Cutebuntu

It seems that I’m in mood to write here. :P Better take all the benefit from the brainstorm as long as it lasts.

Libre.fm

Most of you have probably heard the latest change in Last.fm. Streaming is now chargeable for everyone who lives outside United States, Germany and United Kingdom. Obviously they have right to do whatever they want, I just think it’s stupid to exclude three countries… Anyway in the stream of this Matt Lee created Libre.fm, open and completely free equivalent to Last.fm. It is still in alpha state and what it does mostly atm is scrobbling… or rather gobbling. As mentioned it’s still alpha so if you want start using it, it requires bit more than just registering and typing your username and password somewhere. Client Support -page is also good to read, for example I had to tweak bit the QLScrobbler plug-in before I got gobbling work with Quod Libet.

I hope Libre.fm will keep on growing. :)

Ubuntu.9.04

Just wanted to mention that today is 23.04 and time for Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope, while writing this it’s not yet released, at least they haven’t put the download banners up in Ubuntu.com. I haven’t decided yet whether to try it while waiting the CrunchBang Linux 9.04 which should be released soon after the Ubuntu 9.04.

I like having weather report on my screen and being quite big fan of Conky I prefer using it. What I want isn’t that much, all I need it temperature and information about whether it’s sunny or not. Kaivalagi has excellent weather script Conky Forecast, it’s really versatile, but bit big for my needs. I used also a weather script which I found in ArchLinux forums. For some reason I thought it might be good idea try to use rss feed. I happened to see site called rssWeather.com mentioned in CrunchBang Forums. Conky has rss variable, but as far I know it only fetches the title. And while title was fine, it told the relevant information, it also had irrelevant stuff (and it’s ugly and takes space). For example this:

London, UNITED KINGDOM Weather :: 16C Mostly clear

Okey it tells the location, but I have fairly narrow Conky and the most important part was almost cut away… And if the actual content is this:

16C Mostly clear

Of course I rather have that. Finding solution was bit tricky (I’m not a script master ;) ). I found nice rss script for conky UbuntuForums, but I had to tweak it bit though to get it show the content instead of title. I opened feed’s source code and checked what xml tags were surrounding the content (<description>content</description>). After this I simply changed following part of script:

sed -e 's/<\/title>/\n/g' |\
grep -o '<title>.*' |\
sed -e 's/<title>//' |\


to this:

sed -e 's/<\/description>/\n/g' |\
grep -o '<description>.*' |\
sed -e 's/<description>//' |\


So instead of the title I get the content. :D Under are the relevant lines in my conkyrc:

City A : ${execi 3600 ~/bin/conky_rss.sh "url_rss" 1 1 }
City B : ${execi 3600 ~/bin/conky_rss.sh "url_rss" 1 1 }

This fetches the weather from two cities every hour and first number “1” tells how many articles you want to be shown from the feed. I don’t know meaning of the second “1” but, if it was “0” it didn’t work. Replace the url_rss with the feed you wish.

This is how it looks like on my desktop:

• conky-rss.sh
• .conkyrc

I have been modding different themes to fit better my taste, some I have modded more and some less. So far I haven’t wanted to give them other users. I decided to make exception with this one. I uploaded openbox/gtk theme (including pypanelrc) called Black Grass to Box-Look.org Anyway I thought this looks pretty cool and I could share it with other people too. :D I have also made the tint2 theme and bmpanel theme for it but I still need to tweak the bmpanel theme. Tint2 theme works with the tint2-0.7-beta1.

Black Grass‘s gtk bases on Ma.Fa.GTK. I added there bit of colour though (and changed other things too), as I am huge lover of green. ;) It’s dark theme so you may have some problems with Firefox (related to the textareas). Personally I prefer dark, because for some reason it’s easier on my eyes. I hope you like and I’m happy to hear feedback. :)

You can find the theme from Box-Look.org

Btw. Requires installing gtk2-engines-pixbuf :)