Pulseaudio : The Incredible

The pulseaudio is great. And the greatest thing is that you need not do any config settings in debian for that. Just install it and use it straight-forward. I am using padevchooser as the applet for configurations. Now I can easily add bluetooth headsets and route the audio to them. The blueman applet has pulseaudio plugin. Just enable it.

For using mplayer
alias mplayer='mplayer -ao pulse'

In gmusicbrowser you can do the settings in mplayer advance tab in settings.

And that solves some of the problems with music/videos.

Recommended compiler options in gcc

These are the recommended compiler options for catching most of the errors in c/c++ program.

-ansi -pedantic -Wall -W -Wconversion -Wshadow -Wcast-qual -Wwrite-strings

You can alias it with gcc/g++ in your bashrc/zshrc and your life will become a bit cooler ;)

alias g++="g++ -ansi -pedantic -Wall -W -Wconversion -Wshadow -Wcast-qual -Wwrite-strings"

alias gcc="gcc -ansi -pedantic -Wall -W -Wconversion -Wshadow -Wcast-qual -Wwrite-strings"

Ref : http://www.network-theory.co.uk/docs/gccintro/gccintro_32.html

openbox-crystal

Just to satisfy the "very itch", I am planning to develop some default bindings and configurations for openbox widow manager. People who are intrested in developing the code or contributing on the ideas are most welcome.The source code can be downloaded from the website of openbox-crystal> It will be the home of the development (until further notified) and license will be obviously in GPL.So come on, Give me some sunshine, errr.... gimme some hand.:)

anyremote : the golden bullet bluetooth remote for computers

Though I already have a remote for my laptop, but this anyremote thing is just awesome. We can use any bluetooth compatible mobiles ( ok, most of the them ) as a remote. I am using ganyremote (gui for anyremote) and blueman (gui for connecting bluetooth devices). So the process is as follows:

# apt-get install ganyremote blueman

Make sure that you can connect your mobile using blueman.

Download the appropriate java client's jar / jad file from http://anyremote.sourceforge.net/dload.html and install it on your mobile. Now start the ganyremote and start its server (can use execute button on the ganyremote applet). And then start anyremote-client on your phone. Then search in anyremote-client for other devices and press connect to connect the computer. Voila ! I was able to control gmusicbrowser from the mobile.
Next aim is to write a config in ganyremot to be able to switch of computer remotely.

Colemak layout

Ya I know that this is after a long time. I am sorry as I was busy with some mundane tasks. So here is the news : I have switched my keyboard layout to "colemak". This saves me from RSI and promises to increase my typing speed as well. The speed factor is yet to be verified by me, but the RSI is certainly true. I followed cold turkey approach and it started showing results in 3-4 days. The biggest positive point is remapping Caps key to Backspace key, which itself reduces right pinky movement a lot. In debian it is as easy as these scripts that I am using.

#### file: ~/bin/switch_keyboard_layout_colemak.sh ####
setxkbmap us -variant colemak
xset r 66

#### file: ~/bin/switch_keyboard_layout_qwerty.sh ####
setxkbmap us;
xset -r 66

Reference : http://colemak.com/

A new browser based on chromium.

Should check this link. I dont know how much of this is true and how much it is an intrusion in our privacy.

http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_chrome_vs_iron.php

Besides this if you want to try out a chromium based browser then can download the chromiium iron from the same page. I have not yet tested the browser myself but will certainly do that. It seems that I should read the full agreement before clicking "I Accept".

++EDIT++
A friend of mine sent this link.
http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=114836&hl=en
So its not a problem anymore, The only thing remains is the default ON options for such things. I thing that while installing chrome, these options should be asked for. And for the iron chromium, they should tell how to disable these options.

unp : The universal de-compressor

For a person who spends a considerable amount of his time on computers, its really PITA to use different uncompress programs for wide variety of formats like zip, tar, gz etc etc available on the net. So when you download so many packages in so many formats, then just to uncompress them out, you try tar xvzf to find out that Oh! its not a gz archive. I found a better utilty for this purpose which works for almost all the tar/zip formats available. And its available on debian repo.

# aptitude install unp

And use it just like
$ unp x.gz
$ unp x.tar.gz
$ unp x.tgz
$ unp x.zip
$ unp x.bz2

So njoy!