Humble Indie Bundle 2

If you don't know what the humble indie bundle is let me enlighten you. Basically, it is a pay what you want pack of games from several different independent developers. You can choose divide you payment up between money for the developers, or donate to charity. The games are available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. You can get it here.

I bought the original humble indie bundle last year mainly for World of Goo, but was surprised at how much fun the other games in the pack were. I've looked at the games in the new one and they look promising. Take a look at the video below.

Please take a look and if you like what you see, purchase them.

Hugin

Don't worry, I'm not going to hug you. Hugin is a freely avaiable for non-commercial use program used to stitch photos together to make a panoramic view of said photos. Feeling inspired by AJ's picture, I tried to take a picture of a huge rainbow last night. I couldn't get the entire rainbow in frame, so I took several pictures of it.

Using Hugin, I was able to create a panoramic view of the pictures I created with in a few minutes.

Hugin is available for download for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

PalmSDK on Gentoo Linux

I dislike my phone and my carrier. Once my current contract is up I would love to switch carriers and get a new phone. One option is a WebOS device, the Palm Pre or Pixi. Since I don't want to buy anything without trying, I thought it would be fun to try out the emulator that is provided in the PalmSDK (available for Windows, Mac, and Linux). Here is how I installed the sdk on Gentoo:

First add the sunrise overlay:

layman -a sunrise

Unmask the sdk and novacom and emerge:

echo "=dev-embedded/PalmSDK-1.4.1.427 ~amd64" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords

echo "=dev-embedded/palm-novacom-1.0.55 ~amd64" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords

emerge PalmSDK palm-novacom

Add your virtualbox modules to load at startup and load them now:

echo "# Load VirtualBox Modules" >> /etc/conf.d/modules

echo modules="vboxdrv vboxnetflt vboxnetadp" >> /etc/conf.d/modules

modprobe vboxdrv

modprobe vboxnetflt

modprobe vboxnetadp

Add the novacom to run as a service and start it:

rc-update add novacom default

/etc/init.d/novacom start

Add your user to vboxusers group:

usermod -G vboxusers -a username

Now you can run the emulator (not as root):

plam-emulator

If all went well you should get prompted to select which device you want to use.

If you got a "missing version string error" instead, it most likely means your virtualbox modules are not loaded (see modprobe code above to load them).

To access the console you can use:

novaterm

Enjoy using WebOS!

Pipe Menus KDE4

For many years, I used Fluxbox as my window manager. I made the switch to KDE around the time 4.2 was released. One of the things I missed most was the pipe menu in fluxbox. When KDE 4.4 was released, I found out that you can have the pipe menu functionality in KDE. To enable it, you need to go to your Desktop Settings (right click the desktop) and select Mouse Actions. Next, set your right button to Application Launcher. You also may want to do as I have and add another action to set shift + right mouse button to use the Standard Menu.

When KDE 4.5 was released, the Application Menu was synchronized with the KDE start menu. Finally I could get rid of the start menu, but I still need to add a menu entry for shutdown/logoff and one for run. Using kmenuedit, I created a Leave button using the following command:

qdbus org.kde.ksmserver /KSMServer org.kde.KSMServerInterface.logout 1 -1 -1

For Run, I used the following command:

qdbus org.kde.krunner /App display

For both items, you will want make sure "Enable launch feedback" is unchecked.

Nspluginwrapper Adobe Flash

Nspluginwrapper is a tool that allows you to run 32bit plugins in a 64bit browser. Nspluginwrapper is useful for running Adobe Flash till either Adobe decides to realease a 64bit linux plugin again or one of the alternatives (see lightspark, and gnash) has full support.

Nspluginwrapper should NOT be ran as root.

To see a list of currently loaded plugins:

nspluginwrapper -l

To automatically load all 32bit plugins:

nspluginwrapper -v -a -i

To automatically unload all 32bit plugins:

nspluginwrapper -v -a -r

Alternatively, you could just use a 32bit browser, but where is the fun in that!

Custom CSS for Code

A long time has pasted since I last did anything related to web development. I'm using a pre built template but I wanted to add my own style for code snippets and commands. Here is what I used:

#code{
background-color: #555555;
border: 1px dashed #999999;
padding: 5px;
overflow: auto;
font-size: 11px;
margin: 10px}

Once you have your css you can use <div> apply your style to your text:

<div id="code">This is code</div>

Add course to Forerunner 305 with gpsbabel

Using gpsbabel 1.4.1 use the following command:

gpsbabel -i gpx -f somefile.gpx -t -o garmin -F usb:

This comes in handy when using a tool such as mapmyrun to create a course and then uploading it to the Forerunner 305.