but Notifier just wasn’t getting the messages. Turns out, Blueman seems to use an Indicator plugin that hijacks those notifications. Solution? Turn off the Indicator plugin. From what I can tell it doesn’t do much anyway… of course maybe I should retest sending/receiving files from my Nexus.
QUICK ANSWER:
Right click on the Blueman icon in your Notification Area. Select Plugins. And now un-check Indicator from the list on the left side. Done.
Again, I don’t know if there are any adverse effects to turning off Indicator. But I can’t imagine it’ll break anything.
I’ve been using the Android Notifier with my MacBook for some time. If you haven’t checked it out, please do. The application sends notifications to your desktop for everything from incoming texts to a low battery warning to third party notifications. It’s a great little app if you’re into that sort of thing. So when I made my switch to Ubuntu, naturally I wanted to get the Android Notifier working with my new machine.
I won’t get into how the application works or how to pair your phone with Ubuntu. There’s plenty of info on those out there. The issue that I was running into, was with my Nexus S paired and being able to send files to and from Ubuntu, I could not get Android Notifier to pick up on any of my test notifications. When setting up Bluetooth on my computer to allow for file transfers I’d discovered that Android uses OBEX to push and receive file transfers over Bluetooth. So, with this in mind, I decided to investigate how Android Notifier listens for notifications. After checking out the wiki on the project page for Notifier, I found this article regarding the protocols used by Android Notifier (thank you to the Notifier team for posting the documentation on this). Turns out for the Bluetooth connection, Notifier uses a UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) when sending notifications.
QUICK ANSWER:
While this may vary between distributions of Linux, on my Ubuntu 10.10 setup, I had to install the UUID command-line tool in order to get Android Notifier working. To do this, run the following command:
$ sudo apt-get install uuid
I hope this helps someone solve their issue using Android Notifier. I’d hate for someone to miss out such a sweet app.
So recently I’ve switched from using Songbird to Rhythmbox for my music player. Not sure if the switch is permanent to Rhythmbox, but with Songbird development being dropped for Linux I sure won’t be using Songbird any more. Maybe Nightingale when that has a stable release.
Anyway, with my switch to Rhythmbox, I lost all of my music ratings. Having spent a reasonable amount time getting those in, I didn’t want to give them up and start from scratch. So. I built this little Flash App to merge an xml file exported by the Rating File Plugin for Songbird with the rhythmdb.xml file for Rhythmbox (found at ~/.local/share/rhythmbox/rhythmdb.xml on Ubuntu 10.10). The Songbird plugin will export as a .srf file or something like that, but it’s actually just an xml file, so just change the extension or save it as an xml file when prompted by the plugin.
Be sure to back up your rhythmdb.xml before you go messin’ with it. Not sure what happens if you remove it all together.
If you’re wondering what exactly the app does, it goes through your exported Songbird rating xml supplied by the plugin and grabs each song with a rating, matches it by song title, artist and album to your rhythmdb.xml and adds in the rating. When it does this, if there is already a rating in your rhythmdb.xml for the song, it will be overwritten. Note that if an album has two songs with the same name and artist (which happens more often than you’d think), I’ve simply omitted them from the rating transfer. So neither song receives the rating. Once the files have been parsed, the app prompts you to download the update rhythmdb.xml file.
I know that this isn’t the most robust way for this to work. I mad it like this for simplicity. Not looking to make anything amazing, just wanted to get what I needed done and thought I’d share.
So here it is. Just click on the labels or textfields to select your files and click the Run Script button and let it run. Easy money. Oh, and sorry for the crudeness of the App. Just wanted something that got the job done.
Please comment if you have any trouble.
[EDIT]
…hmm. I just testing the app and wasn’t prompted to save the file when it finished. Might need to look into that. If you can figure out how to download the swf, it should run locally. Here’s the swf file in case you’re not savy enough to pull it from the HTML.
It’s official! We’re going to Sayulita in the beginning of May! Laura and I are brushing up on our Spanish and very excited to get some vacation that doesn’t involve… well, doing anything.
We leave April 30th and return May 7th. Anyone up for watching a pair of pouches for a week? Current plan is to board them. 
Playing around with setting up my Linux box as a VNC client, I ran into an unexpected dilemma. Basically, when running Ubuntu 10.10 and connected through VNC using a Mac as a client, whenever you press the ‘D’ key, all windows collapse. Think it’s not a big deal? Start counting how often you press the ‘D’ key in normal typing. In fact, I initially tried running a Google search on the issue and couldn’t type the search without pressing the ‘D’ key. Anyway, really annoying problem with a really easy fix (assuming you have access to the server computer).
What’s going on.
In Ubuntu 10.10 there is a default Keyboard Shortcut for “Hide all normal windows and set focus to the desktop”. Seems like a useful shortcut. Unfortunately the default (as displayed by the Keyboard Shortcuts dialog) is set to Mod4+D. Now, I have no idea what Mod4 is. Presumably a modifier key like ‘control’ or ‘alt’. The interesting piece to this is that when logged in through VNC (using Chicken of the VNC as a client on my MacBook Pro) the modifier key must not be recognized and so is simply dropped off from the keyboard shortcut. Thus, every time you press the ‘D’ key, all of your windows collapse.
The solution.
Easy. Just open up the Keyboard Shortcuts dialog on the server machine by going to System -> Preferences -> Keyboard Shortcuts, toggle the Window Management group and disable the shortcut by selecting it and pressing ‘delete’. Or change it to whatever shortcut you’d like to use.
Hope this solution helps someone some headache.
This is more of a future note to myself so when updating I have a record of which drive is which, but I suppose it’s possible that someone might find this info useful for their own partitioning. However, I am admittedly a novice at this. I’ve done my research and am confident in my partitions and sizes, but as everything is arguable, this may not be the best approach.
Please feel free to comment with criticism and/or praise.
For my install of Ubuntu 10.10 on a 250 Gb drive with 4 gigs of ram (expandable to 8gb)
sda1 — /boot at 500 mb (primary)
sda2 — / at 8 gb (primary)
sda3 — swap at 8 gb (swap)
sda5 — /var at 4 gb (logical)
sda6 — /usr at 16 gb (logical)
sda7 — /home at 196 gb (logical)
sda8 — /opt at 4 gb (logical)
sda9 — /tmp at 4 gb (logical)
Leaving around 8 gb left of unformatted disk space.
Well, it’s fairly official. We’re heading to Me-hee-co in late April slash early May for Laura’s (and Lauren’s) 30th birthday!! Lauren and Laura came up with the idea and Shad and I have been fully supportive like good husbands that have no issue with drinking on the beach do. Started out thinking we’d head to Hawaii, but after looking at costs, Mexico looks a lot better. Plan is to rent a house in Sayulita as per Isaac’s recommendation. Very exciting. This’ll be my first time south of the board. Can’t wait for a little R&R too. The basic plan, I believe, is to go to Sayulita, get a bunch of cheap beer and taquilla, find a lawn chair on the beach and not move for 5-7 days. Awesome. This’ll be the first real trip Laura and I have taken since 2008 when we went to Asia, so we’re totally pumped. And by “real trip” I mean a trip that doesn’t include going to Minneapolis and/or Lawrence. In other words, it’ll be our first real vacation in quite some time. We’re excited. Did I say that? I think I did.
First a quick review:
Quite a while ago I purchased the Logitech DiNovo Mac Edition wireless keyboard. And I have to say, I really love this keyboard. Especially compared to the Apple’s wireless keyboard. First off, it’s a full keyboard with a number pad, compared to Apple’s. Apple does make a full keyboard, but not a wireless version (at least as of this post date they don’t). Next up is battery life. The DiNovo runs extremely efficiently. I’ve had mine for months now and the battery still reads as full. Whereas when I was using the Apple wireless keyboard, my batteries would be drained after a few months of use. Granted the DiNovo takes four AAA batteries vs Apple’s three AA (or two AA with the newer keyboards). But still. I’d rather not have to worry about it, and from my experience the DiNovo lasts at least twice as long with extra batteries. Finally connectivity. The DiNovo uses a wireless USB adapter which works flawlessly. For me, I use an extra monitor with USB ports, so there’s no issue of having to constantly plugin and unplug the USB adapter from my laptop. I have a few usb devices I use in my workstation and only use one plug when hooking into my laptop. Apple’s keyboard on the other hand uses bluetooth to connect. I have had several problems with connectivity on these. My wife also has used one of these and having two in the house makes everything more difficult. In short, when they work, great. When the don’t, they’re a huge hassle and not worth the trouble shooting time.
So, although I’m annoyed with the functionality of the Dashboard Key and Brightness Keys on the DiNovo, I still would, will, and do choose the Logitech DiNovo wireless keyboard over Apple’s Wireless Keyboard hands down. It’s simply better in every respect for what I’m looking for and need.
Now for the issue at hand…
So the issue here is really quite simple. On the keyboard, as is standard on all Mac keyboards, a number of the F* keys (F1, F2, etc.) have dual functionality, mainly media control (play, pause, etc.), volume levels and brightness. For the most part everything on the keyboard works as expected. The media controls and volume controls work without a hitch. The rest however do require you to download and install the Logitech Control Center for Mac. This installs an preference pane that allows you to configure those special function keys. However, for me at least, even after installing the Logitech Control Center, my brightness (F1 and F2) and dashboard (F4) keys still didn’t work. To this date, I still don’t know why.
Hackintosh…
However, I have figured out a quick fix for the dashboard key. This hack opens the dashboard, but unfortunately does not close it the way the key works on a native Apple keyboard. To accomplish this, open the Logitech Control Center from the System Preferences on your Mac. If your keyboard is connected, you should see it listed. Click on the keyboard you wish to configure and press the Configure… button. A new window will open. Select the Keys tab in the upper left if it has not been selected already. Now you should see a list of all the special function keys and their assigned actions. If you select F4, you should see that it is set to Exposé, Dashboard & Spaces. Again, I don’t know why this doesn’t work, but it just doesn’t. As a fix, change this to Open Application. From here on the bottom of the window under Details you should be able to set which Application opens. Select Other… and find the Dashboard Application in your Applications directory. This should now cause the F4/Dashboard key to launch the Dashboard Application. Again though, pressing the key again, unfortunately, does not close the Dashboard as a native keyboard will.
EDIT:
A better fix…
So I just figured out a better fix for the Dashboard key. Essentially, what you want to do is set up a hotkey control for the Dashboard under System Preferences -> Keyboard and then set the action of the Dashboard key to Keystroke and enter the given hot-key-stroke. Ya dig?So go to System Preferences -> Keyboard (under Hardware). Select the Keyboard Shortcuts tab. Now, select Dashboard & Dock under the left column. In the right column you should see Dashboard listed. If you double click the right side where it shows the shortcut, you should be able to enter whatever keystroke you want.
Now, go back into the Logitech Control Center and configure your keyboard (as described above). Select the dashboard button and select Keystroke as the Assigned action. Now at the bottom under Details you should be able to enter the keystroke you just entered in the Keyboard Shortcuts. Ta-Da!! Should work instantly.
With this solution, the Dashboard key will now both open and close the Dashboard.
Short Rant
It’s upsetting that things don’t just work the way they should. In addition to this issue, I use Songbird as my media player. Unfortunately, the media keys don’t work with Songbird and there’s not easy way to reset them so they do. I think these issues are all more related to Apple’s “closed box” system rather than poorly designed/implemented technologies on Logitech and Songbirds part. Of course that could just be my anti-trust conspiracy theories at work.
EDIT:
I actually just read that this is a known issue for Logitech. From what I read it appears to be something that Apple just does. Basically, media controls and brightness controls will only work on a non-Apple external keyboard if there is not an Apple keyboard connected to the computer. So if you’re on a desktop, and for some reason have two keyboards and one is a Logitech and one is an Apple, the controls will work on the Apple, but not the Logitech. Disconnect the Apple keyboard and the Logitech media controls should work. However, if you’re on a laptop, you’re pretty much just screwed as you can’t “disconnect” the laptop’s keyboard. I really fucking hate Apple’s proprietary bullshit. I’ll leave it at that.
A wise man once told me, “You have to be smarter than the machine you’re working with.” I hope this post helps someone solve an issue that I put up with for far too long.