Water Level 9,40m … from Alex.Be. on Vimeo.
September 2010 M T W T F S S « Aug 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 the cloud
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Multicolor LED Cube
Been extremely busy at work lately and have not had much time to update this blog but I have not forgotten about it! I will update it with some pretty awesome stuff soon.
Also, I have decided to add additional items to this blog. i.e. iPhone tweaks/tutorials, Android tweaks, etc… so keep checking back!
Anyway, I thought I would post something I just recently found online that is pretty cool. Its a 5″x5″x6.5″ cube with 64 LED lights built into it. I thought it would be an excellent addition to my desk at home. You can read more about it here.
Posted in gadgets, miscellaneous
Tagged animation, cool, cube, desk, gadget, lights, program
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Installing themes on Ubuntu/Gnome
First off, there are many different types of themes for the Gnome desktop: Metacity, GTK 2.x, Emerald (compiz), and Icons… I will discuss each type, their differences, and how to install them…
Metacity Themes
Metacity is a window manager for GNOME. It uses GTK+ 2.0 for drawing window frames, meaning that it inherits colors, fonts, etc. from the GTK+ theme. In other words, a metacity theme is only part of a theme – the window border.
How to install Metacity themes
1. Download the Metacity theme you want from here.
2. Extract the theme folder to your desktop.
3. You should now have a folder with the themes name on your desktop and inside that folder should be a folder titled “metacity-1″.
4. Now open up a terminal window and type: sudo nautilus (this runs the window manager as root so you now have root privilages)
5. Browse to /usr/share/themes.
6. Click and Drag the folder on your desktop into the window and youre done.
Now to activate the new metacity theme right click on your desktop and select “Change Desktop Background”. Click the “Theme” tab and choose “Customize”. Click the “Window Border” tab and find your newly installed theme. 
GTK 2.x Themes
GTK themes are themes that correspond with Metacity themes (usually). Metacity themes control the window borders and GTK themes control the appearance of the controls (buttons, window colors, input boxes, text colors, etc.).
How to install GTK 2.x theme sets:
1. Download the GTK 2.x theme you want from here.
2. Extract the theme folder to your desktop.
3. You should now have a folder with the themes name on your desktop and inside that folder should be a folder titled “gtk-2.0″, a folder titled “metacity-1″(maybe), and possibly a few others.
4. Now open up a terminal window and type: sudo nautilus (this runs the window manager as root so you now have root privilages)
5. Browse to /usr/share/themes.
6. Click and Drag the folder on your desktop into the window and youre done.
Now to use the newly installed theme, right click on your desktop and select “Change Desktop Background”. Click the “Theme” tab and choose “Customize”. Click the “Controls” tab and select your theme. Then select the “Window Border” tab and find your new metacity theme (probly the same name as your gtk theme). 
Emerald Themes/Compz Fusion
Emerald themes are another type of window border theme. Emerald is mainly used with Compiz or Beryl. Compiz and Beryl are awesome. They are programs that provide your desktop with really neat effects. If you want to use emerlad themes instead of metacity you must first install Emerald. To do that, open a terminal window and enter the following:
sudo apt-get install emerald
Emerald Theme manager should now be installed. To open it go to System > Preferences > Emerald Theme Manager. This is where you will manage new emerald themes. To find some good emerald themes, go here.
To install emerald themes, download one from the link provided above.
1. Extract the contents of the downloaded file to your desktop.
2. Open the compressed file and extract the file with the “.emerald” extension.
3. Go to System > Preferences > Emerald Theme Manager and click import.
4. Browse to the .emerald file and click install.select it and youre good!
If the window border doesn’t change when you select it then press alt+f2 and type:
emerald –replace
Icon Themes
Icon theme are just that… themes for your icons. There are all sorts of Icon themes out there. Some of the best ones can be found here.
How to install Icon Themes:
1. Download an icon theme from here.
2. Extract the contents to the Desktop.
3. Open a terminal and run sudo nautilus /usr/share/icons
4. Click and drag the icon themes folder, on your desktop, into the icons window. Close the window.
5. Right click the desktop and select “Change Desktop Background”. Click the “Theme” tab. Click “Customize”. Click the “Icons” tab. Select your newly installed icon set.
3 things needed after a fresh install of Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackelope)
1) Add sources to your repositories
First you need to backup your /etc/apt/sources.list file:
sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.backup
…Then add the text below to your /etc/apt/sources.list file
## Medibuntu
deb http://packages.medibuntu.org/ jaunty free non-free
Next, add authentication key to your software sources (for Medibuntu):
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update
Then upgrade your system:
sudo apt-get upgrade
2) Installing Compiz Config Settings Manager and Emerald Theme Manager:
sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager emerald
3) Installing multimedia codecs, flash plugins, JRE, DVD support and MS fonts
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras w32codecs libdvdcss2
THATS IT! From here down is not mandatory, but recommended
Hidden Ubuntu Tips & Tricks
While browsing Ubuntu Forums I stumbled upon a really helpful thread thats main purpose was to demonstrate Ubuntu’s hidden shortcuts. Below are some of the ones I found most useful…
- Selecting any text automatically adds it to a clipboard. MiddleClicking in a text field/place will paste this text.
- Window List Applet, on a panel: you can cycle through the windows by using the scrollwheel.
- Scrollbar in gnome: right clicking on the up/down arrows will scroll you all the way up/down.
- Compiz scale: when scale is activated, you can filter through the windows by typing (a bit like gnome do), by default this is case-sensitive, but can be turned off using the option in the Scale Window Title Plugin.
- Type the first couple of letters of a program/command into a terminal and push tab twice. it will either finish out the rest of the program’s name or give a list of several programs with the same beginning.
- Something that in Windows is not working everywhere: ctrl+backspace and control+delete delete whole words, not only a single letter. Similarly, control+arrows moves the caret (text cursor) to the next/previous word.
- Firefox: Press ctrl+shift+T to restore the last closed tab. It will also restore any text you’ve written in that tab, any buttons you’ve clicked, and its whole back/forward history.
- Generally, if you use scrollwheel, you scroll on whatever window the cursor is over, not necessarily the active window.
- Command-Line tool for downloading YouTube Videos: sudo apt-get install youtube-dl
- Pressing CTRL + C in terminal will terminate any current process running. For example, if you’re doing a disk check in terminal, CTRL + C will terminate it.
- lsof lists all open files.