I joined Pinterest and really can’t see much point to it.
“Look at my lovely pictures of things I done seen on that there internet” is what I keep thinking when I login.

Skip the bollocks from losers who think they’re interesting because they found a nice pair of shoes. Look at manly stuff.

I have no enthusiasm for burgers and computers, at least not this one. I don’t expect to see much new in the iPad 3 – faster processor, retina display, stereo speakers and perhaps some sort of tie-in with the Apple TV which will no doubt be an existing apple TV built in to a good TV unit and priced at 2 diametrically opposed limbs.

Apple aren’t innovators anymore, they’re a consumer electronics company who also happen to sell a few computers.

It turns out that Subsonic comes with it’s own copies of lame and ffmpeg in /var/subsonic/transcode, naturally these are 32bit versions. The solution is to install ffmpeg and lame (if you haven’t already) and make a link from /usr/bin/ to /var/subsonic/transcode/ for ffmpeg and lame. This will allow subsonic to run the 64bit versions.

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg lame
sudo mv /var/subsonic/transcode/lame /var/subsonic/transcode/old_lame
sudo mv /var/subsonic/transcode/ffmpeg /var/subsonic/transcode/old_ffmpeg
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/lame /var/subsonic/transcode/
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/ffmpeg /var/subsonic/transcode/

Wonderful

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(.*)sdbillin.kicks-ass.org [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.sdbillin.com/$1 [R=301,L]

 
This redirects any request for a page on sdbillin.kicks-ass.org to the same page on www.sdbillin.com. Wicked.

I googled an awful lot for this, and the best explanation seems to be to with the way the volume control tries to be intelligent by changing all the channels (PCM, Master etc) at the same time at the same scale. My hardware will have no truck with this and only listens to PCM. My solution below will probably leave some sort of problem with MIDI playback volume, but I haven’t played a MIDI file in 10 years.

If you have the same problem you’re probably going to need to update your /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/paths/analog-output.conf to include the following snippet under the [master] section

[Element PCM]
switch = mute
volume = merge
override-map.1 = all
override-map.2 = all-left,all-right

If all else fails you can make a copy of yours and write over it with my current one. Just don’t whinge if it breaks things.

The one thing I recommend to anyone using linux is to put your /home folder on a separate partition. This makes upgrading or changing OS a hell of a lot easier and in my case made it absolutely painless, just remember to update your fstab on the new install to point back to your home location – it’s probably easier to make a copy of /etc/fstab and copy the relevant lines.

Other than the above tip, there was nothing to report. The install was smooth and I’m running on 64bit, SSE flagged goodness. Everything works, I’ve kept my firefox/chrome etc prefs. There was just one old fix to reapply, which is covered in the next post.

Turns out this is a bug - https://bugs.launchpad.net/awn-extras/+bug/497002

sudo gedit /usr/share/avant-window-navigator/applets/volume-control/volume-control.py

Skip down to line 65 and remove pulseaudio. You should be left with

mixer_names = ("oss4mixer", "alsamixer")

Save. Close. Relaunch AWN (restart, kill it, whatever). You can now select other mixers on the volume control applet preferences.

With compiz you can do lots of lovely (and some pointless) things. Things like making the windows wobbly, or make it rain flaming globs of semen. I think. What you can’t do is map a mouse button to the show desktop action. Poop.

I searched for a while and came across this page with a very handy little script. A quick correction/update to the syntax and it works a treat.

From the command line

sudo apt-get install wmctrl
gedit ~/showdesktop.sh

paste this in :

#!/bin/bash desktopStatus=`wmctrl -m | grep mode | cut -d: -f2`
if [ "$desktopStatus" = " OFF" ]
then
wmctrl -k on
else
wmctrl -k off
fi

Save and go back to command line

chmod +x ~/showdesktop.sh

You can now specify this command to run from a mouse button. Button 9 in my case. Open up compizconfig, go into commands and enter ~/showdesktop.sh in one of the commands then bind your button in the button bindings tab.

It turns out that all the required libraries are installed by default, so :

1. Make sure your printer is installed in Linux. It probably is, but if not this isn’t going to be very useful

 

2. Download the python script from here (copy the text, paste into an editor and save as airprint.py in your home folder

 

3. Mark the file as executable:
   sudo chmod +x ~/airprint.py

 

4. Run the python script with a switch to put the result in the right place :
   sudo ./airprint.py  -d /etc/avahi/services/airprint.service

 

5.  Edit your cupsd.conf:
   sudo nano /etc/cups/cupsd.conf

 

6.  Add “Serveralias *”  above “<Location />”  (without quotes)
7.  Share your printer in the printing GUI

 

8.  Print from your iphone/ipad