Hugo Jonker

I bought a new laptop (cool thingy, it’s a Toshiba Z930 with mem upgraded to 10 Gb, ghi ghi). The specs are really cool: it’s the lightest ultrabook out there (at the time of writing), and while it doesn’t have 1080p resolution, it does do 1366 x 768. Moreover, it’s the only ultrabook which also offers VGA and Ethernet ports. Yeah, these might become obsolete, but I’m an academic, and given the expected upgrade cycle in most universities (“if it ain’t broke, don’t replace it” sums it up nicely), I need that stuff.

I haven’t had time to play with it, I hardly had time to start it up myself. I read that Win 8.1 came out, so I figured to start it up and try to get that on my system – yes, I’ll go for dual boot with Ubuntu (or something else like Mint). Now I have a really cool SSD drive in there – which is not that big. More specifically, it’s 128 GB. Currently, the unusued windows partition is leaving me with 50 GB usable space of that. I started doing windows update, which kept repeating and repeating, every time ending with a reboot and more updates to install. The first update required me to download over 1 Gb of updates. And that was nowhere near the end of it. I was down to 50 GB out of 128 GB (unformatted) before I started this, and your updates are eating away gigabytes of that???

Seriously, Microsoft, go jogging. You’re becoming too fat to sit on my disk.

here’s what did work for me.
(sorry for the short post, in a hurry!)

So, there’s a bug, where Unity (Ubuntu’s window manager) crashes on Alt-Tab. It’s been fixed for a year now in the newer Ubuntu’s, but those of us running the old stuff… we’re stuck.

Unless, of course, we follow the advice in one of the comments:

• Install “compizconfig-settings-manager”
• run “ccsm”
• go to “Ubuntu Unity Plugin” -> Switcher
• disable all key bindings.
• Go back to the main screen and enable “Static Application Switcher”.
  (If you do it the other way around, you will get segfaults.)

It gives you a more limited switcher (only to windows on current desktop). On the other hand, this one switches to windows instead of applications — so no more annoyance trying to switch to the right window of an application that you’re running 10 times (such as a terminal window).

Just came across 2 tidbits. One wasn’t enough to post, but two… I had to ;-)

1. Remove annoying “hover over me” scrollbars

(From WebUpd8.)

In the newer versions, Gnome did away with the scrollbar. There is this scroll-hint which, if you hover over it, changes into something with buttons. Which you cannot click, because the exact center of the two buttons (up/down or left/right, depending on vertical/horizontal scrolling) is projected below your mouse.
It is annoying. It confuses me every single time. But, the good news: it is not necessary.

• Fix 1: sudo echo "export LIBOVERLAY_SCROLLBAR=0" > /etc/X11/Xsession.d/80overlayscrollbars
• Fix 2:
  1. apt-cache search 'liboverlay-scrollbar', and remember these packages (e.g. as $PKG-TO-DELETE),
  2. sudo apt-get remove overlay-scrollbar $PKG-TO-DELETE.

The search gets around the problem of slightly different package names (version number changed) between Ubuntu 11.04/11.10/12.04.
On a related note: stop putting your version number in the package name!

Split Nautilus window in two for easy moving

(From a Slashdot comment)

Either fix ought to work. The first leaves the packages and modifies behaviour, while the second nukes the functionality. Haven’t tried either yet, curious though.

Ever need to move a file from one place to another?
Open Nautilus (i.e., “Places”). In the window, press F3.
Ta – (explitive deleted) – daaaa!

Wish I had known that sooner.

This thread and this bug are amazing. Apparently, “they” decided that when music is playing, and you close the player, the window will go away, but the music will continue. WTF?! Why the *BLEEP* did you think I was closing that window? Because I couldn’t find the damned minimize button???

Seriously, this “innovation” allows your computer to play music without any GUI. Nice huh? You clicked to start, but if you want to stop: open a terminal and issue a command (either banshee –stop or just kill the bastard).

I know the difference between a friggin’ minimize button and a close button. I want to quit the application, not the GUI. Stop treating me like a baby and stop thinking you know what’s best for me.

Edit: worst thing: you set it to play one song, quit the GUI, and it plays one song. And then the process sits there, wasting mem/cpu cycles. *ANNOYANCE*

Edit2: Okay, I’ll just give up on all these new-fangled media players. I never got the fad, I was curious, but with annoyances piling on annoyances… Let me just compile/install the old XMMS myself. Sure, nowadays it doesn’t play nice with the sound system. But it also quits when I tell it to — apparently an uncommon feature nowadays.

FireFox now automagically gives you its latest and greatest… whether you want to or not. Perhaps ok, perhaps not. But: some things change. Things I do care about. I don’t like someone assuming I’m okay with them in this fashion.
Anyway, rant over.

The new Firefox (shiny new version 7, at least new right now) removes the standard url prefix “http://”. I like that prefix. So, let’s add it back!
From somewhere on the web:

To restore the “http” prefix:

1. Type “about:config” in the location bar and press Enter.
2. Toggle the “browser.urlbar.trimURLs” preference to change its value to “false”

And Firefox behaves again.