Harsh J

Am no follower of the Pomodoro technique nor do I know its specifics but before you go ahead and try out those multiple Adobe AIR applications or use the GNOME-oriented Workrave, please try out this software called RSIBreak which was built for KDE specifically.

RSIBreak - Repetitive Strain Injury prevention software for KDE

It isn’t a full fledged timer feature but I think it will get your needs covered with its offerings easily enough. One of the amazing utilities I’ve used, built with KDE Libraries. It should be available in your Linux distribution’s software repository too.

I wouldn’t make this a post simply claiming how Chrome beats over all other browsers I’ve used, cause it doesn’t do that entirely. Surely not the Chromium Linux build I use on a daily basis. But what I really loved in it is something that (I think) was derived from its OS-like architecture concept.

I download several files of the same type and the downloaded filenames aren’t quite the format I like them to be in (Say I want mm-dd-yy while its received as mm_dd_yy, my naming braincells are nitpicky just like yours). The great feature of Chromium is that it keeps track of the file even when under download. That’s to say you can move it around from folder to folder, rename it as you desire and it simply won’t complain, even when it is downloading that file. This is a great use-case for me, I start all these downloads and run my renaming script in the main directory of my download after I’m done clicking download for each of the needed file, every week. I later use these files from their proper directories as my script skillfully places them. Wishing Firefox could do this too someday (Or if it has done, I don’t know — I stopped using it on March 13th 2010).

CCV (Community Core Vision) today almost made me wish I were on Ubuntu and not Linux.

Trying to build it on ArchLinux x86_64 took about 2 hours of searching solutions, building-installing and locating libraries, adding references, counting off one compile-error after another. Nothing has ever thrown errors harder at me. Makes me remember dependency hell.

Well, at least its not Windows and its lack of helper core programs.

Rant Mode Off

Being a KDE user has its ups and downs. The ups are that its beautiful, has a very wide and usable range of applications, updates often for bugfixes, and is generally very customizable. The downs are a few – with the Firefox+GTK integration being one of them. It makes your browser look UGLY! Of course, there are Qt-friendly browsers like Opera and Konqueror, even Arora, but these hardly work well with many sites, especially those of Google (Wave, for example). I’m not gonna delve into that subject, since this post is about using Firefox on KDE 4 (version 4.3.x).

You might have heard of the GTK engine that themes for Qt, known as gtk-engine-qt on most distributions (or with -kde4 suffix, if thats how they’ve integrated). This helps all GTK applications look great on KDE by providing *near* native look and feel. So I install that and smile, happy that my entire K Desktop is as I want it – dark, without gloss and perfectly usable with certain plasma widgets. That is until I notice my Firefox simply does not close itself when asked to, and hangs instead.

At first one would think its due to a plugin, or an extension, probably something added on that is causing it to hang when its supposed to terminate. Even the KB article at Mozillazine supports that fact. Perhaps its a popular reason, but I tried and it didn’t solve the issue for me. I jumped a few steps out of frustration and went on to move my .mozilla directory to a different name, just to see if it was a profile-related issue, and it still refused to close, driving me mad having to `killall firefox` it each time since it always hung at exit. So I switched to Opera and used it with horrible colors – Pages appeared normally as they would be rendered but the forms and other things just didn’t go well with my dark color scheme (Eclipse), making it appear like the image below, unreadable and thus untypable upon.

Unreadable, Unseeable - The form elements as they appear in my Opera (While using a dark color scheme in the DE)

The browser’s great otherwise, its fast and very customizable, but I couldn’t make any changes to these colors. I suppose one can achieve it by writing their own userstyle.css file but that is too much work. Used Opera until today, when I finally found this (pretty old) bug in the gtk-engine-qt project tracker. Uninstalled gtk-engine-qt and lo, all was normal again, closed fine and opened fine. Re-installed all plugins and extensions, and said bye-bye to Opera.

All I now miss is a native-looking dark theme with Oxygen icons, as my K Desktop contains. I’m making do with the Black Stratini theme as of now, it’s beautiful but I like the Oxygen icons better. 440 words for just the choice of browser on a dark theme, tch.

If your mplayer doesn’t seem to be zooming into, or expanding a video to fit the screen under fullscreen mode (Shows black bands all around the video, preserving its actual size), then it’s probably because of the video driver your mplayer is using. I had set mine to xv sometime back in order to play a few Real media files, and though it did zoom in on those files it confounded me when I tried other normal video files like AVI, etc on it.

The solution is to switch the video driver (Preferences – Video tab) to x11, which supports zoom.