Tag: imported

Ubuntu 10.10 logout immediately after login

Since the last few days I was perplexed with a weird issue. Ubuntu 10.10 logged me out as soon as I entered the login credentials. It did appear to try to login, but I couldn’t see the messages. Turns out — it was because of a few ‘conflicting’ entries I had made in .bashrc and .bash_profile files. I commented everything out, and got through without any hassle!

A few days ago, got the Python book I had been wanting. Being a fan of the Head First series, I started liking it even before I had got my hands on it. Prejudice, they call it.
Anyway, the reviews indicate that it’s ‘good for beginners’. So I might start off here itself.

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Tried out Meego, or rather, I should be saying, tried out the ‘Meego port for N900‘ yesterday. Not a very pleasant experience. Not that I wasn’t prepared for a lot of loose-ends, due to the fact that it’s an Alpha release. But still, I’m not calling it ‘unpleasant’ only because of the look at feel. The device became quite slow and unresponsive as well. Thankfully, the good people working on the port had described the way to remove it.

I then thought of trying out NITDroid; and to my surprise — I loved it! The developers have done an excellent job at creating an Android port for N900. I don’t mind ignoring a lot of features ranging from ‘nice-to-have’ to ‘hello-you-call-this-a-phone?’. But what the heck! I got a working Android device with little effort. And yes, ‘I’m lovin’ it’.

Display-specific taskbars

I was always charmed by bigger workspaces. The need was underlined when I realized that I spent most of my time on a laptop with meagre 14.1″ display. I was glad when I got to have another 17.1″ monitor that I could use as an ‘extended desktop’. I was happy with the set-up as such — lots of real estate to utilize, until I realized an irksome issue: Windows does not extend the taskbar to the extended monitor. Thus, if one minimizes an application, s/he has to get back to the primary monitor, and access the application from the taskbar there. While it does not look like too much of a hassle, it does become a pain — especially if you’re like me — who open plenty of apps at once.

There is a nifty little utility called Ultramon which solves this issue by providing a feature of display-specific taskbars. This way, each of the apps are localized to their specific monitors. It also adds a tiny button near any window’s minimize button to send it to the other monitor.

Do give it a try if you’ve woes like I quoted with multiple monitors. It has a number of other neat features as well. The only con is that it’s not free or Open-Sourced.

iPod touch with Cydia

Cydia is an application manager that you can use on your jailbroken iPod. I’m a big fan of it because it has enabled me to SSH as well as VNC to the iPod — and that’s just the beginning!
Anyway, I was finding installing Cydia-based applications on iPod a bit cumbersome — it would take a bit long. Cyder is an great application which thus came to the rescue! Now I can download apps (plus dependencies) on the PC, and then transfer them to the iPod. (Also helpful when you do not have a WiFi.)

Another cool utility that I came across today is iPhone browser through which (and as the name suggests :P) one can browse the iPhone/iPod file system. It’s quite useful if you don’t want to FTP (over SSH) to your iPhone/iPod to transfer files.