Category: General Page 22 of 25

[:en]For news and blog related stuff, and everything else that doesn’t fit.[:de]Ein Sammelordner für alles, was irgendwo anders nicht untergebracht werden konnte.

Skype for Oldies

By Fips

On 28th July 2007

In General

There are times when I wonder how I ever survived without Knoppix as a tool for fixing PC problems on the fly. And give someone a CD and some basic instructions, and you can soon have a live terminal up ready to fix a whole host of problems. Yet I find being able to talk to the person on the other end often vital for solving problems, and more importantly, it can be a reassurance for when you make a cock up!

Normally I just install the latest version of Skype, sadly however the latest Skype 1.4 beta doesn’t work on Knoppix 5.1.1, and owing to legal issues previous versions have been pulled and replaced. Skype are prevented them hosting these prior releases, which meant I had to dig around a bit before I could find a copy of Skype 1.3, packaged for Ubuntu. Download this .deb package, and then run the usual command as root:

dpkg -i skype_debian-1.3.0.53-1_i386.deb

Voilà!

Quiet Moments

By Fips

On 27th July 2007

In General

It’s been a full month since I last posted anything, which is a little too infrequent even for my liking. A combination of holidays, downtime and general idleness is to blame, but there are a few posts in the draft box which never quite got finished, and maybe one or two new things will crop up in the coming days. Also going to give the WPPA plugin a bigger trial and add a few more photos from around and abouts.

In the meantime, here’s something that’s been bugging me for a while. According to the UK’s highway code, and possibly many others, a vehicle overtaking a cyclist should allow the same distance as when overtaking a car, given the possibility that the cyclist might fall over, estimated at 2.0m or some such. But doesn’t that leave many cycle paths in the country technically in breach of this convention?

To Blog, or Not to Blog

By Fips

On 27th June 2007

In General

WordPress

That is the question; as the well known soliloquy roughly goes. A Mind @ Play is now a year old, and not a day wiser, as far its author is concerned. Courtesy of GeneralStats, I can see that in the past year (excluding this post) there’ve been 57 posts, 18 comments/trackbacks, together a total of 31,400 words, and over 8,000 spam comments caught by Akismet. But to what end?

This isn’t intended to be another one of those ‘blogging about blogging’ posts, but occasionally one has to ask why we blog at all. I wouldn’t claim to be anything near an expert on the subject, but it would appear that the more successful blogs do just that: ‘blog about blogging’. Nor should that sound derogatory, some of them do an exceedingly good job of it, but there are only so many times you can read the ‘top 10 ways to get more readers’ et al. But then these people tend to come from the professional end of the blogging community, those who aim to earn something through their work. There were and are no such intentions with this blog, and if there are any advertisements on this site I can only say they are unintentional.

Language Switcher Widget v1.01

By Fips

On 29th March 2007

In General

After a little more research and experimentation, I’ve updated the little Language Switcher widget to enable the user to choose whether to display flags and/or names for the available languages when setting up the widget, and change the heading in the sidebar if required.

Click here to download Language Switcher Widget v1.01.

Language Switcher Widget

By Fips

On 29th March 2007

In General

This certainly isn’t my area of expertise, but I’ve been trying to figure out a way to integrate the Language Switcher plugin with a widget-enabled theme. As this hasn’t yet been implemented, I copied wrote the simplest of Widgets which will list the available languages on your blog in the sidebar.

There really isn’t anything special here, but for people even more hesitant with code than I am, pop this file into the wp-content/plugins/ folder of your WordPress installation, and then enable it via the Plugins admin page. You should then find the Widget available in the Presentation -> Sidebar Widgets admin page. At the moment, the Widget will display your available languages listed only by name. I’m still learning how to allow this to be changed from within the Sidebar Widgets page.

Click here to download Language Switcher Widget v1.0.