Artha is a free cross-platform English thesaurus that works completely off-line and is based on WordNet. It is released under the GNU General Public Licence version

Source

Features

Although a gtk app  it has very little gnome dependencies (So KDE fans dont have to worry -much. Yeah yeah I know its would have been better if written in Qt but then “what can we do”  :(  ) However Artha has tons of features to make anyone (Gnome, Kde, whatever floats your boat) Drool.

• Offline : Unlike most dictionaries which can only be used if you are online. Artha works completely offline. So if you like me are not completely bought up by all this cloud computing craze and live in Africa where Internet sucks. Then Artha is a no brainer for you.  (Even if you are lucky and have highspeed internet Artha is also a no brainer )
• Regular Expressions Search : OK lets say there is a word you  vaguely know or you are unclear as to its meaning or spelling. (Happens to me a lot ) you can speed up/narrow the search using regular expression to locate the particular word they have in mind.
• Suggestions : Say you mispelled a word Artha can give you near matching suggestions (I also love this)
• Relative to Sense Mapping : Artha doesn’t just give you the meaning of words. It so includes words like Synonyms, antonyms. When you Select a relative its corresponding definition is scrolled and highlighted for easy comprehension.

The Awesomest  Feature that rules them all : Yeah I saved best for the last.  For me the feature of Artha which kills every other Dictionary software out there is its support for Notifications.  Here is how it works – Lets say I was going through my RSS reader and I found a word am not familiar with I just need to highlight the word, press the keyboard combination Ctrl+Alt+W (Which can be changed to any key combo that suits you) The meaning of the word gets displayed as a Notification Bubble .

Hence I can easily check the meaning of the word without having to launch the application window.

The notification feature of Artha is supported system wide and works with just about every application which support text highlighting.

Installation

Ubuntu / Debian : Although Artha is available in the Ubuntu / Debian Repository The version there is quite dated. However the latest version has been compiled to .deb and can be downloaded from   here

Fedora (Leonidas/11 or above) :  Artha can be installed with

yum install artha

Note* The version in the Fedora Reposittory is 0.9.1

Other Linuxes : If a binary package is not available for your distribution, you can easy download the source code from here and follow this installation instructions on how to compile from source.

Configuration: After installation, the rest is easy. When you start Artha Its minimizes in the Notification area of your desktop.  From the application window you can easily set you keyboard short cut by clicking on the settings. The default keyboard shortcut is Ctrl+Alt-W.  By default the Notification feature is disabled but can be easily enabled by right clicking on the notification area icon. The rest is easy.


I found Artha to be very useful and goes a long way to enhance my workflow and user experience.  I hope someone find this useful.

So some months ago I got me an E71 Nokia phone, among other things I was hoping to use it as a music device so I slammed in an 8gb memory card, and was all set but for one factor: 60% of my music collection are in ogg format and nokia default music player does recognize ogg. Sure there are some 3rd party music apps for E71 which can play ogg files out of the box but they all lack the kind of integration which you get with the Nokia default music player. While in confused mode I decided to call up a friend nucco and he gave me the tip about .is_audio_player.

What is .is_audio_player

If like me, you have a music library made up of different music formats, and you want to be able to sync them to your portable music player in one music format say mp3. Example, my music collection is composed of different formats, .mp3, ogg, aac but I want to sync everyone of them as mp3 to my Nokia e71. This is where .is_audio_player comes in handy. Nope its not an application, nope its not a codec, its not a library either. Its just a file (yeah file) its a file you place in the root directory of the storage of your music device from where it does its magic.

Configuration

First you open your favorite text editor (gedit, kate, emac, nano, vi whatever). Then you place in the following entries:

audio_folders=Sounds/Digital/

folder_depth=3

output_formats=audio/mpeg

Explanation

audio_folders = Here you indicate the relative path of the music folder on your portable device. On my Nokia its in Sound/Digital

folder_depth = Here you indicate the folder depth of the music folder (remember that every storage device attached to your Linux computer is mounted on /media/ hence you will start counting from the device mount point. In my case it was.

/media/e71/Sound/Digital

Since our final destination ™ is Digital (in my case that is) which is 3 step away from /media I indicated the value for folder_depth to be 3

out_formats = The last parameter is quite straight forward it’s asking what media format you want your files to be encoded in before sync. In my case i want them encoded to mp3 hence i added audio/mpeg

Now configure the file the way it meets your needs and then save as .is_audio_player remember the . (dot) in-front of is_audio_player. Once the file is saved, place it at the root of your music device (Nokia, Sony Erikson, China Mp3 device etc). In my case i placed it inside the memory card of my nokia phone (make sure you are using a mobile phone that can be seen as a mass storage device)

Note: Any file with a . (dot) in-front of its name is hidden by default in Linux hence you may not see the file after saving it until you tell your filemanager to view hidden files (ctrl +h) for (gnome) and (alt + .) for (kde)

Below is the .is_audio_player file inside the memory card of my nokia.

Once all is set, you can now plug your portable music player to your Linux computer and open Rhythmbox.

If all goes well Rhythmbox will detect your audio device. (in my case my nokia.)

All that is left is for you to select the tracks you want to sync. (you can always create a playlist) Drag and drop them into your portable music player’s icon. (You can also drag from your portable music player into your Music library.)

Transferring from your music library in rhythmbox to your portable music device might be slow, especially if it has to encode them to another music format before the transfer.

In the end I was able to encode all my ogg to mp3 files and sync them with my freedom hating E71 on the fly. I hope this helps someone out there.

FYI:

• I don’t know if this method would work with ipods.
• Legends have it that Amarok supports .is_audio_player I can’t tell since I have not been able to get it to work in amarok 2.1. If you have been able to please let me know.
• The Original ogg file on my music computer library is unaltered.

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Powered by Bilbo Blogger

How it all started

Ever since i started a blog i had always wanted a wanted a application which would allow me do my blogging (preferably offline ) without having to use the web browser. One of the reasons for this was because i (as at then) did not have a stable Internet connection and had to go to Internet cafe to do my blogging which wasn’t really convenient. I wanted a way to do my blogging offline and then upload later. Even when i had a stable Internet connection i still prefer to having to use a browser for blogging. Unfortunately for me most of the blogging applications ( Drivel BloGTK KBlogger gnome-blog) i tried on Linux just didn’t cut it, some didn’t work with wordpress and the once that did weren’t powerful enough or were buggy or just too basic.

I gave up and resigned my self to the web for blogging. This was until recently when (I Cant quite remember how it happened) i found about about Bilbo Blogger and Beng. I saw the tool i just needed

Bilbo Blogger

Bilbo Blogger is a free/Open Source Blogging client, focused on simplicity and usability. Its is based on Qt4 (KDE) but should work well on gnome (i haven’t tried it but it should.. just remember i said should)

Here are some Summary of some of its Features

Currently featured:

• A full featured WYSIWYG editor + An HTML editor

• Previewing your post with your blog style! like when you are visiting it at your blog.

• Support for Blogger1.0, MetaWeblog, MovableType (WordPress supports All of these!) and Google GData (used on Blogspot.com blogs) APIs!

• Support for Creating/Modifying/Deleting posts.

• Support for creating drafts and scheduled posts!

• Support for uploading media files to your blog (Just on supported APIs e.g. MetaWeblog and MovableType)

• Support for Fetching your recent blog entries.

• Support for adding Images to post from your system. It will upload them on

• Submitting post to blog (Just on supported APIs e.g. MetaWeblog and MovableType)

• Support for saving local entries before publishing.Saving your writing copy to prevent data loss, at configurable intervals.
• Internal auto spell checker. (KDE spell checker used so most of languages are supported)

Installation

Although as of blog time there were only two binaries available for Linux and one for windows.

Archlinux users Bilbo should be available in the arch community repository ( am not sure about this as i don’t have an arch installation to confirm) but in any case an arch package can be downloaded from here

(K)Ubuntu

To install on ubuntu. You are going to add a third party repository popularly called PPA To your system. This is not hard.

To start open Terminal and copy and paste the following command (you can do this via GUI but when writing a guide some things are better down using commandline copy and paste of cause i would explain every process so at least you know what you are doing)

First we download and add the key for the repository we are about to use and add it to how system.

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com \ 0xfe0272d55c41c17774052e575646f8b10331274d

Then we add the repository with this command

echo deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/neversfelde/ppa/ubuntu `lsb_release --short --codename` main | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list

Then we refresh the system and download bilbo with

sudo apt-get update ; sudo apt-get install bilbo

Once installed you can find Bilbo on the Internet section of your application Menu

Now i give a brief guide on how to configure Bilbi blogger to your blog

First your start bilbo ( like you don’t know that already hehe) once installed you will find it under the Internet section of your application menu.

The first thing you want to do is to add a blog, (my blog is hosted on wordpress.com hence that is what this guide would be based on. )

Just select Add Blog from under Blog menu

This would open a dialog box, something like this

Type in the URL of your blog then enter your blogs username and password and click the Auto Configure button. In my case it was http://ubuntunigeria.wordpress.com and i clicked the Auto Configure button. Then Bilbo would work its magic and Auto configure the settings for the blog. If all goes well (and it always did in my case) The dialog box would now look like this.

Bilbo has auto configured my blog settings, pulling the Title of the blog, the correct URL. You can go to the Supported features tab and check out the list of features bilbo has support in your blog here is mine

Once your blog is configured and loaded up. you would see a page which looks like this.

So here is the layout of Bilbo Blogger, it always you to use both WYSIWYG, or for code warriors you can always use the HTML editor field. one really cool feature with bilbo is the ability to preview you draft and see how it would look like on the blog page, This for me is one of its killer features

HTML Editor

Normal Preview

Preview with blog style

Other cool features of Bilbo

• It support multiple blogs hence you can setup more than one blog at a time.
• It also allows you to edit previous blog posts ( or delete them)
• If you are working on a blog post, you can always tell it to save locally, like as i was writing this post, i got disconnected, if i was using the web interface i might have lost some of my works or would have to wait for the Internet to get back before i continue. With bilbo i just told it to save my work locally and continued working.
• It also allows you to add tags and post the blog to a category

Bilbo also supports tabs you can edit more than one blog at a time with it just by opening a new tab.

Most importantly i found bilbo to be very stable, its doesn’t slow down on me or crash on me. i never experience on crash with it.

There is just so much to talk about Bilbo you would have to give it a spin to see your self.

I
hope someone finds this useful.

However one thing i have always wish it had was the ability to run in the background so that if i close thunderbird i want it to minimize to the system-tray/notification area and inform me real time when i have a new mail. Thunderbird has a small memory footprint hence am not bothered about it sucking up my system resources. For a very long time i took what life offered and made do with opening thunderbird to check for a new mail and closing it when i am done (i hate having my task manager side of the system panel filed up with running applications). Then one day i was like heck i have had enough and decided out to find a way to get thunderbird to do exactly what i want (run in the system-tray when not needed.) i did some googling and the name firetray came up, turned out it was just want i wanted.

Installation and Configuration

Firetray is an add-on for thunderbird and can be downloaded from here download and save the file to your hard disk. In Mozilla Thunderbird, open Add-ons from the Tools menu.

Click the Install button, and locate/select the file you downloaded and click “OK”.

After this you need to restart Thunderbird for the firetray to start working. You might also want to go through the preference of firetray to configure how you want it to behave, for example by default thunderbird does not minimize to the system-tray when you close it. You can go through the settings and configure it to your taste. Here is how i have configured mine.

Conclusion

I have come to find firetray a very valuable plugin for thunderbird.

It allows me to make Thunderbird run in the background and get out of my way. when they is a new mail, i get notified and it tells me how many unread mail i have in-box

One more cool thing i love about it is how it makes it easy to check for new messages and even send a quick email, By just right clicking on the icon on the system-tray

Ok that is the end of my rant. Hope this helps somebody.

FYI: Firetray can also be added to firefox, sunbird, seamonkey 2 and songbird, allowing to set up custom icon, minimizing to tray instead of closing, control playback using multimedia keys in songbird

Thankfully i found a workaround

Work around
Open Pidgin and go to Account menu

select manage account, choose your yahoo account and click on modify

go to the advance tab. and in the page server field replace whatever is there with the following
cs101.msg.mud.yahoo.com

save and close.

Try connecting to yahoo again from pidgin. It sure worked for me. I hope it works for you

PDF-Shuffler is a small python-gtk application, which helps the user to merge or split PDF documents. You can also rotate, crop and rearrange their pages using an interactive and intuitive graphical interface.

Source: Softpedia

I tested  it and found pdfshuffler so easy to use that it might amount to waste of space writing about how to use it. Once you import pdf(s) its splits it into pages which can be rearrange by dragging them with your mouse, you can also delete any page you don’t want.

Here is a Screencast

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90zJC1Y2D7M]

Installation

Debian/Ubuntu users can download a Deb here which can be installed by double clicking on it (the installer might download other dependencies from the Debian/Ubuntu repositories which the application needs to install but it does this automatically)

Edit: I tried installing this on Ubuntu 8.04 (hardy heron) but its threw up some dependencies errors. which i got round by installing the following packages from the ubuntu 9.04 repositories

http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/p/python-pypdf/python-pypdf_1.12-1_all.deb

http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/p/python-pdftools/python-pdftools_0.37-1_all.deb

Everything went fine from then on.

Once installed you can launch it from Application/Graphic/Pdf-Shuffler

Other Linux Distributions

I can either download the source package and compile it from source, or search Google for a package compiled for their distribution for their distribution Thanks to pete who pointed out that

Since it is a python application people do not need a distribution specific package. They can just download the source package, unpackage it and run the file “pdfshuffler” ($python pdfshuffler) assuming that all required additional packages (http://pybrary.net/pyPdf/) are installed on the system. Maybe it’s worth to tell a little about that. Advantage is here that even a user without root privileges can run it.

here are the dependencies that pdf-shuffler needs to run

· pyPdf 1.10 or later
· Python
· PyGTK

( I found an rpm for fedora 11 here and one for suse 11 here )

Hope this helps somebody

After  all said and done here is what i came up with

Recipe

*  gtk theme =  Gkt-theme MurrinaBlue (might not work well on ibex and lesser unless you are using the latest Murrine theme engine from svn)

* Emerald theme = Emerald – MurrinaBlue

* Icon =  Icon Theme Powered

* Fonts = Liberation ( Avaliable in the Ubuntu repositories)

* Wallpaper = Minimalistic Black and White

* Dock  = Gnome-do with the docky Interface

* Global Menu Bar for Gnome

So there you have it, This should be my default desktop look, till am bored again and need to try something new. or just return to the gnome old Default Gnome layout who knows

It grabs an identi.ca RSS feed and uses the latest update as your Pidgin status message.

Installation

First you have to make sure that perl is enabled in pidgin to find out : In Pidgin, navigate to Help->About and find “Perl Enabled” If Perl is not enabled, you may have to install Perl and then re-install Pidgin. (afaik Perl is installed by default on ubuntu so if you are using ubuntu you may skip this step)

Needs the perl rss and the perl simple module to work i easily installed this by

sudo apt-get install libxml-rss-perl libxml-simple-perl
or open the synaptic package manager (Systems/Administration/Synaptic) search for and install
libxml-rss-perl
libxml-simple-perl

once that is done. Download the plugin from here

and place it in your home diretory under .purple/plugins (.purple is a hidden directory and you have to ctrl+h to see it) if you go to the .purple directory and you don’t see plugins you can create one. (that was what i did in my case.)
then i restarted pidgin (not sure if this is necessary)

Enable Plugin
Goto Tools/Plug-ins

Enable Identica-Status

Make sure you Configure Plugin and put the identi.ca username you want

Once all is done you would see you Identi.ca notices as you pidgin status.

You can find a similar plug-in for Twiiter here  http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-twitterstatus/

next generation sound server for Linux, making all sorts of “ear-candy” possible: from dynamically changing the volume of individual applications to hot-plugging support for many different devices.

source:  http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2007/10/pulseaudio-to-bring-earcandy-to-linux.ars

one of the  PulseAudio Dev in describe it said

One of the things !PulseAudio is supposed to be is a “Compiz for sound”.

source: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Interviews/LennartPoettering

Such was the hype around PulseAudio that many Linux users were expecting it to be the next best thing since compiz fusion.

well fast forward to 2009 and Pulse Audio is one of the most hated, curse at application on the linux Desktop. Although to be fair most of the issues people have with PulseAudio have much to do with the way Verious distributions packaged it than the progam itself.

Ok enough ranting back to the reason for this blog post

One feature i found interesting   about PulseAudio  was the ability to independently control the volume of individual applications on the fly, and its one feature that i have found missing in  various implementation of PulseAudio i have used  from Ubuntu 8.04,Ubuntu 8.10 to Fedora 10.. HOLD IT THERE! i didn’t say it wasn’t possible. just couldn’t be done on the fly with a few clicks.

Well gnome-pulse-applet makes you do just that.  gnome-pulse-applet is a very useful gnome applet that makes it easy to control the individual  Volume of  applications using PusleAudio in gnome.

To install, download the latest Installation package for your distribution  here http://code.google.com/p/gnome-pulse-applet/downloads/list (as at the time of this writing  only deb and rpm packages for ubuntu 8.10 and fedora 10 respectively were avalaible for download )

Once installed all you have to do is right click on an empty space in your gnome panel and add PulseAudio Volume Control. you can even change the appearance from vertical to horizontal by right clicking on the applet and going to preference.

screenshots

Gnome-Pulse-Applet is a cool program that brings one of the much talked about feature of PulseAudio to the masses. Although the project is still at an early stage, i tested it on my ubuntu 8.10 and it worked fine without any problem. I was able to control,mute and increase the individual Volumes of VLC,Firefox (streaming with Toteem) and Rhythmbox.  Anyway i saw a post about this applet on identica and i thought i should share. Hope someone find this usefull

rm $HOME/.gnome2/keyrings/login.keyring

Now next time you login and connect to a wpa wireless you would be asked for a new keyring password. put in what you feel comfortable with.
Hope this helps someone.