First impressions of (official) FroYo on Motorola Milestone

Now, that we finally got Android FroYo for Motrola Milestone, I installed it on my phone. Here are my first impressions (which I expect to be updated within the next few days). Please feel free to comment.

Android Market Search Plugin for firefox

Hi all,

I was wondering why there is no Firefox search engine for the Android Market so I wrote one myself.

Workaround for Bug in Synergy: Wrong layout in Client

Quite a while back, I wrote an article about Synergy. There exists a nasty bug concerning the keyboard layouts. When typing on the client machine with the host’s keyboard, the keystrokes have been interpreted according to the US American layout instead according to the German one.

Cleaning optical media with acetone – Don’t even think about it!

Let me give you the chance to learn from my mistakes.

The story in short (if you’re in a hurry):

Never ever (really: NEVER EVER) try to clean optical media with acetone!

The full story:

Speed up KUbuntu 10.04 LTS – disable virtuoso-t / strigi / nepomuk

This is a short piece of advice or a hint rather than a real blog posting since I won’t explain any details about any programs referenced here (which in the first hand relates to my absolute lack of knowledge about them). After upgrading from Kubuntu 8.04 LTS to 10.04 LTS – which involved upgrading KDE from 3.5.sth to 4.4.2 – my computer got incredibly slow. I must admit, that by ‘computer’ I mean my somewhat old AMD Sempron 2300+ (single core) with around 1.5Gig of RAM.

I finally realised, that some processes like nepomuk and virtuoso-t frequently occupied my CPU in a way that my computer was no longer usable (for the past two weeks, I only used it as a network-enabled, file- and print-serving heating device).

Rename a bunch off ogg vorbis files according to their meta information

Nearly every software music player I know has a neat button which – when pressed – automatically figures out meta-information from the filename. But what about the other way around?

Today, I happened to have a large ape-file with an according cue-file. After converting and splitting it with cueape.sh, I realized that the cue-file consisted of a bunch of crap that started like this:

Grub reports Error 15 after Kernel Update in (K)Ubuntu

If you have a – more or less – exotic configuration of hard drives and partitions on them, you might run into something like “Error 15: File not found” when rebooting after installing a new kernel. This of course might be a problem in other distros as well. I only know it from (K)Ubuntu.

Cloning virtual harddisks to use with VirtualBox

There are several reasons why one would like to clone a virtual harddisk image which is mounted as a partition in a Virtual Box. As in my case, I needed to investigate on two different frameworks that are known not to work correctly when both of them are installed. For not being urged to set up a completely fresh installation of  Linux, cloning the existing harddisk seemed to be the optimal way. This way, I can decide which system to boot, depending on which framework I want to use.

Problem with Dialog Buttons in Eclipse under KDE 4

I discovered this quite a while ago but forgot to digest into a post. Some versions of eclipse and some versions of KDE4 seem to dislike each other. This results in not working buttons in dialog boxes. Actually, you can click them but nothing happens. Meanwhile, all keyboard-shortcuts work fine.

Whatever the problem is (feel free to answer this by means of a comment) you can work around it by

Samsung MP3-player YP-U1 doesn’t recognize files in subfolders

Recently, it turned out that my (admittedly a bit ancient) MP3-Player “Samsung YP-U1″ ran into difficulties recognizing files in subfolders, it just said “No Entries”. To make things worse, this behaviour didn’t even affect all subfolders and beyond, some subfolders that worked few days ago, stopped working.