Archive for category Personal
OpenOffice Header Annoyances
Yeah, yeah, I know there’s going to be tons of people who are going to immediately exclaim “You should be using LaTeX instead of OpenOffice!”, but it is not always an option. I try to write some of my papers in LaTeX but often I am unable to as either my teacher wants a slightly modified MLA format which is near impossible to do easily (that i’m aware of such as a separate title page with the included MLA template) or I need to digitally upload the document in Microsoft Word format. Neither of these are exactly ideal scenarios to be using LaTeX and fudging with it hours before a deadline. Another possibility is the teacher will accept nothing out of the ordinary of how Word formats things which is the cause of this current rant: the header.
OpenOffice implements headers in a very different way than Word does relating to margins. Word traditionally has always written its headers inside the top margin where text is not normally printed, which is what my teacher expects to see. OpenOffice, however, does not follow this behavior as it takes the meaning of margins literally. In OpenOffice having a top margin of say 1-inch means that the inserted header will start below that 1-inch mark where one would traditionally type. Many people will argue that OpenOffice actually gets this “right”, but what’s right isn’t helpful when my grade depends on it.
So my problem basically boils down to the following issue of getting OpenOffice to mimic Word’s behavior with respect to headers and margins. I suppose I could set a fixed height for the header field and make the top margin really small to compensate for this, but that seems like a royal pain to do. Thankfully for the time being I’ve not hit any teachers that have really nailed me on the incorrect formatting. I have to say that this is one of the only current issues I have against OpenOffice and I find it a life saver in college otherwise.
Blog Fail and Migration
So earlier today I went to update my now dead Movable Type blog and massive fail ensued. I tried to edit a widget with the web interface and clicked the text box to edit the current widget. The box instantly cleared itself and then autosaved. awesome! I couldn’t find anywhere in my backups of the site where to restore this widget (which was the main home widget) and frankly even if I restored it the editor is still a complete fail in my browser.
So once again, I have migrated back to wordpress and I must say.. it has gotten significantly better. The administration interface finally seems intuitively and cleanly organized to use. The migration was almost completely painless and took even less then 5 minutes. I logged in to my crippled Movable Type blog and exported the posts. Installed wordpress to the server, filled out the database details and then then went to import. From there all what was necessary was to click on Movable Type and upload the exported file on my desktop. Within second my entire site was restored. (more or less…)
I used markdown heavily on Movable Type which didn’t migrate so gracefully as I would have liked. I have installed the plugin for wordpress which seemed to fix some issues but almost all of my old posts have wonk formatting. I’m frankly to lazy to fix it at this point and am just calling it a day in having a working site still. I’m really digging wordpress’s new interface, I’d argue it’s even cleaner than Movable Type’s interface now.
Now I’ve just gotta spend an eternity getting a good theme, updating the blogroll, and adding/fixing pages. Huzzah!
MP3 Player
So my current mp3 player is starting to really show its age at only 512MB, although it’s been great with 48+ hours of battery life on a single AA and had am/fm radio built in, and is practically the size of a C battery kinda. Anyway, I’ve been toying with the idea of perhaps getting a new mp3 player, but I really have no idea where to start. Ideally I’d want something with at least 4GB, maybe a radio tuner, and decent battery life. Most important of all is it must play nice with Linux without retarded hacking or flashing firmware, I want it to “just work” and ideally for under $100. I don’t really see anything jump out at me when I look at newegg, so if anyone could drop some hints on decent mp3 player it would be appreciated.
In search of a laptop bag for a student…
So I’m in the need of a laptop bag for when I leave for college. At the moment I can’t decide on any bookbag/backpack designed for a laptop to buy. Needs to hold a decent amount of garbage plus keep my 15.4″ lappy safe. If anyone has any recommendations please let me know!
Sound!
So apparently my kernel was correctly configured for sound all along. The only problem was the very last column in alsa mixer was a device called speaker with no volume, just “mute” or “unmute”. I unmuted this column and sound started playing, yay!
Bluetooth Working now
I finally got bluetooth working last night and playing friendly with gnome. It was surprisingly simple once you have your kernel setup correctly for your bluetooth device. All what was needed was a simple merge:
% emerge -av bluez-gnome bluez-utils gnome-bluetooth Although gnome-bluetooth isn’t required, as bluez-gnome is the important package to emerge. bluez-gnome provides a handy applet that appears in the notification area allowing you to browse and send files to other bluetooth enabled devices. It’s fairly straight-forward. note: I did have to logout of gnome and back in after emerging bluez-gnome for the applet to appear in the notification area.
Todays lesson of what not to do
So today I learned that emerge xorg-server with USE=hal is a very bad idea. When I relogged in for something else, it hit me. My entire keyboard layout was completely hosed. Hit the up arrow, can you guess what it did? That’s right, up arrow takes a screenshot. what?. It was the only beginning of my woes. Luckily my desktop box was still connected to irc, so I asked around and was told that a workaround from total borkage is to install xorg-server without hal. So with a magical:
USE=-hal emerge -av xorg-server I was on my way typing normally. This was all brought on my wanting to use the windows key as a modifier key in gnome, but it was being reported as Super L. Eventually in the end I found where to set it as Hyper in Gnome and all is well. I hope hal fixes this soon, that was annoying… However, I did find it neat gnome had a keyboard layout for IBM->T61. Yay!
current laptop screenie
So here’s my current laptop screenie:
It’s my gnome desktop with a floating urxvt. The font I’m using is Terminus and it seems to be working pretty good so far!
Next up is getting bluetooth working and sound.
New ThinkPad T61
So recently I got a shiny new laptop in the mail and have been going through the struggles of getting Gentoo to run on it and have everything just work. Well, things didn’t just work without some work, but it’s nearly 100% now. My first issue was getting the WiFi working. Gentoo-sources 2.6.26 worked intermittently, so I needed to try something else. I installed network manager and let it start handling the wifi and magically it started working. For some reason if I let udev at init launch my iwl3945 wifi interface, the card would instantly RFKILL itself. Very frustrating, but at least I have a working wifi card now with 2.6.26 and iwl3945 + network manager. The second issue of course was suspend. What a pain this adventure was. If it wasn’t for fellow Gentoo Developer Joker with an R61 kernel config I would have never gotten suspend working. My initial kernel on resume would simply blink the crescent moon sleep light on my thinkpad and never resume. I assume it was kernel panicking. I used his config and changed it for my wifi card, and now suspend works flawlessly. Note: I’m using pm-utils for suspending. Here’s my .config for anyone who wants it: .config Right now I’m running Gnome, even though I’m not really a fan of it. HAL automounting seem to be working fine which is a plus, just had to emerge gnome-volume-manager with the automount use-flag.
Pandora Radio – Channel degradation
I use Pandora Radio for my music listening habits as listening to the same thing gets stale and old pretty fast. The only downside being it needs to be run inside a browser with flash. I must say it is a great service for the most part, but there is a slight problem. Users of Pandora may have noticed this trend themselves. After a certain point of songs over time, the channels themselves start degrading in quality of their recommendations. Was it some rogue song? To many thumbs up to tell anymore? I don’t know, but I do know that eventually (about every 3 months here) one has to start up a new station as it gets to the point where the recommendations are completely horrible. For instance, today for my Disturbed station (seeded by Disturbed, KoRn, and Seether) I thumbed down 25 songs in a row before it got to something I remotely enjoyed. Time for a new station channel…