The Hyperlogos

Recently I decided to give XBMC Live a try as the alternative to making my own Ubuntu install. I figured they might have it worked out to go a little faster. It looks as though I was right, and it's a great install so far as I can see, but I also discovered that they left out bluetooth. As probably the best cheap option for a good remote is a used Playstation 3 remote available at a gamestop near you for thirty bucks or less, this seems like an unfortunate omission. As I want to use a Logitech MX5000 keyboard hooked up to an MX900's USB Bluetooth dongle/mouse charging cradle, it was especially annoying.

Since I got a Mixman DM2 and like to run Linux I decided to put the two together. Slight hassle, though, the kernel doesn't sit still while you're not watching. A slight tweak is needed to get the driver to work on a modern kernel; in my case, 3.0.0-14-generic on Ubuntu.

Ubuntu has set the system clock to UTC since the Intrepid Ibex (8.10.) I didn't notice because I had upgraded through several other versions. Using UTC for the system clock is cool if you don't dual-boot, but I do. The functionality exists in at least Vista and later to use UTC for the system clock, but I'm using XP and don't trust it to work even if it appears to.

For some time now I have been using ps3mediaserver to stream video to my Xbox 360. Since solutions for playing various video streams on various devices have become more convenient of late I've become less picky about what I transcode to, except that I like to achieve fairly high quality. ogmrip has become less useful of late, failing on most source video on which I try to use it, so I've gone back to Handbrake, the most competent and arrogant of DVD transcoders.

I have two LCDs and Ubuntu, and I want to use compositing so I can use Compiz. Xinerama still doesn't work with Composite outside of Xgl, which was deprecated some years ago. I want to play full screen games but they don't properly span monitors in many cases, even if that's what I wanted. What is needed then is a way to easily toggle the second monitor. I found it in the Ubuntu forums archive in the form of Disper.

As I now own a Magellan Maestro 4050, which unlike my 4250 has bluetooth and a headphone jack, I decided to upgrade the software. After hunting around a little I found Miopocket 4.0, a complete shell replacement for WinCE 4.x through 6.x GPS devices including smartphones with touch. It implements an iPhone-like interface and provides dozens of utilities, apps, and games.

After installing plugbox linux on my Dockstar I found that new users' passwords expired on login and forced a logout forever. To fix this for a single user use this script:

Call it with the username you want to fix. It sets the last change date to a day after the epoch but it works.

GoogleCL is a python-based command-line utility for accessing Google. It uses gdata-python-client for the google interface. No Windows release is planned, but this is largely irrelevant because python runs fine on Windows, and so do gdata-python-client and GoogleCL.

One of the big problems with Google Chrome is the lack of inline PDF support on most platforms. Google has added preliminary support for PDF to Chromium but so far it has not come to Linux. It may come tomorrow, but until then, users who would like to avoid using acroread may use the following hack, at least on Ubuntu Lucid. As always, your mileage may vary.

We have often heard from a broad variety of pundits about how Linux is not a mature, enterprise-class Unix. All discussion over how "Linux is a kernel" aside, today I have encountered the first piece of evidence that suggests to me that this is true. It seems that no Linux distribution has a simple "repair permissions" tool. This was a standard feature of package managers of UNIX systems before Linux was even dreamt of, for example in Solaris.