I’ve been learning some python over the last few weeks, thought I would give it coding a Openbox Pipe Menu a go. It’s not very useful and some of the guys in the Crunchbang Forums helped me to fix my bugs. Here is the code:

#!/usr/bin/env python -W ignore::DeprecationWarning
import sys
import cgi
import twitter

if __name__ == "__main__":
 twit = twitter.Api(username="", password="")
 status = twit.GetFriendsTimeline()
 print "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>"
 print "<openbox_pipe_menu>"
 print"    <separator label=\"Twitter\" />"

 for u in status:
    tweet = u.text
    tweet = tweet.replace("\"", "'")
    tweet = tweet.encode("utf-8")
    tweet = cgi.escape(tweet)

    print "    <menu id=\"%s\" label=\"%s\">" % (u.id, tweet)
    print "        <item label=\"View Tweet\"><action name=\"Execute\"> <execute>firefox http://twitter.com/%s/status/%s\ </execute> </action> </item>" % ( cgi.escape(u.user.screen_name), u.id)
    print "        <item label=\"Tweet by %s\" />" % (cgi.escape(u.user.name))
    print "        <item label=\"%s\" />" % (cgi.escape(u.relative_created_at))
    print "    </menu>"

 print "</openbox_pipe_menu>"
 sys.exit(0)

I don’t suggest you make use of it, this is the alpha version but I intend to add some conversation thread and caching into it at some point. I’m also learning some perl but I haven’t really made anything other than programs to test things.

I’ll try and post something tomorrow, after all the site is called Wednesday Morning.

Darius

Well, i’ve re-skinned this thing again. I’m going to endeavor to post something “useful” each Wednesday from now onwards. Now this is probably not going to happen but who knows. I really want to make more use out of this space. Well today is my “Linux Birthday”, 1 year ago today I installed Mandriva on my eee-pc to give it a go for the first time. This started my love affair which ended up with my deciding to swap to Linux as my sole operating system. I have been learning all this year and I still learn things all the time. I’m proud to say I’m still using Crunchbang Linux. It’s based on Ubuntu and runs the Window Manager Openbox.

Check out my latest desktop picture, I’ve spent a little while putting it together and it’s just comfortable for me.

My Current Desktop

I’m sorry for the hugeness of the image, If your interested I currently have 2x 19″ screens (1 wide and 1 normal square, don’t ask me why. just the screens i’ve got). I will be posting my conky setup on the site. I based it on a setup by someone else, I’ve heavily modified it since then but I will try and find a link to theirs.

I’m going to be updating categories and tags across the blog to utilise this fantastic theme. I hope you enjoy the new useful stuff I will post, any suggestions would be great.

Bye!

Just a follow on report from the crunchbang install. So the plan was to install crunchbang on my second HD and leave the windows HD intact, the fact that i’ve reiterated this is probably telling you. “oh my what went wrong?”, I swear that i checked and double checked which HD was the windows HD but yes I managed to install linux over my windows parition however I did back everything up! Go me, proactive backuping is the way to go!

Crunchbang Review (Full)

So i’ve been spending the day or so setting up my crunchbang distro on the desktop (trying to come up with a funny name for it) and generally playing around with the full version. I’m  used to the limited set of applications that comes with Cruncheee, the crunchbang iso was a good 200MB larger than the cruncheee one but however only took me a few minutes to download from the labs (using the crunchbang official list not the mirror), got to love that internet connection! I’ve got to hand it to phillip (corenominal) he has put together a fantastic list of starting applications, pretty much anything you want to do you can straight out off the box! Speaking of box, it also runs openbox as well as cruncheee (kind of crunchbangs selling point) and I have to say that my system is more responsive and quicker to boot than it ever was on windows.

Crunchbang is also very “fuss free” meaning that nothing required any real knowledge of linux to get working, my USB wireless adaptor worked straight out of the box with no problems. I was always having problems with it in windows and I swear I get a better more constant signal off it that I did before. I’m a relatively unexperienced linux user and the only real problem i’ve come across is nitrogen crashing when i try to set the image for my two screens to be different however its working fine for the few dual screens desktop wallpapers I have. If anyone knows of anygood 2560×1024 wallpapers let me know .

Semester 2

Well this post has taken me a few days (what i wrote above was from nearly 2 days ago). Since hten the gf has installed crunchbang as her primary OS too (shes also a computer scientist) and we are both finding it quite nice to use linux as our only operating system. Semester 2 is here (as you may guess from the sub-title) and anyone who’s been following the weather in england can tell it was a perfect begining, it was a total nightmare getting in today and I’m really worried about tomorrow and the ice :s.

I’m going to leave it there, i’ll post up some off my idea’s for the arcade script in a few days. See what you guys think

Darius

Onwards, Upwards and so forth… As anyone knows read any post here i’m a linux user, I use crunchbang linux as my primary operating system on my day to day. I rarely use my lovely desktop PC although I really should however I commute from home to University and like to be able to move on the go. Well recently I’ve been thinking that I should do the big swap and finally get make linux my primary operating system on my desktop too (i’m keeping a windows partition because i want to be able to play games without hassle). I have 2 drives (250GB’s each) and I’m going to have one for linux and one for windows with a 500GB external drive for the two of them, for music etc.

So i bought one from amazon for ~£50 (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B001EKW0O4) which i thought was a pretty amazing price, I got free super saver delivery and it arrived today, well i got a red slip from Royal Mail for it today.. so i had to go and collect it. I’ve run into my first problem however, what format should I use on it? I’m currently going with FAT32 however im concerned by the 4GB maximum file size, i know that NTFS isn’t all that great on linux so if anyone has any suggestions let me know.

HD Review

I thought I might give “reviewing” it a go, I’m not usually one for saying “this is crap” because I just do my research and buy which ever product is best so i don’t deal with alot of “crap” (i really wish blogs could have a crap alarm like LO). Firstly, it’s very very geared towards windows users however that is just a fact of life. I get a total of 465GB out of the “500″ claimed which agian is fine and totally expected. I really love some of the hardware features, I’m one of those computer geeks who turns his computer off when he goes to bed, i know its extreme (i do take my netbook to bed with me though :s). This drive turns on and off with your computer, it is completely independantly powered, I think thats just a pain useful feature. I’ve had other drives which require you to switch them on and off manually and I’m just too lazy for that. It also has an “power-saving mode” , i’ve not been able to find any material telling me how it saves power exactly but the description says

[quote]Buffalo DriveStation USB 2.0 Hard Disk is a simple solution to back up your important data.
The Power Saving Utility constantly monitors data access to the hard drive and automatically redcues power consumption when the unit is idle.
TurboUSB software increases data transfer speeds via USB.
Secure Lock Ware software encrypts and protects your important personal data from theft and unauthorised access.
With Auto Power On/Off Function, the DriveStation automatically turns on/off with your Windows PC.[/quote]

Now i worry slightly that “reducing power” between idles will reduce performance or cause it to consume more power spinning up if the time between idles is short. The last feature still remains my favourite.

WednesdayMorning

Well in my last post i mentioned some changes, i’ve edited the splash to point here. The layout of the splash will give you an idea off what the website will look like. I’m going to use the template that i designed the WoW Site as it didn’t have a WoW Theme to it. Eventually the blog will be skinned to match or i’ll intergrate the blog into it somehow but for now the website will be used for the following :-

• Publishing tutorials, articles and HOWTO’s on pretty much anything I’m working on
• Some Scripts, a few friends of mine are flash developers (flash game developers) and they bitch about there being no truely good and easy to set up arcade scripts so i thought i’d start with that

It’s a pretty limited scope at the moment but I’m sure some idea’s will come to me as I get started.

Exams are nearly over!

I’ve got my last examination off Semester 1 tomorrow and I can’t wait, this has been the most packed semester I’ve had yet and from what i’ve been told this is as bad as it gets. I plan on taking the whole weekend (including friday) off to do absolutely nothing. It’s been a fair while since I’ve had chance to do nothing.

Well i’ll try an update a little quicker next time, probably will be about my new setup for my desktop and my experience with that.

Darius

Greetings,

Got a couple of things to talk about today,

• The future of wednesdaymorning.co.uk
• Stupidly small USB keys
• Crunchbang update
• Twitter? What do you use it for??
• Ubuntu Phone Buddy and other gadgets
• anything else that comes to me as i write

Future of  WednesdayMorning.co.uk

Well anyone who’s read the blog that has read the main domain site will know what wednesdaymorning.co.uk was suppost to be about.  Check out the splash description if you haven’t already, it’s basically a WoW UI repository. It stores your lua data and addons and restores it on other machines, it was an idea I had while i was on the train to see my girlfriend when she was studying in Reading. The big selling point of it was that it would be a in Java and wouldn’t require a client to actually be installed on the users computer. Anyway but the big upset is that

…

…

i’ve stopped playing WoW, mainly because of issues associated with the latest expansion pack but it was about time for me to stop. Now, this doesn’t stop be developing this website which is something im still interested in however it’s not something I’m interested in constantly updating and maintainingt So i’m trying to think of something to do with this domain, now  I already have the blog but maybe I could add some kind of personal portal including things like :-

• tutorials i’ve written and future tutorials
• interesting news articles i find

As you can tell i’m kinda stumped, so anyone with any idea’s please post a comment and let me know about them. I’m always looking for a reason to code something in PHP!

Stupidly Small USB Keys

Okay, they really annoy me. I’m a firm believer that making things smaller for the sake of making things smaller is entirely pointless, now I’m not refering to transistors or anything that is a true benifit. I’m talking about USB Flash drives mainly, i find having an 8gb flash drive the size of my pinky a little pointless and just an effort to sell more pointless gadgets. Here’s a picture illustrating my point.

Going from left to right, 8gb USB Flash Drive, 1gb USB Flash Drive, Pen (for scaling), 100gb USB Hard Disk. As you can see the first USB drive is the one i’m talking about. The second one is in my opinion the best size for a USB storage device, it’s big enough to remember however its also small enough to fit inside a pocket or wallet. The 100gb USB HD is infact what i used to carry around with me before I got my eee pc and I still carry it along with me these days however sometimes i felt the cable annoying. So that was my little rant about them, they tend to come in 2-8gb sizes and are quite cheap however if you buy one please tie it to yourself because you are bound to loose or forget it.

Crunchbang Update!

Now this isn’t techniqually true as i write this because the update instructions arn’t out yet so if you want the latest version you have to install it clean.

Download it : http://crunchbanglinux.org/wiki/downloads

Release Notes: http://crunchbanglinux.org/wiki/release-notes/8.10.02

Now i can’t really give it a review because i haven’t used it so as soon as the update instructions code up i’ll stick up some kind of review however there was something in the release notes that struck my eye.

[quote]A modified default theme for use on smaller screens.[/quote]

I don’t remember from previous release notes if this was something already in their because if it was it was poorly done but i do remember posting about it on the forums so I’m crossing my fingers .

Twitter

I recently signed up to twitter, http://twitter.com/aughban. Every time i go to change my picture I find that there are to many tweets? Okay i’m all for blogging and podcasting but I don’t really see what i should do with this twitter thing, now that might be because i don’t have any friends on it (mainly because the search function has been disabled).

So? if you want to see my tweets add me, I would really like to see what all the fuss is about.

Ubuntu Phone Buddy!

This thing is really cool!

3x USB ports, SD Card Readers and a phone charger with multiple types for most phones on the market

Now i’m not just shamelessly plugging this thing, I actually bought one! Mainly because i needed somewhere to put my phone when im at my desk but it also provides a few helpful features such as the phone charger. The phone charger runs entirely off the power supplied via USB and its damn useful because it means i can leave my phone charger by my bed. The one and only complaint I have about the thing is that you must keep the silicon pad very clean or it doesn’t allow your phone to stick to it! This does mean every few days i need to give it a wipe because of the dust on my phone from where its been in my pockets.

I did find it kind of ironic that in the instructions it mentioned how to install it on Windows and Mac and not linux however  it worked fine in crunchbang.

etc

I’ve been listening to the linux outlaws podcast while i’ve been writing this, i think i’ve mentioned before that its one of the podcasts i enjoy listening too and they had a few good articles that have come up over the week such as the Oz’s banning MySQL people and the follow-up to the teacher incedent. If you haven’t read them I suggest you go and listen to the podcast, they have to genuinely interesting stuff on their and they are very easy on the ears.Oh and they are firefly fans which is always a plus in my books, they take the line “we aim to misbehave” for their website and i think it suits the theme very well. Oh and fab is a crunchbang user so thats another plus! (you can probably see from the very informal structure to these posts, i don’t actually plan anything in advance and my english isn’t very good either)

I suppose this being a blog about me and my Uni life I should mention something about it, i’ve had my head in my operating systems book the last few days learning and revising everything for my exam this week. It’s going well, its by far the most content rich module i’ve done this semester (i would even go as far to say to content rich) however the teacher is extremely helpful and attentative to our questions. I really can’t wait untill the next semester starts and I don’t have any work for a week or so, I could really do with a few days off to do absolutely nothing!

Thats all for now.