Harsh J

I recently blogged about the lesser-known Listen Music Player for GNOME.

Being an XChat IRC user I wanted a plugin (or do you spell it plug-in?) similar to the ones for Amarok, Exaile or Banshee, etc to display my current playing song along with the artist and album information. But I couldn’t find one out there, so I decided to modify the Amarok one and made one myself for Listen Music Player.

So all, say hello to my first ever release:

Listen Announcer
(An XChat IRC plugin to display song information from Listen Music Player)Download:

Download Listen Announcer
XChat plugin for Listen Music Player
(Right click and choose Save As …)

Its easy to install and use this in XChat, and here are the steps:

Installation:

Graphical (Easy) Method:

1. Open your Home folder and press Ctrl + H (To view hidden folders).
2. Open the folder called .xchat2 (Note the dot) and place the downloaded listen.py file in it.
3. Start or restart XChat and the Listen Announcer plugin will automatically load

Command (Faster) Method:
Give the command:
mv listen.py ~/.xchat/

Or another way is to open XChat and go to the XChat menu and choose the Load Plugin or Script … option and from the dialog box that appears, choose the listen.py file. This method doesn’t make the loading automatic however. Anyone of the previous methods make the loading automatic.

Usage:

Give the command /lis in any channel to make it display the current song.

An example: [QwertyM] is listening to ‘US History’ by ‘Flipsyde’ on ‘We the People’

Of course, give /help lis for more information.

Enjoy!

Note: You may need the Python module for XChat to make this Listen Announcer plugin work.

I’m so contempt with using Google that I never change this search option bar in Firefox. Never even bothered clicking it, though I know its handy for accessing Wiki or Amazon and so on but I always found it easier to type the search term in precisely and get to whatever I wish using Google.

So what I’m saying is that the default Firefox search bar looks like this with Google on:

However, did you notice this small “Ubuntu Package Search” residing under the choices in Ubuntu’s “Gutsy Gibbon” 7.10 flavor?
Change it to that one and it searches whatever package you query it at the Packages page of Ubuntu’s site. This is much better than opening Synaptic or giving an apt-cache search since Firefox is open almost the entire time my PC runs for me.

But there’s a catch, it searches for Package names rather than descriptions. Which is a bad thing if you don’t know what you’re looking for or what the name might be.

I’d listened to this crazy song like 3 or 4 years ago. Just stumbled upon it again today, and wasted around an hour listening to its repeats. Its hilarious!

Click the image to listen to Scatman John’s Scatman (Ski Ba Bop Ba Dop Bop) song:

You can find the lyrics to this song here.

And no, “scat” here isn’t what your dirty mind might be thinking, its a style of singing.

Listen Player is much like Rhythmbox but with more management, functionality and looks thrown in. But that doesn’t make it any complex to use at all!

Amarok’s library manager is what had me attracted to it for a full year, but it being a KDE application and Exaile being far from its best features as a GNOME replacement, made me look for other alternatives.

From Listen’s Website page:

Listen is an audio player written in Python. Thanks to it, you can easily organize your music collections.

It supports many features such as Podcasts management, browse Shoutcast directory.

It provides a direct access to lyrics, last.fm and Wikipedia info.

It intuitively creates play-lists for you by retrieving information from last.fm and what you most frequently listen to.

So you see, its very intelligent at what it is, and also being Python-ic, its easy to add things to it as well.

Install Listen and give it a try atleast!

Here’s a screen-shot from my Listen player:

To install on Ubuntu - Click this or run: sudo apt-get install listen

On the other side of the topic, I wish Viji a very happy 18th birthday. Enjoy your day!

Agreed using a mail client for GMail would be an easier and better task than using the Web interface, but still, there are many who love the web interface!

So if you don’t wish to join the IMAP and POP crowd by running Thunderbird or Evolution, etc, this mini-guide by HowToGeek is for you.

First off, open up your text editor (GEdit or whichever it is you use) and type the following into it:

If you are using Firefox:

#!/bin/bash
firefox https://mail.google.com/mail?view=cm&tf=0&to=`echo $1 | sed ’s/mailto://’

Or for Opera:

#!/bin/bash
opera -newpage “https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&tf=0&to=`echo $1 | sed “s/mailto://”`”

Save the file as gmailto (No extension’s required).

Now right click the file and go to Properties and under the Permissions tab, check the “Allow executing file as a program” check-box. Like the following:

Now issue the command:

sudo mv gmailto /usr/bin/gmailto

(Assumes your gmailto file was in Home directory. Replace with location if not.)

Now head to System > Preferences > Preferred Applications and in the Window that appears, choose Custom in the Mail Reader field and give the Command field as:

gmailto

Refer this image to understand better:

Hit Close and you’re done. For testing it out, click this link - mail@someone.com. That should automatically take you to GMail’s Compose page with the address in it automatically, just like how clients handle it.

Credits to HowToGeek.

P.s. Also works for all types of Linux distributions running GNOME I suppose.