Quickly Check How Many Unread Emails You Have In Gmail
If you’re not using Firefox, get it. If you’re not using Greasemonkey…get it.
Good. Now that you are living in the current century, Lifehacker found a seriously cool Greasemonkey script today called ‘Gmail Unread Message Count in Favicon‘. It does exactly what it says it does, show your unread mail count in the Gmail favicon.
After you’ve installed the script, restart Firefox and you should now see your unread count in the favicon.
The only drawback I see to this is if you subscribe to the David Allen GTD philosophy. Knowing your unread inbox count is one of the worst thing you can do. If you don’t care about that, this script is a must have.
Using Screenlets to Monitor Your Computer and Bandwidth
I used to use Yahoo! Widgets on Windows to keep tabs on my computer. There are some widgets that I really miss. Mainly some of the monitoring functions, like CPU and RAM usage, hard drive space, etc. I also had a handy weather widget and a clock as well. Nothing major, but just some of the niceties that make your desktop, your desktop.
There are several widget platforms on Linux including gDesklets, Google Gadgets and Screenlets. After trying all three, I settled on Screenlets simply because it did what I needed to do. If you’re looking for the widest array of widgets, Google Gadgets is the way to go. But for this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to setup Screenlets and how I’m using it to monitor my computer and my bandwidth.
Installing Screenlets
- Nothing new here. Just go to ‘Add/Remove’ under ‘Applications’ and search for quot;screenlets"
Rock Climbing At Stone Works Climbing Gym
Just got done climbing at Stone Works Climbing Gym in Carrollton, Texas. It’s the tallest indoor rock climbing facility in the United States and second worldwide. It was pretty amazing. The routes range in height from 18 feet to 121 feet. I of course forgot my camera, but I’ll get pics next time I’m there. Definitely recommended for anyone who loves rock climbing.
I’ll leave you with a couple of pics from their site.
Installing Sun Microsystems VirtualBox On Ubuntu 8.10 With USB and Audio Support
So after I switched over to Ubuntu, there were still some things that I absolutely had to have Windows for. Primarily Photoshop (I do run CS2 inside Crossover, but I much prefer CS4), Dreamweaver and until Songbird learns how to not suck at podcast management, iTunes (that one just feels dirty everytime I type it).
Today I’m going to show you how to install Sun xVM VirtualBox on Ubuntu 8.10. I’m using Sun’s version as opposed to the 100% open source version, simply because it has some proprietary support for USB. I’m also not sure how much weight this holds any more, as I’ve not used the open source version for quite some time.
What We’ll End Up With
- Install Sun xVM VirtualBox on Ubuntu 8.10
- Install Windows XP inside VirtualBox (you can choose to install just about any OS you would like however)
- Enable USB Support
Connect Ubuntu 8.10 to a Windows 7 Share
So I’ve been playing around with Windows 7 today. Figured I’d throw a quick tutorial on how to connect an Ubuntu machine to a Windows 7 share. Quick note, I’m running the first beta of Windows 7, build 7000. Since the network stack has changed very little from Vista, I’m assuming this will work the exact same way once Windows 7 actually ships.
Setup Windows 7 Share Folder
- Create a new folder wherever you want your share to be. I’m going to put mine on the desktop. Easiest way is to right click and choose ‘New’ –> ‘Folder’
- Name your share. This is going to be where you will connect, so I would recommend not using any weird characters or spaces. I’m calling mine ‘myshare’
- Now we need to enable sharing on this folder. Right click the folder and choose ‘Properties’
Mount NTFS Formatted Harddrives In Ubuntu
Even though Ubuntu is pretty good about automatically mounting any new external or internal hard drives, I think one of the things all Linux users should have a little bit of knowledge of is the fstab file. fstab is a config file that contains information about all the partitions & storage devices in your computer. It’s located at /etc/fstab.
Why is this important? It’s nice to be able to mount your drives to wherever you want on your computer, and make sure it mounts to the same place every time you boot. I recently added another external drive to my computer that was from an old Windows computer obviously formatted as NTFS. I had three options: 1) let the drive auto mount 2) reformat the drive as ext3 so Linux could read it natively 3) add a mount point in my fstab file. I chose option 3. Here’s how to do it.
Ubuntu Audio Preview Feature
I was messing around in Ubuntu 8.10 today and stumbled across a really cool audio preview feature. I’m not sure how long this has been a part of Ubuntu, but it’s already very useful and has a lot more potential. Check out the video after the jump.
One of the things I would like to see is some type of scrubber that pops up after you hover your mouse over it so you can scrub to a specific point in the audio. I’d also like to see maybe a checkbox popup in the scrubber window that keeps the popup open so I don’t even need to actually open the audio file. I made a rough mock-up of what I’m thinking of.
I seriously love this feature, and I hope they don’t stop with what they have. Just some thoughts for taking it to the next level.
Missing Add/Remove Programs List In Ubuntu
I normally use Synaptic Package Manager or the command line to install/remove programs in Ubuntu. Sometimes, however, I like to just look through the list with the descriptions and see how the programs are rated to make a decision on what to install.
Today I opened Add/Remove to find this…
Synaptic still works fine, but Add/Remove doesn’t show any programs whatsoever. After searching around the Ubuntu forums, I was directed to the fix. Simply type this line into the terminal
sudo apt-get install --reinstall app-install-data app-install-data-commercial
After this ran, everything worked perfectly. I talked to one person on the forums to see if he knew why this happens, but no one seems to know…Just one of the joys of technology I guess.
Revolution OS Video
If you’re a serious GNU, Linux, FOSS kind of guy/gal, and haven’t seen this movie, I highly recommend it. The beginning starts out with Eric Raymond telling a story about when he ran into a big wig from Microsoft. When asked who he was, Eric replied “I’m your worst nightmare.” Ya, It’s seriously nerdy…you’ve been warned
Chinese Gift Exchange = Caption Contest
So I was at a Christmas party on Friday where we had a Chinese Gift Exchange. I pretty much cleaned up with the best gift, an awkwardly erect duck. I need your help to add captions, name it, whatever you can think of. Game on.
‘Pharmacy Duck’ by Leslie
