Ever since I bought my laptop, Linux has had problems with its touchpad. For example, Arch recognizes it as an PS/2 mouse instead of Synaptics or ALPS touchpad. Because of this, when I switch off the touchpad with its off button, I can’t turn it back on again.

So after doing some research, I discovered that there is another way to do what I want. That is to load/unload responsible module with modprobe.

I made a simple bash script that does this, and mapped a keyboard shortcut. Also I needed to change the sudoers file, so that I can use modprobe -r psmouse and modprobe psmouse without giving the root password. Works like a charm.

#!/bin/sh

if lsmod | grep -q psmouse
    then sudo modprobe -r psmouse & echo 'Touchpad turned OFF'
    else sudo modprobe psmouse & echo 'Touchpad turned ON'
fi

Recently I heard about Bluetile. So I gave it a shot.

Bluetile is a tiling window manager for X based on xmonad. Windows are arranged automatically to tile the screen without gaps or overlap, maximizing screen use. Bluetile’s focus lies on making the tiling paradigm easily accessible to users coming from traditional window managers by drawing on known conventions and providing both mouse and keyboard access for all features. It also tries to be usable ‘out of the box’, requiring minimal to no configuration in most cases.

Den ganzen Beitrag lesen…

Its been some time since Google announced that there will be extensions similar to the ones that Firefox has. Few weeks ago they released a build featuring the extensions. Very quickly people started developing them and even sites for extensions  showed up (http://chromeextensions.org/).

But only today Google officially launched the beta version of extension channel.

Den ganzen Beitrag lesen…

I have always been interested in computer programming, more specifically in software programming. I have some PHP knowledge, in fact it was my first serious programming language I learned, not counting QBASIC, that I learned in school decades ago. However, I don’t really enjoy creating web applications, I think that I can do more things in the operating system (there’s bigger freedom) than in the browser.  However browsers are slowly becoming our system, but that’s a different topic.

Anyway, Python was the language I choose. To me it seems very simple and can do powerful things.

It’s been over a year now that I have slowly explored it.  There are multiple books to start with, and surprisingly they do not cost anything, at least the .pdf version. One of those that I used to introduce myself with Python, was Byte of Python. It covers almost all the essential things and has nice comparisons with other languages, so everyone can learn something new. Then comes the Python documentation, which is a really good resource working on a projects.

After learning the basics, there are lots of places to fulfill your knowledge – like solving problems with Python in Project Euler and The Python Challenge. The last one is really great, because it specifically designed for Python. Each challenge has taught me something new.

Recently I decided that I would like to start a project of my own. The idea is to create application for audio file organization – Awesome Music Organizer (AMO). This would serve many purposes. Learning Python, collaborating with other people (if there will be any) and I haven’t found a nice music organizer in Linux that could do everything I want. So I have added more information on the AMO page.