the-shrike.net

Here I am again.
Some weeks ago, I wrote about my customized version of the reddit’s CSS.
I’ve been working on it, and changing the look of the website quite radically.
The version I’m actually using has some sensible issues about the styling of the reddit toolbar, but I’ll be working on trying to fix those visualization issues later on: now I want to try to use this new looking reddit and see if it suites my liking on the long run.

This new “restyle” is definitely more radical, and strongly inspired by the custom CSS used on the reddirIRC subreddit, and makes use of a javascript file (as in UserJS for Opera and/or greasemonkey script for Firefox) to change a couple of images displayed on the page. The images in questions are the main LOGO in the upper left corner, and the two arrows for the “new and upcoming” reddit box on the main page. The modified versions are in order simply because of their white background: was quite a fist in an eye.
Let’s say it’s not required, but was something that annoyed me and thanks to a sleepless friend that wrote down the script for me (I know nothing about JavaScript), I managed to achieve the image-switching too easily.

Here’s the actual look of it as seen in my Opera (9.60_build2430/GNU Linux) session:

Of course, with the JavaScript in place, the logo is not going to change “a la google” for different occasions/celebration, but it doesn’t bother me much. I am not linking to my version of the images, for the simple reason that they’re hosted on my website, and I want to be sure noone will be using them direct-linking. But saving the original one from reddit.com and modifying it it’s as easy as it could ever be: if I’ve been able to do it :p (the background color code is #222222).

Anyway, here are the relative files:

• reddit2.css: the CSS file,
• reddit.js: the JavaScript for the image replacement.

Hope you will manage to find this interesting ;)

Since I love reddit, I use it a lot and I spend a long time reading on it and living it, it felt natural and spontaneous to try to fit it to my needs, customizing its look to appeal my taste.

This doesn’t want to be a post (a quick one indeed) about previous/future version of reddit, but its only purpose is to make available for everyone the result of this playing/messing around with CSS, in order for others to improve and if they want use my custom CSS. I’m sure there are a lot of this theme around, but well, here comes my contribution.

You can download my custom CSS here.
Any comment is of course welcome!
In the meanwhile, this is how it looks in my browser (Opera 9.52beta2086 on Linux) ;)

Note: I have the “compress the link display” option active in my reddit’s preferences.

While an awulf lot of things are changing all around me, and in my life (most of them in a nice way, indeed) a lot of the good old habits are just as true and real as they used to be.

Having moved to London, all I have with me right now is the strictly necessary to survive, so even if in my mind the equation wasn’t exactly like that, at the time I packed my bags apparently the final decision was to give priority to clothes against books ad DVDs. Of course, that doesn’t mean at all my reader (or watcher) side is sleeping or dead, quite the contrary. Understanding the inevitable fact that a monthly rent is a fixed expense that can definitely be quite heavy on someone’s bank account, doesn’t mean that you’ll stop yourself buying books&DVDs neither, especially when you have new empty shelves in your room ;)

This to say, buy me books!
Anyway, being 5:40 in the night I quite lost myself, but all the point of this was to introduce a useful customization for all you Opera users out there.
Adding something like this:

[Search Engine 47]
Name=Amazon.co.uk ISBN
Verbtext=0
URL=http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/%s
Query=
Key=ai
Is post=0
Has endseparator=0
Encoding=iso-8859-1
Search Type=0
Position=-1
Nameid=0
Deleted=0

to your search.ini (for me located in /home/curson/.opera/search.ini) or by editing directly the new search from your Tools > Preference > Search Opera menu, you’ll be able to search for a book on Amazon.co.uk (I’m quite sure it works in a pretty similar way for any other International Amazon website) using it’s ISBN number. Quite useful if you want to be sure you’re looking at a particular edition, or if you don’t want to end up buying something with a similar name but completly different from what you’re looking for.
A very similar search can be created to just look for a title or author (or just about everything…) by using http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/&keywords=%s&index=blended this code as the URL/address field. Note that there %s is the search variable you’re going to type in Opera address bar after the relative Search Key (for the ISBN example above, that Search Key was ai, but you can decide whatever you like as long as unique among your other customized searches).

That’s it, I’m still sleepless, but with a more efficient Opera browser at my disposal to spend my sleepless nights looking for effective way to spend my money :)

I’ve been struggling quite a lot lately with my beloved Opera browser and flash video (read: YouTube and so on).
Even if the configuration of the flash player/plugin on my Gentoo looked perfectly working (Firefox was playing flash video flawlessly…), I was unable to enjoy them with Opera, which is my main browser.
Well, looking at the fact that I am in Tokyo enjoying all the pressure of my JAL training, I didn’t actually looked deeply into the problem trying to find a solution, until this afternoon, when straight back from the training center I don’t know why, but I found unbearably annoying to have to open another browser just to watch a video… my geek side took the command and a quick jump into Gentoo’s Forum gave me all I needed to solve the problem (refer here for the relevant post!).

Apparently, was just a matter of re-linking the plugin:

# ln -s /opt/netscape/plugins/flashplayer.xpt
/opt/opera/lib/opera/plugins/flashplayer.xpt
# ln -s /opt/netscape/plugins/libflashplayer.so
/opt/opera/lib/opera/plugins/libflashplayer.so

plus changing the /opt/netscape plugin path in Opera Preferences Downloads to the /opt/opera path (2 Mime types) works. In a new setup Opera takes the right path automatically, when the symlinks are made first. So only putting these 2 symlinks in the ebuild would be an (ugly) temporary fix…

Needless to say, now everything is working!
I’m missing following the OpenSource community (I really don’t have time even to keep the pace with all the news around…), but it’s good to see it’s still helpful as ever! ;)

Lately I started to notice minor problems and weird behaviour with the way gaim was dealing with my friends’ avatars on MSN. Ok, I know it’s not something vital, but sometimes a little of eye candy is what you need… anyway: I noticed that with people that have already upgraded to Windows Live Messenger (the evolution of MSN messenger? O_o) gaim got crazy, messing up the avatar and pratically not displaying any of them anymore for those contacts. I was about as sure as I’m still called Federico that the problem wasn’t directly gaim-related, but that the cause was probably somewhere in a new way the new impressive (yes, sarcasm is in excess in this post tonight…) MSN client of mother Microsoft has chosen to manage the avatars… but hey, I was still stuck with gaim-2.0.0_beta3-r2, and was worth a try updating.
Gosh, mommy alwyas tells me it’s better to stay with what you have, if it’s working. But I’m not used to listen to much to what she tells anyway, so I emerged the last beta6 available in portage. It’s uglier than how it was before, but seems definitely more stable and less buggy than the previous beta version, which is good.

But then the problems came… apparently having updated gaim resulted in a now “broken” library linking for the d-bus sub-system. ARGH! (someone could explain to me what exactly d-bus is on my system for, after all? It’s always a pain messing with it and its dependencies). A whole bunch of program were by then complaining with the same message:

error while loading shared libraries: libdbus-1.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

and of course not starting at all.
After a couple of re-emerging of some of them, hoping for a re-linking of the missing library or the installation of it in a new slot, I found out I was still in the same situation as above.
What to do? Of course, google it.
This was te relevant result. Following this post and doing:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libdbus-1.so.3 /usr/lib/libdbus-1.so.2

solved the problem just fine, even revdep-rebuil stopped complaining. It probably isn’t the cleanest solution around, but it’s working just fine.

Sometimes my Gentoo just scares me (not that this won’t make me upgrade again the next time I’d feel the itch :D).

As some of you may know (or may not) I’m the happy owner of a Video iPod G5 (30 GB).
Support under Linux is well known, and let me say that I really find myself more confident in using programs like GTKPod & GPixPod rather than that big fat elephant that is iTunes (yes, I tried it on windows… I promise to not boot that again. Really!). They work, and they work well, but something that is still missing is the ability to import (and thus to convert) video files to the shiny iPoddy which seems to have quite difficoult tastes when dealing with video, speaking of video and audio codecs.

But mplayer (and mencoder) is a powerful thing, and you’re using an intelligent Operative System: get advantage of that.
Someone (not me) did exactly that, and wrote down a simple script to do all the work [*].
Great.

Now, this works well, it actually stress my CPU quite bad, but that’s mainly because Haldir is a very old folk. Just remember a few Gentoo tips to correctly setup your system to work with video2ipod (or whatever you’d like to call it).

• Be sure to emerge mplayer with encoder and aac support, thus using something like USE="aac encoder" emerge -a win32codecs mplayer. Of course you’ll need all the other codecs too, but that’s a fundamental part for the script to work: it needs aac audio codecs up and running.
• Remember to emerge the relative codec too: emerge -a faad2.
• Remember to activate the flag for “aac codecs” when emerging ffmpeg too: USE="aac" emerge -a ffmpeg

That’s good, you should be done with a system able to run the script an to convert your .avi, .mpg, .wmv... file to the .mp4 format you need for your iPod. Then upload them via GTKPod as if they were musical files, and that’s it: a fashion and cool way to discharge the battery of your Apple friend ;)))

[*]: The original script page is no longer available. Here you can find a local copy of the script hosted on my server. If you’re using Gentoo, this is a good place where where to start looking for info on the converting process.