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How nice are these?

Hope you can name all the consoles! =D (Source: etsy.com)

When configuring your Gnome appearance and icon themes in Ubuntu 9.10 do they keep reverting to some ugly defaults? Yeah, mine were too. The problem’s related to gnome-settings-daemon, as seen here.

The fix:

Modify the file: /etc/X11/Xsession.d/55gnome-session_gnomerc so that it contains the following two additional lines (shown in comments):

# ADD FOLLOWING LINE
rm -f /tmp/session-is-gnome
BASESTARTUP=`basename "$STARTUP" | cut -d\  -f1`
if [ "$BASESTARTUP" = gnome-session -o \
        \( "$BASESTARTUP" = x-session-manager -a \
        "`readlink /etc/alternatives/x-session-manager`" = \
                /usr/bin/gnome-session \) ]; then
  GNOMERC=$HOME/.gnomerc
  if [ -r "$GNOMERC" ]; then
    . "$GNOMERC"
  fi
  # ADD FOLLOWING LINE
  touch /tmp/session-is-gnome
fi

Then modify the file: /etc/X11/Xsession.d/99×11-common_start to contain only the following code:

if [ -f /tmp/session-is-gnome ]; then
  exec /usr/bin/dbus-launch $STARTUP
else
  exec $STARTUP
fi

Fixed! Next!

Update: Although gnome-settings-daemon is definitely the guilty party here, the above fix doesn’t resolve it dying on login all the time, although it does increase the odds of starting correctly. If your icons switch back to some drab default, or other such off behaviour, check gnome-settings-daemon hasn’t died on start with ps -ef | grep gnome-settings, if it’s not running, you know it’s the problem. Will have to research this a bit more…

Click! Click! Click!

Wouldn’t mind putting together some PHP like this myself some day…

I had to cover clipping and opacity masks in Illustrator CS4 for a class I’m teaching the other day, and they’re rather fun and easy to do, so I knocked up a guide I thought I’d share.

Read this.

Create this:

Or something much, much cooler =D

If you fancy having a go, remember that Adobe Illustrator can be downloaded free for a 30 day trial (although the download never works in linux w/ firefox – so I grabbed my copy through Internet Explorer on XP running through virtualbox). Once you use it for a while and get over the whole fighting the software stage, it’s actually not that bad…

I went to burn a couple of audio CDs for the boy today, and bod-frickn-dammit if Brasero / GnomeBaker and K3B didn’t all threw their hands in the air in dismay that I might actually have the nerve to want to convert mp3s to CD-audio on the fly. Very poor.

So, as wav files come in less flavours than mp3s and tend to work first time, I knocked up a quick script to convert a directory of mp3s to .wav files using mpg123, it even handles spaces correctly after I’d given it a stern talking to… Anyways:

#/bin/bash
gotmpg123=$(which mpg123)
 
# If there's no copy of mpg123 we're not going to be doing any converting. Abort!
if [ "$gotmpg123" = "" ]; then
    echo "No copy of mpg123 found on system! Try running: sudo apt-get install mpg123"
    exit 0
fi
 
# Otherwise, if we're all set, make a directory to dump our wav files into
mkdir WAV
 
# For each file in the current directory that ends with .mp3, convert it to .wav and place in our new WAV folder
for file in ./*.mp3
do
  mpg123 -w ./WAV/"${file}".wav "$file"
done

To use the script:
- Copy and paste the above code into a new text file called mp32wav or something
- Make it executable with chmod +x mp32wav, then
- Copy it to /usr/bin for easy access with sudo cp mp32wav /usr/bin/

With that all done you can just go into a folder of mp3s in the terminal and fire it off. It’ll create a folder called WAV inside whatever directory you’re in and stick the converted wav files there with the original filename but with .wav tacked on the end.

Cheers!