U3Helper

Preface Being proud owner of a U3 capable flash drive, I wanted to add some of the tools I use everyday but which were not U3 compatible. Running a U3 program from the LaunchPad basically does the following things: Ejecting the U3 drive does the following for all programs which were ran in that session:… Read More »

Synaptics Touchpad

To use features like circular scrolling of a Synaptics touchpad, you need to add the following lines to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf: You also need to add the following line into your ServerLayout section in that… Read More »

Französisch in Berlin 🇩🇪

Extrakt aus “Französisch im Berliner Jargon” von Ewald Harndt: Dort wird u.a. aufgezeigt, dass viele Wörter im normalen (Berliner) Sprachgebrauch ursprünglich dem Französischen entlehnt sind. Das liegt wohl vor allem daran, dass im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert der Adel mehr französisch als deutsch gesprochen hat. Die deutschprachigen haben dann zum einfacheren Erlernen meist beide Wörte… Read More »

Wherever Change Directory

wcd is a tool which catalogs all directories of your $HOME (can be configured to catalog the whole drive) and then lets you type wcd Desktop and switches over to your ~/Desktop from wherever you are. Or you can type wcd “Rammstein*” and it will show you a list of your Rammstein-albums of your ~/Music-directory… Read More »

festival Text-To-Speech

Simultaneous playback The festival text-to-speech synthesizer seems to use normal ALSA playback instead of PulseAudio. This leads to it failing when there’s already something playing. E.g. if you’re listening to music with Rhythmbox, festival fails with this message: To make it use PulseAudio, we can re-route the audio through the pacat utility as proposed on… Read More »

Music Player Daemon

Instead of playing music through usual audio players, there is the possibility of using the mpd – a daemon which runs in the background and plays music. The great advantage is: You can choose between various interfaces and always control the same player with the same playlist(s) – even via TCP/IP from another PC or… Read More »

zsh

I recently switched to using the zsh instead of bash. The reasons were those comfort functions of zsh, such as: So I installed the packages: zsh, zsh-doc and zsh-lovers. When starting it for the first time, you’ll encounter a configuration tool which asks several questions to make your zsh experience a good one. Bad thing… Read More »

XPlanet

XPlanet renders an Earth globe including actual clouds and satellites’ positions. It also has data to render the moon, mars or the sun. You can even put the image on your Desktop so that it shows the current Earth view from space instead of a boring wallpaper. To make things a bit easier, there’s this… Read More »