Gnome 2.10 and Mounted Volume Icons

I’ve been enjoying the subtile improvements in Gnome 2.10 over the last two or so days.

One of the most noticable improvements is the new Places menu and the trash panel applet. Between the Applications and Places menus and the trash can applet sitting on a panel there is no need to interact with the naked desktop ever. The Places menu allows you to open file manager windows directly to your home directory, places you have bookmarked in file open/save dialog boxes, and mounted network volumes.

The Places menu and Trash Can applet are always visible no matter how many windows you have on top of the desktop. Nice and easy. It always annoyed me having to move windows out of the way, switch to a clean virtual desktop or use hacks like the “Show Desktop” buttons and keyboard combinations just to interact with the filesystem and mounted volumes.

At least in Ubuntu the desktop ships bare. No icons at all and I’ve come to prefer it that way. The only icon type they forgot to turn off is the Mounted Volume icons. I was a tad annoyed by this but it has an easy fix:

gconftool-2 -s /apps/nautilus/desktop/volumes_visible -t boolean -s false

You can also use the graphical gconf-editor tool to browse the settings tree with helpful descriptions of most settings.

Cracking Combination Locks

This guide on cracking Master Lock combinations makes me want to buy a lock just to try it. I remember noticing the “stick points” back in days when I had a school locker but never thought much of it. It would be interesting to see a cross section of the lock as I’ve always wondered what the inside of a combination lock looked like.

Streaming Tunes

With the exception of a rare purchase of an audio CD from a local “New Age” shop I don’t “buy” music anymore. I don’t feel its worth the $16 to $20 with tax to purchased a CD from a limited collection that will only have one or two tracks that I will truely enjoy. And DRM bullshit can bite me. DRM makes dealing with music way too fustrating. Every form of DRM kills the impulse buy without worry factor. Now I have to worry about what DRM format, what the “rules” are for use of the format, and how many dollars I’ll be fucked out of when the RIAA monopoly decides it needs a revenue boost so it fucks with the DRM system.

For the past year I’ve been listening to online streams heavily which I occastionally supplement with music that I have already laying around. There are many really crappy streams with low quality audio put out by “DJs” who blather on and who have music tastes incompatible with my own.

Live365 has a number of decent member programmed streams covering a wide range of tastes. In order to get a decent quality stream you must be a member which costs about $6 a month. You also need to have a mp3pro capable player to take advantage of the higher quality. Unfortunately the best option for playing this format under Linux involves running Winamp under wine. I managed to rig up Wine and Winamp by having Firefox pass pls files to the following shell script:

#!/bin/sh

OLD_PARAMS="$@"
setarch i386 wine ~/.wine/c/Program\ Files/Winamp/winamp.exe \
  `echo $OLD_PARAMS | sed "s/\/tmp\//E:\//"

I was a happy subscriber for over a year until I hit a little snag with billing issues (my fault) with Live365 and decided I was tired of dealing with the Winamp under Wine hack so I let my account expire. I can’t stand listening to poor “free” quality of the few streams that I liked that were not member only so I’m building up a list of free streams out.

So far I’ve found myself enjoying the following three streams while working:

Armitage’s Dimension

This stream deals mostly with J-Pop and other forms of music found in anime movies and shows. It has an open request queue system with a large library which always seems full whenever I go to submit a request. It seems to have an active community around it and they seem to keep the queue full with a good mix that I find enjoyable.

Japan-A-Radio

This stream ranks pretty high in Shoutcast and covers mostly non-anime J-Pop. I listen to this stream whenever Armitage’s Dimension doesn’t hit the spot.

Goth Metal World

This site covers heavy metal like Night Wish, Luna Coil, and other power and goth heavy metal groups. Has many many bands that will never see the light of day in US record stores (mainly because the average US citizen seems to love watching skanky pig fuckers wave their asses around more than actually like music enough to explore). This stream works great for when you need to drown out the office around you to focus hard on something.

Not only does music in the office played over a decent set of “cup” headphones have a “white noise” effect it helps keep me awake. It has practical work uses also. I always try to keep a stream running when making firewall and router changes and generally throughout the day. A break in the stream tells me that either I or a co-worker fucked up right away. ;) Also the traffic generated by the stream is good for seeing how many retransmits the AP has to attempt when testing the installation of new wireless gear during a walk around test.