Month: February 2008

For those who are willing to install stuff outside Synaptic there’s Alarm clock (haven’t tried it myself), but for the rest of us it looks like there’s no going round Evolution.

Thanks to Mr. Murphy, I went looking for a reminder app right after uninstalling Evolution, for which I had no use. Of course, this caused the calendar available from the panel’s clock not to have any such functionality at all, so I had to go back and re-install Evolution. It’s a shame, because although Evolution’s calendar probably does everything you could ever want, it seems like overkill for someone used to the rather minimal Freebie Notes from Power Soft in Windows.

This is probably the dumbest user error made in the history of computing, and thus probably useful only if you want to have a laugh at my expense. Go ahead, I fully deserve it.

I had successfully switched my Windows storage drive to NTFS-3G and thought I would now have write-access to KeePassX‘s database. But despite having write-access to other files (such as images) on the drive, the Save button was still disabled in KeepAssX after opening the database file from it.

I tried copying the database to my home directory and opening it from there, but it remained unsavable. I checked, and all the access bytes were as they should be in order to allow for modifying the file. I tried creating a new database, and that seemed to work. I even contemplated exporting the old database to another format in Windows and then importing it in Ubuntu…

…until I realized I hadn’t actually made any changes in the database prior to trying to save it.

That’s right. After creating a test entry into the database I could save it just fine, even onto my NTFS drive. Doh!

I fully understand the reasoning behind disabling the saving function when no changes have been made in the data (KeepAssX is hardly alone in this choice of logic), but in this case my intuition seemed to work massively against that logic, so I guess that qualifies the issue as one of accessibility.

In my defence I can say that I did change the order in which the entries are shown in KeePassX (for some reason they seem to default to reverse alphabetical in Ubuntu) before trying to save, and that’s why my subconscious mind fully expected saving to be enabled. Apparently the listing order is not among the data saved in the database, but if it is, the Save button not reacting to it is an obvious bug in KeePassX.

I went looking for a Cuttermaran equivalent for Ubuntu, for cutting the MPEG2 streams recorded in MythTV. First I tried GOPchop, but despite indexing the file, it didn’t show it in its file listing after opening it and so I couldn’t really do any editing with it.

Then I found Avidemux. Despite the unfortunately limited -sounding name and repository description I decided to try it and boy, am I glad I did. It’s quite capable of cutting MPEG files as well as dealing with many other codecs, so I highly recommend it. It’s even available for Windows.

Quakenetin #ubuntu.fi:n wikin vastaavaa ohjetta suomenkieliselle Gutsylle soveltaen: päävalikon (käynnistä-valikon) kuvakkeen päällä oikean hiirennapin valikosta Muokkaa valikoita, siellä Sovellukset > Järjestelmätyökalut > Asetusten muokkaus -kohtaan väkänen. Sen jälkeen päävalikosta Järjestelmätyökalut > Asetusten muokkaus ja /apps/nautilus/desktop/trash_icon_visible -kohtaan väkänen.