Tech Scribblings

So, I just started using twitter and it is pretty cool. One of the best things I think on facebook is seeing people’s status change…it can show what they are going through or doing right now. Twitter is a little microblogging tool that you basically just state your status like you would on facebook and thats it. You can get updates in text message form sent to your form whenever someone adds something to twitter.

I love it. Sometimes it takes too long to write a whole blog entry but it is easy to send little status updates in my free seconds…the question is, how do I get family members and friends to watch that for my status updates without having them be forced into getting an account and always logging in to see the updates…

Maybe there is a WordPress plugin I can use to show it on my personal blog or some sort of RSS thing to check out. Either way I think I like twitter…although they need to add more ways to send and receive updates, like through email, IM, or RSS or something, because I don’t get unlimited text messages so it can definitely ruin the experience.

For the last several months on my Ubuntu machine at work the numpad has not been working. It has been so frustrating. I would turn the numlock on and off and nothing would seem to get it to work.

I thought it was something wrong with the keyboard or possibly after a kernel update one of the drivers changed and killed it for some reason. I was on Hardy and haven’t taken the time to update to Intrepid yet. I just figured after I update to Intrepid it would fix the problem. Turns out it probably would have but I fixed it without having to upgrade yet.

This problem actually has to do with Gnome’s Accessibility settings! I found out that if I type 2,4,6, or 8 on the key pad it moved the mouse around by tiny amounts, almost unnoticeable.

To fix the problem I just went to System -> Preferences -> Assistive Technologies, clicked on Mouse Accessibility, selected the mouse keys tab and unchecked the “Allow to control the pointer with keyboard” option. That fixed it!

Holy cow, this about blew my mind. I was working on a simple little website that had no FTP access so I was just planning on copying all the files down to check out the site and see how things were working. Obviously it is not fun to do that. Well I did have SSH access to the server and so I was trying to see what images were which, well, I didn’t really want to scp all the files I wanted to preview one-by-one. Oh, and I didn’t have root access and wasn’t sure if it had NFS available or not. That’s when I found out about sshfs!

With sshfs I can mount all the files locally over an SSH connection! To do this I:

sudo apt-get install sshfs

Edit /etc/modules and add a line that says ‘fuse’ if it is not there already

Add myself to the fuse user group:

sudo adduser username fuse

Then just mount the filesystem:

sshfs username@host:/path/to/remote/files /media/mount-point

Then to unmount do:

fusermount -u /media/mount-point

That’s it. It was so nice to work on all the files using my local tools and apps. Obviously this is not the best idea for changing a production server but it just provides a little nicer look at the remote files.

I had installed Adobe Reader to replace the default eVince document viewer. The problem was that PDFs I opened in Nautilus still opened with eVince. I wanted to know how to fix it so it would always open with Adobe Reader.

In order to do that you need to navigate to the file you want to open with a certain program in Nautilus. Right click on the file and click on Properties. Open the “Open With” tab. Select the program you want to open the file.

Thats it! So easy, and much better than the Windows way of doing it, you just have to know where to go.