languor.us

No self-respecting guy will admit to liking soppy girly pop by artists such as Mariah Carey. But it was with some happiness that TIL that a long-"loathed" favorite of mine, Mariah's Without You is actually a rip-off of a 1970 song by Welsh rock group, Badfinger (whose own story is pretty shocking (two of its band members committed suicide)). So I can now openly admit to liking the song :)

I was looking for a way to add a custom context (right-click) menu to KDE's Dolphin (in Kubuntu 14.10, Utopic) that (much like in Windows) would allow me to enqueue an entire folder/directory in Videolan. Many of the examples that I looked at were rather sketchy or incomplete. Here's a simple working example that might be of help to someone else out there. You can modify it appropriately to get it working for other applications as well.

A quick and easy way to join or merge multiple PDFs together on Linux (Kubuntu 14.10):

This doesn't resample pages or any other nonsense like that either :) pdfunite is provided by the poppler-utils package which should already be installed.

If you want to do the opposite, i.e. split a unified PDF file into multiple ones, poppler-utils also provides the aptly named pdfseparate.

Hope this helps :)

Do you have a USB keyboard? Does it work fine? Does it also work fine once you boot into your operating system? Does it not work at all during the boot process before loading your operating system?

If your answer is yes to all of the above, then you've very likely been an idiot like yours truly and enabled the Fast Boot feature in your Intel motherboard's BIOS without reading the fine print.

Here are the lyrics for "Watching cars go by", a funky song by Felix da Housecat (featuring Donna the Cyber Whore). (I couldn't find the lyrics transcribed anywhere correctly.)

I remember, many, many years ago, finding a plugin for WinAMP that allowed (IIRC) easy looping of a section of an MP3. I wanted to do this again. Only this time, there was no WinAMP and I am a foobar2000 user.

If you see something like the following error message when you run a sed command:

then it (probably) means that your regex capture group has not been escaped properly.

So, if you are using a command like:

then it needs to be escaped like so:

In other words, round parentheses/brackets need to be escaped while the square brackets do not :|

If you, like me, have the (off and on) pleasure of working with Unity3D (5.1.1f1), you are probably familiar with implementing cute li'l workarounds to get around the pesky li'l niggles that seem to plague the otherwise fun package. Today, I ran into an issue with the Inputfield nGUI component. From the looks of things, it doesn't like you playing around with its font size.

I had the misfortune of trying to install Microsoft's "Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel" which creates, well, a virtual CD/DVD-ROM drive that allows you to mount ISO images. There are a number of other programs that do this, but seeing as to how this was a M$ product, free, Window-7 compatible, and light of weight, I decided to give it a whirl. The README.txt that accompanies the installation file provides instructions for the manual addition of the vcdrom.sys driver to the Windows directory.

N.B. This is a mirror of a page that no longer exists at its original location.

I needed to be able to save game state, and I wanted to communicate back and forth with websites, and I needed the files to be human readable, and I needed it to be easy [I have been told I am very needy]. The best thing for me to do was to figure out how to read, and write, XML inside Unity3D. It’s a web plugin right? it should support XML processing, and the DOM model right? Well, yes, yes it does.