How I get by almost perfectly with Chrome

You may have read that I <3 Mozilla Lab's Ubiquity. But in all honesty, My browsing experience has been simple and quite fast, since I switched to Chrome more than a week ago. Let's review what I need to add to it to be usable:

From left to right, I added these extensions:

• chrome currency converter: replaces all currency on the displayed page with the converted value in the currency of your choice. Click the coin to toggle that effect. It works perfectly!
• autopagerize: works on some pages, like google search, and basically it keeps fething results when I reach the bottom of the page, instead of waiting for me to click the next button (who does that more than once a week, anyway??)
• xmarks bookmark sync (they also have some search-related extensions, but i don't use them). I know chrome syncs with google bookmarks, but xmarks does it to firefox. and safari, too, making it possible to sync bookmarks on the iphone/ipod. (great!) now @google, when can i expect tags on my bookmarks? that is one feature that makes me launch firefox just to find out where i saw something whose name I can't remember but had to do with <tagname>..
• proxy switchy! - i have to use my university proxy to access some bibliography-related resources. it works. 'nuff said.
• AdBlock+. (others may prefer AdBlock - i still haven't made up my mind)This *had* to be there. I mean, we can make a style/userscript to remove certain things, but it's a lot more handier to just point and click on a div/table/image and *bamf*, gone forever. Who needs rotating/flashing/NSFWP banners? not me.
• 1Password. this was another think I couldn't live without. I'd still be using Firefox if it weren't for this invaluable piece of software. Now be warned, its Chrome extensions isn't nearly as complete as the Firefox one. But it fills my passwords, at least. And that is all I care for now. (But I'll be looking forward for auto-filling, auto-submitting and the amazing Command+slash...)
• shareaholic. there may be several (grouped or individual) extensions to perform these stuff. but shareaholic is complete, fast, sleek and very useful. even if i just click on it once a month, it'll make my task a bit faster and painless. so it's worth it.
• facebook for google chrome. does it need a description? notifications, wall, etc. and allows to make posts and comments/likes. it does its job, well enough.
• diigo. I keep some notes on scattered web places, and diigo has been handy. the extensions is better (and smaller, space-wise) than the bookmarklet. yay.
• chromed bird. remember what i told you about facebook for chrome? read it again, replace facebook with twitter. there you have it. it works. perfect for the casual twitter, or for a quick post (remember, i used ubiquity. if someone has a working twitter quicksilver plugin, i'd be all ears...)
• chromy. gets your bookmarks in a vertical menu, with a toolbar with scripts to add to evernote, lookup somewhere, translate, etc. it's still on probation on my setup, beacuse I haven't used it after getting it installed and configured. looked great as a concept, though... :)
• feedly. welcome back to my life. i missed you. you're prettier, fancier, more usable and more usefull than google reader - or any other rss reader i've used so far. I'd stopped using you when you clashed with some firefox nightly builds features, but with chrome you seem to be working great. so thank you for that!

And that's about it. i have some more usercripts and bookmarklets to simple stuff (multiple columns on google, images lightbox, an overlay with selection translation to english, a design set of tools, with grids, rulers, etc). And everything works. Wait, did I mention that www.youtube.com/html5 experience works on Chrome, but not on Firefox? Yeah, that means no more Flash on YouTube. That also turned my head.

So, my dear Firefox, this is a (at least temporary) goodbye. We'll see each other again on compatibility checks on my web design experiences, or after you decide to put more effort on Ubiquity's support. Ta ta.

W595, meet your new brand: (void).

A2-DB3150 Flashing / Debranding. This is the fancy name for which you must look up in the web, if you need to remove the annoying, unpractical and often limiting (and annoying, have I mentioned it's annoying??) branding that certain network operators carve into the great Sony Ericsson W595 (dubbed Walkman). A2 it's the chipset family, and DB3150 is the motherboard type, I'm told. On the other hand, the vast majority of forums tell you that you can edit a little file in the phone to inform the Sony Ericsson Update Service (SEUS) that it needs a new (generic) firmware. Well, that didn't happen to me. Why? my Fw was already up to date. So the other option was to flash the desired generic fw into the phone. I found out that I had to pick one with the appropriate language settings (e.g., Western Europe would have, among others, English and Portuguese). And I also found out that some tools to do it, with the appropriate guidelines. So, without further ado, for your referencing pleasure, here's the first set of instructions to achieve debranding:

1. Download a2uploader.rar from here A2UPLOADER-download(also contain Gordon's Gate Setup) and unpack
2. Run Gordon's Gate Setup and install flash drivers (if you already didn't install)
3. Download MAIN, FS and custom files for your phone (all needed files you will
find here in download section - firmware(MAIN and FS) or custom files (CUSTPACK)

[From A2-DB3150 Flashing - Top Sony Forums]

Read the article for the rest. And enjoy, for instance, 3G networks blocking, and the consequent longer battery life! :)

Ubuntu on alcohol doing Office 2007

Up until recently I've found myself drawn to explain people who wanted to do something good with their computers to step into the Ubuntu way (or equivalent free linux distr.). But the caveat would be the same — people would have to let go of the Oh-so-good-and-pleasant-without-whom-I'd-do-nothing-out-of-my-life Office 2007. But last week I took another shot at it. Installed an ubuntu on an 2 year old Asus F3JC laptop, saved the rescue disc to keep the windows XP license, and created a Virtual Machine (tried QEMU, VMWare, and was about to try the Sun approach too). Yes, it runs. Yes, it loads office's apps. But hey, I'm trying to talk someone into leaving XP because Ubuntu 64 would be a better experience... Come on, booting an OS and then booting another OS and go through the hassle of sharing folders between them in order to use the guest OS's apps? That's... devilish unpractical, to say the least!

To work around that, a good friend reminded me of Wine, a (the?) WINdows Emulator for Linux. I remember having read that office 2007 didn't run there, but boy, I was clearly wrong about that! Yes, it's not a click-install-run procedure yet, but It's doable, if you're willing to follow some precise guidelines. The trouble is, there are lots of machine/architecture/emulator version/office version combinations out there, and I found out most guides only work for a specific one. Thus yes, some forum scavenging is required. First, let's give a warm thank you to the Wine team. It has grown so much, now it can run .NET frameworks, DirectX and other recent MS works flawlessly. Then, note that I tried and successfully install, run and use Word, Excell and Powerpoint (Publisher crashes, as well as Access, and I didn't try any other Office app). This was done using Ubuntu 8.10, the 64 bits version. To make your life easier, I'll state that I had troubles following most guidelines with the updated wine version (1.1.12), so I reverted to 1.1.11 (use the archive here). After doing that and starting from a clean (sober!) wine state (do a 'rm -rf ~/.wine' on the console shell), I followed the instructions on two sources (I've found many others, but the procedures are essentially the same, gotta set the required libraries and runtimes right before installing everything), and got everything up and running. Sweet! I can now ditch the 6-10 GB image for a virtual system, and have people run office as fast (faster? or is it just me?) as open office. If that won't make up people's mind, what will? Oh, right. Yes, you can wooble a word window just like any other, and it looks as sleek as you think it would! Eh. (Btw, see here for a handy replacement for your office disks. Claimed to be working, I haven't tested any.)

Share and enjoy. And in a Windows 7 15-minute's of spotlight era (do you really believe it will stay much longer than that?), let's keep our machines light, pretty and productive with the free alternatives.

Ecto, meet Blogger. Now go make some beautiful newlines.

I've been using Blogger to all my post publishing needs for some years now. And since I moved my "home" into a Mac OSX system I've started using ecto to publish to them. But I've stumbled in this issue in more than one blog, so this post serves as both advice for the frustrated and to remind me in future installations (never googled your blog to see what your past thoughts were? you are missing out, then!)

Problem. I write a text, such as this one, with some paragraphs. and if I publish them as is, blogger spaces them out, inserting linefeeds (<br/> HTML tags) between them. So I desperately try to fix them in ecto. I refresh the posts list, and see the extra spaces. If I fix everything, I get the same result. If my mind wonders and I forget to fix something, and still publish it, I see not one but two extra line breaks. Wow! :)

Solution. Taken from an ecto's support forum entry the idea is to make Blogger *not* insert linefeeds in every return on the posted text. ecto does that job already, so we simply stop Blogger for doing extra work. Who knows, someday ecto will detect that automatically and won't hurt our posting confidence in the process :)

Details. Go to your Blogger dashboard, see the Settings tab, and the Formatting subtab. Set "Convert Line breaks" to "No". Save. Publish. Rejoice!

Serve your music with class. Use Bowtie!*

I recently stumbled upon TUAW's article on Bowtie.

Context: music info and control in a Mac OSX (Leopard) environment. I have until now been envying Coversutra's users, for its beautiful and useful cover art, shortcut-controls of iTunes and Last.fm song submission. Well, seems like I've made my setup even better. Want to know how? Let's start by grabbing the latest version of Bowtie. Yes, it's still in beta (next beta is being worked on as I write this, according to the author it will be due in a couple of weeks). Run it. Run iTunes, and play. And that's it!

Wait... but I see an space-eater icon in my dock. Coversutra has the option to go to the menu... But Bowtie has no need for such a menu. what for? So grab your application icon, right click, show package contents, and find the Info.plist inside it. Now add a new String parameter called NSUIElement, and give it a value of 1. Presto, relaunch the app, and you have no icon at all on your dock - and the UI is still on your desktop! But wait, how do I go to the preferences? That's right, no menu is there. So just click on the UI, and press the default Preferences shortcut, "Command+", to bring up all the juicy options!

Waaait a bit more... but I don't like how this looks like! Well, two options: either make your own skin, see the downloaded package for details, of look trough some foruns for Bowtie related skins. I promise, you will be much surprised with the quality of each theme!

Hey, I'm not there yet - I used a Coversutra demo and I liked the search features... and the much much more comprehensive shortcuts to customize from! Ok, ok. I'll bet if you want to have this trouble to use freeware to suit your picky needs, you already have a launcher such as say... Quicksilver! Am I right? So you're all set. Just install the iTunes module, and skim through its settings, and triggers. Shortcuts aplenty for all of you keyboard lovers, and a bonus one - "Search iTunes". give it a handy shortcut, and it will be all you need. But if you want to look for artists, albums, or tracks, just type iTunes in Quicksilver, press right arrow and browse whatever you want, and then play it. All very very similar to what you already do with Quicksilver, which is a big plus!

Still now happy? Last.fm integration is not enough? Still need that menu icon, despite useless? Still find out the window is not on the desktop when pressing F11, like Coversutra's? Found any other nasty bug? Do everyone a favor and tell the developer. Beta versions are there for you to find bugs and for developers to fix them!

*or How to kill the need for Coversutra and its paid support once and for all...

AppleScripting Twitter in Quicksilver

Today I woke up with a strange need to show some love to my everyday helper, Quicksilver. And just as I was about to twit something, I realize that was the perfect addition I was lacking! Let's see what I've come up with.

I found out Tweet.scpt from Ted Leung, an AppleScript to send Twitts via Quicksilver. As simple as that. Drawbacks, Twitter only lets us send 140 characters long messages, and Quicksilver won't count that in the interface for us. Also, inline text writing in the default QS interface is not exactly great looking. For the UI issue all I had to do is to grab the BezelHUD skin from Julius Eckert. Just trust me on that one, see the video on his page or go ahead and install it - I'm not going back, it's awesome!

To the char count problem, I had to make some modifications to the script. In short, I opted to count the chars using

count characters of tweet

then either send the message to twitter or show a dialog warning telling you have exceeded the char limit. Pretty simple, and works almost great (bonus for finding how quicksilver could show the char count in the text-edit window!).
All the notifications use Growl. And the script looks for your Twitter account info in your Keychain, using the Usable Keychain Scripting addition, from Daniel Jalkut (another small modification from the original script, that uses the Apple's slow Keychain Scripting...). But I found out the Keychain thing was being blocked if it wasn't started yet. So I "borrowed" this loader (I can't remember where...), and call it before I try to access my password, and it works great:

on startKeychainScripting()

-- This function ensures that the Keychain Scripting.app is launched by a process

-- different from the one executing this script. It is only needed when using Keychain Scripting to

-- retrieve the password property of a key.

-- Quit Keychain Scripting if it's running, since opening this script may have implicitly launched it.

try

tell application "System Events"

set foundApp to first process whose name is "Keychain Scripting"

set pid to id of foundApp -- this will exit the try block if the process isn't running

quit foundApp -- we get here if the process is found

end tell

end try

-- get Finder to launch Keychain Scripting

tell application "Finder"

open application file ((path to home folder as string) & "Library:ScriptingAdditions:Usable Keychain Scripting") as alias

end tell

-- make sure that Keychain Scripting is up and running

repeat while true

try

tell application "System Events"

set foundApp to first process whose name is "Usable Keychain Scripting"

set pid to id of foundApp -- this will exit the try block if the process isn't running

end tell

exit repeat -- we get here if the process is found

end try

end repeat

end startKeychainScripting

This is also included in my script. All you have to do is to place it in ((path to home folder as string) & "Library:ScriptingAdditions:Usable Keychain Scripting") and reload Quicksilver. Try it out!

Now all I have to do is to find out why direct messages like "d username hey, what's up" don't get their destiny :( Maybe it has something to do with http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json not liking direct messages, but my spare time is up now, I'll give this another try later on...

Last, but not least, many thanks to all authors and contributors of all software and tips I've mentioned in this post! :)

DVD Flick

So I hear you just got yourself into the getadivxthengetasubtitlefilethenwanttousethelivingroomdvdplayerandwhatnow? game. So now you have to know that most operating systems out there can burn dvd's, but the conversion stuff is too kinky for them to work out of the box. I won't go into the required legalese to explain the issues at hand - google for it, if you really want. Let's skip to the interesting part. You're stuck with Windows. I pity you. But it's not a lost cause, at least for a simple task such as divx into dvd conversion. Oh, and I know there are PLENTY apps out there to do the job. But can they also do subtitles sleekly as well? I've used WinAVI Video Converter, but now there's a free (as in speech) little tool that simply works! Get the app, install it, and give it a test. for the record, I'll itemize what this does:

1. Pick an AVI file
2. Pick a subtitle file (srt, perhaps)
3. Produce a nifty DVD playable with a subtitles track!

[Go to DVD Flick for more...]

Audacity: Can I remove the vocals from a recording to make a Karaoke track?

Today I was asked to remove the voice from a song (for a kid's Christmas event). I already knew that it is simply impossible to achieve in a general-purpose tool - it depends on the frequency arrangements of the voice parts of the song. However, I found a little program (I've used before) called Audacity that is able to help us with this task. the authors have even written a small page with the necessary steps for a specific (albeit common) case:

1. Import your stereo file into Audacity.
2. Open the track menu (click the arrow next to the track title), and choose “Split Stereo Track.”
3. Select the lower track (the right channel) by clicking it in the area around the mute/solo buttons.
4. Choose “Invert” from the Effects menu. 5. Using the track menus, change each track to “Mono.”

[See the full article in Audacity: Can I remove the vocals from a recording to make a Karaoke track?]

Skim

This is my first post with an advice for the Macsen, and Emacsen alike!

So let's say you're working on your LaTeX article. Let's assume you're into the "\C-c \C-c" way of life. Isn't that a bore to compile the pdf and then also have to (close any opened window and) open the file, every time you make the smallest of the changes? Fear not. Skim to the rescue! Go to the preferences pane, in the Skim tab, you'll find an unchecked box saying "Check for file changes". Now why is this unchecked in the first place? No one knows for sure... Just pick from the preset Aquamacs Emacs (or tweak arround to match your preferences), and you're ready to go. Open the file once. Now switch to emacs, change the TeX source, and compile it. Skim will ask you if you want to reload the file, just tell it to keep doing it automatically from now on - and that's it! One less "\C-c \C-c" for article compilation, multiplied by... lots!, that means... well.. a healthier life for your fingers, at least! Here's the screenshot, for your delight.

ObjectDock, TopDesk and Launchy

Recently I've come across the task of modding a common Windows XP to look and feel more like a MacOS Tiger. I've stepped up to the challenge, and there's lots of good software to help you. After giving them all a try, I find the following the most usefull:

1. StyleXP - with this one you'll get the bar and windows just like a mac (look for styles in wincustomize!)
2. ObjectDock - Rocketlaunch is also cute, but objectdock is more versatile.
3. Launchy - Remember quicksilver? this is close :)
4. Topdesk - this is a good expose!

As for the dashboard, the only widget tool I'm familiar with is google desktop. so you're probably good with it, too, if you have a reasonably decent machine (RAM-wise).

After a while without trying any kind of blogging ...

After a while without trying any kind of blogging systems, I'm back to the world. Here's my current settings:

• A blogger account (beta version) with two blogs:
• • Carpathian cloud, for all my academic and technical posts. Aimed at the common geek :)
    
  • This one. Aimed for the general audience. PG not necessary, but may be advisable in certain posts!

Hope we can have some fun here!