if grep -q 'Autokey' <(echo `gsettings get com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist`); then echo "'Autokey' exists in Unity panel whitelist. Nothing to do here."; else echo "Adding 'Autokey' to Unity panel whitelist." && gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist "`echo \`gsettings get com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist | tr -d ]\`,\'Autokey\']`"; fi

This will check your current whitelist to see if Autokey is present, and if it isn’t intelligently append it to the whitelist without messing up your current whitelist entries. If it’s already there, it won’t add a duplicate entry. This one-liner can be easily modified to add any value you want to Unity’s system tray whitelist, in order to fix the same problems with other applications. Note that you may have to log out and log back in before the changes take effect. Enjoy!

If you didn’t notice yet, I modified the theme of my site, in particular header.php, in order to show a black censorship bar over my site’s heading. Why? There is a law being passed that aims to completely censor the internet in the name of stopping copyright infringement. The impact of such a bill is much more far-reaching than just copyright infringement. This could completely change the way that we use and experience the internet. I encourage everyone reading this to visit http://americancensorship.org and show their support. Let’s stand up together to fight for a free internet where information isn’t restricted! Just look at what it’s like in China, the level of censorship on the internet through the “great firewall of China” is astounding!

• LibreScribe no longer crashes when retrieving the list of applications installed on the device. This was incredibly frustrating when I was trying to develop it. It also filters out the LiveScribe Connect and System files, so that they are not listed if they are present on the device.
• Instead of displaying a hard-coded list of notebooks, LibreScribe now retrieves the names of all of the notebooks actually in use on the device.
• When a device is not present on the system, or LibreScribe can’t find it, the page tree now shows a “No Smartpen Detected” item, along with an brand new icon that indicates that no device is connected instead of the regular pen icon.
• I added context menu event handlers to the page tree, so now when you right click or press the menu button, LibreScribe can display a menu of options relevant to the item you clicked. More work on this still needs to be done, but if you click the root element (the smartpen itself, or the placeholder when one isn’t connected), you will now see a new menu allowing you to rename the device, refresh the connection, or display information about the device.
• When the device is unplugged or plugged in, the page tree and the applications/audio lists will now automatically refresh themselves.
• LibreScribe now retrieves the name of the smartpen from the device, rather than defaulting to “My LiveScribe Smartpen”. It can also set the name of the pen, but this feature is still a little bit buggy (it won’t brick your device, so it’s safe to test). Interesting discovery: In the LiveScribe desktop software, you can set the name of the pen to anything up to 50 characters. This does not mean that the device doesn’t allow more than that, it’s just a ‘soft’ limit in the LiveScribe desktop software. There probably is an actual limit, but I was able to set the device name to almost a paragraph of text, including every symbol you can type on a standard US keyboard, and retrieving it from the pen worked perfectly. The pen stored the entire thing, and returned it when I checked the name, although it did not display the entire string when I turned the device on, just the first part of it. The string of text I tested was “~`!@#$%^&*()-_+={}[]:;”‘<>?/,.\ Testing the maximum name length for a LiveScribe Smartpen… I wonder if I could fit a paragraph in here…? You have got to be kidding me… I typed this much and it STILL works? That’s incredible. There’s virtually no limit to how long the smartpen’s name is. I can’t believe I can set and receive values this long! I’m speechless…“. Needless to say, you can store almost anything in the name of the Smartpen. I wonder how the LiveScribe desktop software would react if it tried to retrieve this string.
• I added a dialog box to rename the device, as well as another dialog box to confirm the new name.
• LiveScribe no longer crashes when removing or connecting a smartpen while the program is running.
• I merged in the inline functions written by Luis Pedro Coelho on his fork of LibreScribe, which are a better implementation of device type checking than I had
• Tons of new debugging output was added. You can see this output on the console. This makes figuring out what went wrong in a crash so much easier.

Remember, LibreScribe is still alpha quality and should not be used in a production environment. If you have any issues or suggestions, feel free to file a bug report. Or, if you’re skilled enough, I’d appreciate it if you fixed the bug yourself, and submitted a patch. Ah, the benefits of open source coding! This is only just the beginning. Expect tons of new enhancements and bug fixes over the next several months.

via No Takeover Project

Image via CrunchBase

Using a neat little trick, I managed to send everyone on my Facebook friend list a Google+ invite. In this post, I’ll show you how to do that. It’s actually quite simple. If you don’t have a GMail account, this will still work for small amounts of contacts, but you need to use a GMail account to process and invite all of your contacts at once.  First, if you don’t already have a Yahoo account, sign up for one. Otherwise, sign in and go to Yahoo Mail. The reason this works is because Yahoo and Facebook have some kind of partnership. Once logged in, go to the “Contacts” tab. Click “Import Contacts”, and choose the “Facebook” option. Allow Yahoo access to your Facebook contacts. On my account, it only imported 100 contacts the first time. After the second try, I had all 257 of my Facebook contacts imported. Now that you have your contacts imported, go back to the “Contacts” tab. Click “Actions”, and choose “Export All…”. When asked, export as a “Yahoo! CSV” file, and remember where you saved that. You will need it later. Now go to Google Contacts. Create a new group called “Facebook”. Once you have a “Facebook” group, click the “Import” link on the upper right of the page. Select the Yahoo .csv file, and make sure to choose to import it into the newly created “Facebook” group. Now that you have all of your contacts imported, if you don’t have GMail, select all of your contacts and choose “Email”, otherwise go to GMail and login to that. In GMail, click “Contacts” and then click the “Facebook” group. Click the checkbox above the list of contacts to select them all at once. Now click the “Email” button. You will now see all of your contacts in the “To” field of GMail or your email client. Copy the entire list, and paste it into the Google+ invite form. Click invite. Congratulations, you just invited all of your Facebook friends to join Google+.

UPDATE: I got a second invitation by Richi Jennings of Computerworld, who I emailed before posting on Beatweek’s wall, asking for an invite. Thanks Richi! However, I still didn’t manage to get into Google+, unfortunately…

UPDATE 2: I finally managed to sign up for Google+! I’ll try to invite everyone who asked me to send them an invitation, but I can’t guarantee you’ll be able to sign up.

Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday I upgraded my blog to the new major revision of the WordPress blogging platform, version 3.2, as soon as it was publicly released. In only a day, the new version was downloaded over 330,000 times. The new version of WordPress is supposedly much lighter and faster than the previous iteration, as a lot of bloat has been removed and a lot of the code was optimized to be more efficient. The new version features a new admin panel and an HTML5 compatible default theme. Overall, I am pleased with the new version of WordPress, and I’m looking forward to even more positive changes to the platform in the future.

Because the easiest step is creating the audio file, I’ll start with that. If you’re just looking for a short beeping sound, and you don’t feel like opening up Audacity, the file I used can be downloaded below.

Audio File Used: 440Hz Beep for 3 Seconds

This is actually incredibly easy. If you don’t already have Audacity, download and install it. Now open it up, and choose “Tone” under the “Generate” menu. For me, the settings I used were Waveform: Sine, Frequency: 440Hz, Amplitude: 1, Duration: 3 Seconds. This will quickly generate the beeping sound. Now you need to export this in a format playable by MOC. To do this, go to File > Export… and set the file type to “Ogg Vorbis Files“. Now save the file as something.ogg in the same directory you want the script to be in. For my script, the file name I used is “beep-440-3s.ogg”, but the name really doesn’t matter. I don’t recommend using spaces as you probably have to escape them in your script, which is a pain that can easily be avoided.

Now, if you don’t already have MOC console audio player installed, you need to install it (or another tool of your choosing) in order to play the audio file from the command line. To get MOC audio player in Ubuntu or Debian Linux, you can type the following command in a terminal, assuming the debian package “moc” is available in your configured software repositories:

sudo apt-get install moc

This method requires super-user (administrative) permissions, unfortunately, but that probably won’t be a problem for you. For more information on the sudo command, see Ubuntu Linux, Day 18: What Is This ‘sudo’ You Speak Of? (pcworld.com). Excuse me for a second, my timer just went off… now that we got that over with, let’s get started on coding the script!

Now, In my case, because I have to switch between ice and no ice every 20 minutes, there are three times that I switch between the two as 60 divided by 20 is 3. Because this is an odd number, the range minutes that I will or will not have a bag of ice on my face alternates every hour. To determine whether or not I should have a bag of ice on my face in a given 20 minutes, we can use the modulus operator, which is used to determine the remainder of a division operation. If the modulus operator returns a zero, then there is no remainder (obviously). By getting the remainder of dividing the number of the hour by 2, we can tell if the current hour is even if the remainder is zero. The way I wrote this script isn’t the most efficient way of doing this, but I wanted to create something that worked quickly without spending too much time on it. Also, yes, I realize I could’ve done something incredibly simple, like using the watch command to tell me when to alternate between ice and no ice, but this was more fun to code, mostly for practice, and it works for me. An example of how I would use the watch command instead is to have it wait 20 minutes (the argument ‘n’, which is the time to wait, is in seconds, so there are 1200 seconds in 20 minutes), and play the sound after that amount of time. This can be done with the following command from within the folder where the beep audio file is stored, substituting the duration and the file name with the ones you used/need:

watch -n 1200 mocp -l beep-440-3s.ogg

This will wait 20 minutes from the time of starting the command and then beep, repeating every 20 minutes. However, the title of this guide is “How To Make a Beeping Timer Using Bash Script and Ubuntu”, so I’m going to show you how to do that.

First, we’ll start with the obligatory shebang line:

#!/bin/bash

Because the entire script will be repeated indefinitely, until closed (such as using Ctrl + C), we want the main contents of our script to be in a while loop. The bash equivalent of a “while (true)” loop is “while [ 1 ]“, so the entire body of the script will be enclosed in that loop. Instead of brackets, while loops in bash are terminated with “do” at the beginning, and “done” at the end. The most obvious challenge we need to focus on is getting the current hour and minute in a format that’s incredibly easy to parse and work with. Linux’s “date” command works wonderfully for this. It does nearly all of the work for you, all you have to do is tell it how to format the date. If you look through the man pages for the date command, you can see that you’re able to specify how to format the date. All we’re interested in is the current hour (%k) and minutes (%M). To retrieve the hour from the date command, you simply type “date +%k”, where the formatting we want is after the plus sign. Go ahead and try that. The command to retrieve the current time in minutes is the same thing, substituting “k” for “M”. The letters are case-sensitive. When initializing a variable using bash script, it’s possible to set the variable to the return value (output) of a command using back-ticks. So, to get the current hour and minute, our code looks like this:

HOUR=`date +%k`

MIN=`date +%M`

Now that we have the hour and the minutes, we need to check to see if we should play the beep audio file or not. If the remainder of dividing the current minutes by 20 is zero, then we should be playing the file. The code for this is as follows:

let REM=”$MIN % 20″

if [ $REM = 0 ];

then

mocp -l beep-440-3s.ogg

fi

The “-l” argument of the mocp command tells MOC to just play the audio files specified in the command line arguments without messing with playlists, etc. Now that we have the beep working, we could consider the script done, as it goes off every at :00, :20, and :40 after the hour, but other that the fact that it’s obvious if you should put on ice or take it off, it’s a coding challenge to determine which one, so I decided to make the program say whether you should put ice on or vice versa. The first thing I did is realized that there are three times in an hour where I alternate between ice or not. Two of the times are the same except for the middle time at 20 minutes. Because 20 / 20 is one, we can check if the current minutes divided by 20 is 1 and display whether or not to put ice on depending on if the hour is an even number or not. In my code, I refer to the current minute divided by 20 with a truncated remainder as the current “set” number. The code for this is easy to write:

let SET=”($MIN-$REM)/20″

For debugging information, I list the current hour, minute, set, and whether  I should have ice on or not on the screen. This is also easy to code:

echo -n “Hour: $HOUR Min: $MIN Set: $SET “

In the string echoed to the console and the mathematical expressions, a variable name preceded by a dollar sign ($) is replaced with the value of that variable and evaluated as such. The -n argument of the “echo” command just tells echo not to append a new line character to the end of the string it prints to the output stream (in this case the console). The reason for this is because later in this script I echo whether or not I need to have ice on or off, and it looks neater to have it all on the same line. To determine whether the hour is an even number or not, we get the remainder of dividing the hour by two. If the remainder is zero, the hour is even. We can then use that to help determine whether we alternate cycles this hour. The code for this is incredibly simple:

let hrem=”$HOUR % 2″

As stated earlier, if the set is the middle set (set ’1′, at 20 minutes after the hour), whether or not I need to use ice is different than the other two sets. Using that logic as well as the fact that the fact that the cycles alternate each hour, we can piece together the logic using very basic conditional statements:

if [ $SET -ne 1 ]; then

if [ $hrem -ne 0 ]; then

echo “Ice On”

else

echo “Ice Off”

fi

else

if [ $hrem -ne 0 ]; then

echo “Ice Off”

else

echo “Ice On”

fi

fi

If you aren’t familiar with bash syntax, “-ne” is short for “is not equal to”, which is usually expressed in other languages using “!=”, or “not” before a condition. Finally, to prevent a lot of redundant output, we will use the sleep command to wait a minute (60 seconds in the command) before the next iteration (repetition) of the while loop:

sleep 60s #wait 1 minute

And we’re finally done coding the script! Now, we just need to save the script in the same directory as the beep audio file, with the “.sh” file extension and set it as executable. To do that, you can use the Properties dialog, or just do it with the command prompt using the following command:

chmod +x ice-timer-script.sh

Now you can run the script using the command “sh ice-timer-script.sh“. I hope that somebody finds this tutorial useful. Writing this certainly helped keep me busy, since I’ve been in bed for the majority of the day. If you have any questions or feel that anything needs clarification, feel free to leave a comment! The final script used in this tutorial can be found at http://code.dylanmtaylor.com/bash/ice-timer-script.sh.

rm -rfv $HOME/.gconf/apps/panel

Now log out and log back in. Your GNOME panel settings will be reset to their defaults. Enjoy!

• When the smartpen is connected/disconnected, the application no longer crashes, and the status is automatically refreshed
• Device storage usage is now displayed in MiB instead of in bytes. This makes it a lot less confusing how much space is remaining on your smartpen.
• A bug, where the Echo Smartpen was detected as an “unknown LiveScribe Smartpen” in certain cases was fixed.
• All absolute paths have been removed from the project. All resources are now referenced using relative paths.
• wxFormBuilder has been replaced with wxSmith. The entire user interface has been recreated from scratch (although it’s very similar to the old interface, intentionally)
• Many C++ source and header files are no longer necessary, so they have been removed, and merged into other files. This makes the codebase a lot more maintainable.
• Duplicate udev events (such as multiple add events of the same device) are ignored now. Previously, we ended up refreshing the device information up to four times in a row because of duplicate events. This significantly reduces the delay between plugging in a device and seeing a response on the screen.

There are still tons of issues that still need to be fixed before LibreScribe becomes usable in a production environment, but I’ve been steadily making progress, and I hope to have something useful out soon.

Dear Dylan,  Here is your Service Request # 1-5145156021 We recently received your feedback. Thank you for sharing this information. We really appreciate your time and effort in bringing this one to us. I will definitely forward this one to our software engineers so that we can make the necessary changes to our software. We really appreciate your feedback. It’s through customers like you that we’re able to make improvements in our current and future products. If you have any more questions or concerns, please contact me at your convenience and I will be happy to assist you. (If I am not available, another representative may reply to your request.) To respond, please select “Reply” in your e-mail software, and be sure that the past e-mail is included in this reply. [AOL Users: In order to include the previous e-mail, you must highlight it with your mouse when you are replying.] If your e-mail client automatically deletes prior e-mail thread information, it will cause a delay while we look up your support history. If this is the case you may want to save the old e-mails as attachments and attach them to the current e-mail. Sincerely, Efren Lexmark eSupport Team http://support.lexmark.com

Lua error detected: While parsing install.lua: config/run.lua:1374: attempt to index global ‘ownhership’ (a nil value)

After playing with the installer, I finally got it to work perfectly, so I emailed the Lexmark support team to let them know how to fix this, but for now, I’m going to share what you need to do on my blog.

First, you need to extract the files for the installer. To do this, you need to run

./lexmark-inkjet-legacy-wJRE-1.0-1.amd64.deb.sh –noexec –keep

It’s worth noting that there are two hyphens before noexec and keep. Once you run that command, the files for the installer will be extracted to the tmp folder in the current working directory. For now, just type cd tmp and press enter. Now, open up a text editor, such as gedit and navigate to the config folder in the tmp folder we just extracted. Open up the file “run.lua”. The problem is that Lexmark misspelled ownership as ownhership, which broke the installer. Around line 1484, you will find a line that says

if tonumber(ownhership[1]) == 0 then

delete the errant h in the word ownership and save the file. Now, go back to your terminal and run sudo sh startupinstaller.sh in the tmp folder. The installer will work as expected now.

Update: Special thanks to Mathieu Triclot for your $5 donation! Glad I could help!