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.