Regensblog

I had high hopes for Kubuntu 8.04 (the Hardy Heron) with regard to bluetooth transfers from our mobile phones to our computers. Apparently it got better for most of the world from 7.10 (the Gutsy Gibbon) to the current version, but not for users of Symbian-based phones like our Nokia E50 and E61i models.

Then I noticed apparently receiving bluetooth file transfers from our Mac mini to our Kubuntu Linux machine running 8.04 worked just fine — so why not from our phones? Was it related to our phones or to the software on our Linux machine?

It’s apparently related to the bluez-utils package in the Ubuntu repositories. A user posted on launchpad.net (original post here) that using the bluez-utils package from the Debian “sid” (unstable) repositories worked for him.

So, get the unstable bluez-utils package from here, install it with

sudo pkg -i bluez-utils_3.30-3_i386.deb

reboot, and that’s it…at least, that’s how I did it. I hope I’ve saved someone some self-hair-pulling and googling.

Thanks to Tammy and Matthias, we’re watching Season 2 of The Dog Whisperer. In one episode, they showed more of Cesar Millan’s sweet wheels — the ones attached to his feet.

They’re called LandRollers and they look really, really cool. I could totally see myself using something like these to get to and from work as a way to change it up from my daily bike ride (which I’ll miss while I’m in Iasi May 5-10) or to get more of a workout on the way to work. My bike rides are all-naturally powered by Yours Truly of course, but they’re about 17 minutes on average — not long enough for an aerobic benefit. I suspect the cobblestones surrounding our building would be too much for them, but once I can get out to the sidewalks on Obermünsterstraße or the flat pavers on Neupfarrplatz, it should be smooth sailing from there.

I’m already known for riding my bike to/from work in all kinds of weather; cruising in on a pair of these shouldn’t be that much of a switcheroo. And besides, that’s by far not the weirdest dude in the office. A certain Dr. S. is known for zooming from office to office on our floor on his kick scooter and even wore his Darth Vader mask all day in the office on his birthday.

I’m a size 11½ should anyone feel like donating a pair to me.

Größere Kartenansicht

I can amuse myself with this stuff all day.

Last night Sarah and I were marveling at Gmail on her phone. That’s a pretty sweet little light-weight app — very intuitive and quite easy to use via WLAN. Pretty much any available WLAN (our house, of course, but also friends’ houses and coffee shops and unsecured wireless networks at/near restaurants or hotels). I got to thinking,

Is there something similar for chat functionality available for her phone?

Of course there is. This morning I stumbled upon Fring. I told it her mobile number and it sent a link to itself via SMS, which I clicked on and started the installation process. About 2 minutes later, we were up and running with

• Skype (including chat functions)
• SkypeOut
• Google Talk (including Gmail Chat functions)
• Yahoo! IM, AIM, ICQ, and MSN chat (all of which we have used in the past, but don’t need very much anymore)
• various SIP providers (none of which have used in the past, but that might be something I can get the Enginerd* to help us with — he seems like a pro)

This software is very cool. Basically it allows you to do VoIP communications through your mobile phone’s internet connection, be that an internet connection via WLAN or 3G or EDGE.

What’s the upshot for you and me? A tighter electronic leash Enhanced communcations availability for Sarah! The next time you chat or call her via Gmail or Skype, it might well be via her phone instead of one of our (several) computers here at home. This will be great for when we’re traveling, for example, to Mexico (instead of paying 4€ a minute to talk, we could paying, um ZERO pesos a minute down at the condo’s WLAN hotspot).

Man, I love technology.

It’s been like 10 days since either of us has last posted. You might be wondering, “Are they in a Banana Bread coma?”

Nope, but we have been busy. Here’s what we’ve been doing:

• Sarah took a 3-day road trip to Frankfurt with our pal Andrea.
• I have been to Nuremberg twice and Frankfurt once for one-day busines trips.
• We have been to IKEA twice in person, and once by proxy (thanks a lot Natasha and Tommy for the delivery service).
• As a result of that, we’ve been exercising all those muscles necessary for lugging big flat packages up narrow staircases and cranking hex-head screws into wood with allen wrenches.

<rant>Most recently, I’ve been struggling with Lotus Notes as a result of being bought & sold last year. Other acquired units in the new parent company who were forced out of Exchange/Outlook years ago have advised us to just stop resisting and just accept it. They’ve also said,

“Notes is really powerful with regard to embedding workflows and distributed collaboration. Cliff, you like to tinker, right? You could do a lot within the Notes platform.”

It’s true, I do, but I’d prefer to be able to hit the ground running, and that’s not going well. I am severely missing my — or even any — keyboard shortcuts.

They don’t even have to make sense or be compatible with Windows de facto standards (ctrl-n does a new <anything>, ctrl-s saves the current <anything>, et cetera). Just don’t make me use the freakin’ mouse please! Alas, there really is no keyboard shortcut for replying to a message in Notes* — I have to select the “reply” button on the screen in order to reply to a message; something that every other email program I’ve ever used (Outlook, Outlook Express, Mail.app (on the Mac), Mozilla Thunderbird, Eudora, and even Gmail) has made more accessible with a keyboard shortcut.

Those who have asked me for computery help of any kind have undoubtedly been annoyed by my “helpful” suggestions to “just hit tab twice, then press shift-ctrl-[whatever], and it’s a lot faster.” Your eye-rolling does not go un-noticed, as you ignore me and pore over your screens, looking for something to click on. And while you’re doing that, I’ve already deleted three emails and started composing a reply to another one with an embedded screenshot showing you how you could have done it faster.

Prior to the big switcheroo from Exchange/Outlook to Domino/Notes, I did some googley research and found a plethora of Lotus Notes hate speech sites. From those I got an idea of what awaited me on the morning after the mailbox conversion. They weren’t wrong; Notes is a disaster for people like me.</rant>

It’s not really all that new, but I’m sprucing up a design idea I had last year while Sarah and I were visiting our pals Margot and Nick — going for something a little greener.

Never fear though: if you prefer the older Regensblog design, it’s still available. Just check out the menu bar on the left (or right, it’s up to you really) and find the section near the top called “Themey Stuff.” I’ve also put a similar design in there inspired by my walks around Regensburg at night called “Ghost on the Bridge.” I got the idea for user-switchable themes from B. over at Eurotrippen — her site is so slick!

If you find any inconsistencies or formatting problems, please let me know about them.

Ooh, snap. They totally nailed it in the article “An Amazing Mind: The REAL reason we use Linux.”

I have a very cluttered desk. In addition to the two monitors, two keyboards, two pointing devices (that’s what you call your mice if at least one of them is a trackball or trackpad), two webcams, two microphones, and two iPods, there is a ton of garbage, loose cables, photo paper, a CD spindle or two, post cards we bought and never sent, CDs awaiting import into iTunes, etc.

I don’t have a lot of room for all my stuff. For that reason I like my trackball. I got The Man™ to pay for my Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard and also Trackball back in the day in Troy, but the stipulation was that I couldn’t take them with me when I left (why the hell not? I can’t imagine anyone else being happy to inherit them) for Regensburg four years ago.

No matter, I asked Den Mann™ replace my keyboard here in Germany with the Microsoft Ergonomic keyboard after a couple years, but I was still missing my trackball. I coughed up for a used one on eBay and am pretty happy with it, but until today, I hadn’t been able to get the little midget buttons to the left and right of the main buttons to work. I mostly wanted them to work as surrogate browser Back and Forward buttons like I remember from MSIE 4 or 5 back in the day.

Some quick googling revealed that I am not alone! Turns out it’s not a fix that has to happen in Firefox at all, but rather an X11 tweak. I found it on launchpad.net:

Don’t forget to save a copy of your xorg.conf file first, in case you have to revert to it later!

Currently this can only be made to work in firefox and not in nautlis, yelp, ... with the following workaround:
1. Open a terminal and enter the following command:
$ sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf
2. Change the "Configured Mouse" protocol to:
Option "Protocol" "Auto"
3. Add the following following line (this maps horizontal scrolling to your back and forward mouse button, horizontal scrolling by default has back and forward actions in firefox):
Option "ButtonMapping" "1 2 3 6 7"
It should look like this:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Configured Mouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "CorePointer"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "Auto"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "ButtonMapping" "1 2 3 6 7"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "true"
EndSection
4. Restart X (Ctrl-Alt-Backspace).


Good news and bad news!

You want the bad news first? OK, here it comes.

I couldn’t get Skype 2.7.0.257 for Mac OS X to work. I used the built-in uploader thing to look for a new version and download and install itself. Then, when trying to log in afterwards, it never worked. The “Signing in…” rotating graphic thing just kept spinning. I tried a couple different approaches:

• rebooting (sorry — reflex holdover from my Windows days)
• dragging the Skype application icon from the Applications folder out onto the desktop, and then dragging it back into the Applications folder (this helped, amazingly, with the iSync application after upgrading to Mac OS X 10.5.2 — it was just a shot in the dark)
• Doing a fresh download of Skype 2.7.0.257 for Mac OS X from www.skype.com and overwriting the previous installation

None of that stuff worked. In the end, I found a copy of version 2.6.0.184 for Mac OS X that I downloaded from www.netzwelt.de which I installed. It appears to work better, since I can log in properly, but I must confess, I haven’t actually tested it yet.

Now for the good news!

I was poking around for an updated version of Skype for use on Linux, and I noticed they’d released a beta version of 2.0 for Linux — including video support! I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. Downloaded the Ubuntu package and with sudo dpkg -i skype-debian_2.0.0.43-1_i386.deb on the command line it was all installed and ready to go. Even better (or actually worse, financially) news: I didn’t need to buy those USB microphone and camera for use with the Mac after all — audio works great on Linux (like it always has) and even my ancient Intel Create & Share CS330 webcam (I remember paying like $50 for it at Costco back in the day) seems like it will work. Haven’t tested it yet directly. Those who know how to reach me on Skype, please do so to take the 2.0 beta on Linux for a spin with me.