I’m a big fan of elementary OS. Paraphrasing from their design philosophy, elementary OS offers a concise, simple interface that avoids configuration in an effort to get out of your way so that you can get things done. This is great, except when you want to configure something a little differently. Enter super-wingpanel. Super-wingpanel is…
Yearly Archives: 2013
Keeping Your Files When Distro Hopping
I currently quad-boot my laptop and each of those OSes occasionally gets replaced. It can be messy to keep track of your documents, music, pictures, etc. when distro-hopping. In the past I’ve tried retaining a separate /home partition. This partially works, but can go bad quickly if you’re running different versions of the same software…
Transparent Panel in elementary OS
I’ve seen this tweak requested a few times in the G+ community so here is the answer. This modification will affect both the standard wingpanel as well as wingpanel-slim. Disclaimer: This method will alter the theme for all users of your computer. First we need to launch Files in administrator mode. If Files is in your…
Word Clock: Switching Lights
Progress is coming slowly on the word clocks. I’ve assembled the LED driver boards. These boards host a series of standard serial-in parallel-out 595 shift registers that pump into ULN2003A NPN darlington transistor arrays. The schematic is pretty straightforward. The arduino tells the shift registers which pins to turn on/off. When a pin goes high…
Consuming Twitter API 1.1 with Application-Only Auth in Android
Preamble Recently twitter turned off API 1.0 requiring applications to move to 1.1 and begin using OAuth for all API calls. For those of us who simply wanted to display a user’s timeline in our app, that means things just got a little more complicated. There are essentially three ways to authenticate with Twitter Standard…
Custom Keybindings in elementary OS
The keyboard-settings pane in Ubuntu allows custom keyboard combinations to launch applications or scripts. This feature is currently missing from elementary OS’s keyboard plug. However, with a little command line foo we can setup the keybindings without the GUI. First we need to install gconf2. It may be installed already, but in case it’s not:…
Silencing a Phone
As someone who spends more of the work day on the phone than not, I appreciate my headset. So when the jack on my phone started acting up, I was quick to get it working again. Recently, my phone started emitting a high pitch tone whenever a headset was attached. I tried multiple headsets to…
Word Clock: Building the Frame
I’ve started building a word clock. For the most part, I’m copying this one, but I’m hoping to include an improvement or two. Since the electronics piece is pretty straightforward, I began by building the frame the lights for each word from bleeding into the next. With the frame fully assembled, it was time to…