One of the things that has annoyed me with Nvidia’s Twinview utility is that it doesn’t recognize if you swap external monitors (or at least I couldn’t figure out how to make it do this). I use an external monitor at work and at home, but they are different resolutions. Typically what I do is put my laptop to sleep at home/work and then fire it up again when I get to work/home. This works fine except my external display resolution is wonky because each monitor uses a different max resolution. Enter disper. Disper allows me to adjust my display on the fly, even if I swap external displays. Here is what I do to get the new monitor recognized. First, turn off the external display which shrinks my desktop back to my laptop screen:
disper -s
Then I extend the display back to the new display:
disper -e -r auto -t left
This is also great for using an overhead projector. Another great thing about disper is that is command-line only. Much faster/easier than the crappy Twinview GUI.
Disper can be obtained here. Fedora RPM courtesy of the Yellow Cow Blog.
I saw this link that solved my problem. For me, it was noticeable whenever I had BZFlag active and some other application generated a sound. Glad to have this annoying glitch out of the way.
Just installed wpToGo on my G1. If you’re seeing this post, then it works. More to come, I’m sure…
This is one of those things I only do occasionally, so here’s a note on how to do it.
rpm2cpio rpmarchive.rpm | cpio -idmv
This should extract the entire rpm into the current dir, so make sure you are in a clean dir before you do this. The rpm2cpio command should be available on any distro that uses rpm.
Some months ago, launched a huge, DRM-free catalog of songs and albums available in MP3 format. Now they have released their download client for Linux in native formats for Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and OpenSUSE. The client is not required to download individual songs, but only for entire albums. I’ve already downloaded a couple of albums as well as individual tracks with no problems on Fedora 8.
Their terms of service appear to be somewhat heavy-handed, but I don’t really see how they could effectively enforce them with no DRM involvement. For the foreseeable future, this will become my primary means of music purchase, finally replacing CDs.
I stumbled upon this invaluable gem:
http://souptonuts.sourceforge.net/how_to_linux_and_open_source.htm
It is a page of over 200 tips and tricks for all sorts of *nix and opensource goodies, like this:
TIP 70:
Generating Random Numbers.
$ od -vAn -N4 -tu4 < /dev/urandom
3905158199
This guide is full of stuff that you may only do occasionally but you can never remember how to do it (like configuring Spamassassin (tip 92)). There's also a lot of handy shell programming hacks, like this:
TIP 179:
history - bash command to get a history of all commands typed. But, here is a way
that you can get date and time listed as well.
$ HISTTIMEFORMAT="%y/%m/%d %T "
Defining the environment variable above give you the date/time info when you
execute history:
$ history
...
175 05/06/30 12:51:46 grep '141.162.' mout > mout2
176 05/06/30 12:51:48 e mout2
177 05/06/30 12:56:59 ls
178 05/06/30 12:57:02 ls
179 05/06/30 12:57:39 ls
180 05/06/30 12:57:49 ls -l
181 05/06/30 13:01:10 history
182 05/06/30 13:01:20 HISTTIMEFORMAT="%y/%m/%d %T "
183 05/06/30 13:01:23 history
...
Learn it! Live it! Love it!
Whatever.
On FC5 (don’t have FC6 yet), if you don’t have the rpm for “koffice-filters” installed, you won’t be able to open up anything except native Krita files. I believe that these filters are packaged separately because they are maintained separately from Krita, since they are used by other KOffice applications. Makes sense if you think about it, but I had to do some searching to figure it out.
Need to make multiple PDFs into one? Here is an easy way to do it with Ghostscript:
gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=finished.pdf file1.pdf file2.pdf
After scanning a few documents, I converted the resulting individual PNGs into PDFs and then used the command above to make a single, multi-page PDF.
Here’s a few other apps I discovered for manipulating for manipulating PDFs:
pdftk
mbtPDFasm
multivalent
This bad boy is great. Compared to the Diaper Genie, the Diaper Champ does not require you to purchase expensive refills. You can use just about any type of plastic bag with the DC. Its simple to use, and keeps diaper odors away from your nose. I load it up with a regular kitchen trash bag with the yellow tie thingy so I can seal it off when I haul it to the trash bin. You can purchase one from Target.
Here is an ingenious method for freeing your junk-o-riffic printer that you got with your new Dell Super-Fantastic-Overpriced-Home-Computer Bundle of DRM. I’m optimistic that this method will also work for any DRM-crippled device as well.