languor.us

So if you've just installed or upgraded to the new version of Kubuntu (Wily Werewolf), you will notice that Skype runs fine but does not appear in the system tray as an icon. The workaround to fix this is to install the sni-qt package, but specifically the 32-bit version of the package (as Skype is a 32-bit app). To do this, open a terminal and type:

This will also install a dependency. Once this is installed, quit Skype and restart it to find the familiar green check in your system tray.

I wanted to add a timestamp to my MySQL command prompt to keep a track of when the previous command on my screen was executed (my mysql window is open all the time). As per MySQL's docs, this can be done with something like:

mysql>  prompt [\w, \R:\m]> 
PROMPT set to '[\w, \R:\m]> '
[Sun, 12:30]>

(Note that there's a space after the > in the prompt command.)

The other options for the prompt command are:

So here I was happy with my installation of program foo.exe under Wine in Linux (Kubuntu if you must know). All of a sudden, the program starts whining a little, wobbling a touch, and generally exhibiting wonky tendencies. While I could have uninstalled it and tried to reinstall it to see if that fixes the problem, there's a neater solution that is only available for Wine users.

If you run into the following error while adding a project into Eclipse from existing source using the New Project dialog,

then you are very likely trying to create a new Eclipse project that contains Eclipse metadata files from a previous Eclipse project created at the same location. The fix for this is to import this pre-existing project into your workspace using the Import, General, Existing Projects into Workspace option.

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.