Category Archives: Computers

Home Office

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Home Office 21/07/2009, originally uploaded by Dale Nunns.

The office ADSL line died yesterday morning and so far Telkom have been un-able to fix it.

So I’ve been working from home for yesterday and today. The photo is what my desk looks like towards the end of the day. The 2x 19″ monitors are hooked up to my Linux machine, the LG laptop is my normal laptop I do all my work on, running Windows Vista. The little Asus Eeepc is acting as the wireless link between my upstairs computer and our ADSL router downstairs (haven’t cabled yet or gotten round to getting my machine a wifi card.) I’m using Synergy between all the machines so I can use the one Microsoft Mouse & Keyboard between all the computers.

Also in the picture is my Samsung Scanner/Fax a couple of boxes stacked on top of it (not sure why), cup of tea, cell phone and couple of lamps and a few odds and ends.

The arrangement is rather nice, only problem is that I’m sitting on a sleeper couch we have in the room which is a little too low and there isn’t enough space to stick a normal chair in, so I have to take frequent breaks to give my a back a bit of a rest and stretch my legs and the rest of my body.

Synergy Rocks!

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If you’ve never heard of Synergy its a pretty awesome application. Basically it allows multiple computers to share one set of Keyboard, Mouse and Clipboard. It’s cross platform so it works very nicely if you’re running a mixed environment.

I set it up today at home (had to work from home as our office ADSL went down.) between my desktop PC running Ubuntu Linux and my laptop running Windows Vista. You install the Synergy app on the various PC’s that you want to be clients, in my case thats my laptop, you then setup a machine as your “server” and point the clients to the server. On the Server machine you decide in which direction the various clients are and then hook everything up.

At the moment I have it if I move my mouse of the left hand side of my linux machine the cursor continues moving across onto my laptop screen and now my laptop has focus, so I can type and work on it using my desktop keyboard and mouse. I? can even copy something and then move right again onto my linux machine and paste it.

The laptops keyboard and touchpad continues working, but its much better than having another keyboard and mouse cluttering up the desk.

If you do plan on trying it out I would suggest you get QuickSynergy for your Linux/MacOSX machines as it makes configuring things much easier.

Sending Mail from Linux Command Line using Gmail

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Was knocking together a little script tonight that downloads a few pages that I would like to read in the morning and then email them to me. I had a problem though finding a simple way to send an email from the command line in a script.

Then I came across this article which shows you howto do it using a program called ssmtp, works brilliantly.

Wine & Twitter

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wine-twitterTwitter is pretty weird, I follow a few people… people that I actually want to hear from or that mention things that interest me. For me Twitter isn’t a marketing tool or anything like that because at the moment I don’t have anything to really promote, for example? I hardly ever mention this site on Twitter because I’m not trying to drive tons of traffic to it. For me Twitter is a way to “catch up” with other people and find out what they’re reading, thinking about or doing.
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Windows Console Replacement

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console2I spend a lot of time at the command line in both windows and Linux, I guess I feel more at home or perhaps more in control. On Linux I have Gnome-Terminal which is a perfectly adequate container for a command line. On windows though I only have the standard cmd.exe which is seriously annoying, you can’t have things like tabs etc.

Over the weekend I went in search of a replacement, something that more closely resembles gnome-terminal and I found console2, and so far I found it perfect. I’m not hardcore enough to install one of the many ports of bash to my windows machine and I haven’t tried power shell yet, it?s not so much script ability that I need as much as the ability to run my command line apps from a nicer looking window and consolidate all of them into one window.

Bookmark All addon for Firefox

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I use Firefox alot, its open all day and by the end of the day I normally have between 20 and 40 tabs open. Often I would like to bookmark the tabs, especially when doing research on stuff, so that I can come back to it later but its often not important that I bookmark it with any kind of description a date is normally more than enough.

Up to now I’ve normally just hit CTRL+SHIFT+D (Bookmark All Tabs) and type in today’s date, this had worked but it is a little cumbersome and sometimes I mis-type the date.

A few days ago I set out to find a plugin that does this or find the info needed to write one, after alot of searching I found a add-on that did exactly what I wanted.

Here is the Addon page on Mozilla.org, it’s called “Bookmark All” and allows you to add a button to your bar that basically bookmarks all the currently open tabs under a folder (that you select) with today’s date and time.

Get a Samsung SCX 4200 Working On Ubuntu 9.04

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I have a Samsung SCX-4200 Printer/Scanner it works rather nicely and I like it alot, even though I don’t use it often. Tonight I plugged it into my Ubunut machine and it printed first time, with no setups. Unfortunately the scanner didn’t work.

A few quick search’s revealed this forum entry on the Ubuntu Forums and from there I found this site with .deb packages for the Samsung Unified MFP drivers. After installing the packages the scanner suddenly work in XSane and I could scan. I’m really like the fact that more and more hardware “just works” now in Linux, or works with minimal tweaking. I haven’t had to compile a kernel or any other software in a very long time.

After getting the scanner to work I found 2 nice apps to use instead of XSane, the first is flegita a nice little app that makes it easy to scan things from the scanner to png, jpg, tif and PDF and the other app is gscan2pdf which allows you to scan to pdf.

Uploading Pictures to Stuff.za.net

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My new phone (Nokia N78) has the ability to upload pictures taken to Flickr, so this morning I created myself a flickr account, configured the phone and tried it out.

It’s pretty cool, I can take a photo with my phone and then select an option and upload it straight away to Flickr. I’ve also found that Flickr can link to this blog, so now I can take a picture, select an option… type a short message and presto the image taken is uploaded to Stuff.za.net. It’s actually pretty cool, and it seems to work well. I must admit that I’m now slightly tempted to get Flickr Pro account, although I think I’ll wait a bit and see how much I use it first.

BTW you can see an example of all this wizardry with the OMFG post.