Harsh J

Don’t worry, both of these are just minor UI improving Mozilla Firefox extensions and not one of those heavy-weight resource hoggers. And you’d probably need the first one installed, its like a bug-fix. Read on …

First one would be the Long Titles extension.

As you’d have noticed on Firefox at times that the title attributes (tooltips/titles) in various pages are never displayed fully and always end abruptly with a “…”.

Like this image below:

This is cause of certain bug in Mozilla Firefox. Though this has been fixed in the upcoming Firefox version 3.0, you can fix this partial-showing in Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 with this extension – Long Titles.

After fixing they’d look like below: (To get what am talking about)

The second extension is a rather personal pick of mine. Its called Hide Menubar.

Does what its named as, hides the menu bar (File, Edit, Favorites, History, Tools, etc …) and shows them only when you hit your ALT key.

Before:

And, after installing the extension:

Just like IE 7 does, perhaps. I use this to get more viewing space since I don’t really use my menu bar that much.For bookmarks, I use the Ctrl + B sidebar feature instead, when required. (This plugin also auto hides your menu after a certain amount of time, neat!)

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.

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.

This is for those who experience the following error while installing anything from apt-get or Synaptic package manager from the official repositories even though you have the valid GPG keys installed (For Ubuntu/Debian ONLY):

WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated!

(And further are required to use –fix-missing parameter to solve the error.)

To fix it, do this:

sudo apt-get install debian-archive-keyring debian-keyring

Next, run the Update by giving:

sudo apt-get update

That’s it, you shouldn’t be experiencing anymore issues with verification on the Official repositories. If its of the rest, you need to acquire a GPG key manually.

Alternate way – SecureApt