Author Archives: Heath

Office Lights: Revisited

My office lights were a problematic project from the very beginning. I struggled to get the TLC5940 LED drivers to correctly light the LED strips and when I finally got that working I shoved it all in the wall and sealed it up before anything could go wrong. The problem was: the TLC5940 chips were…

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Xbox 360: Repurposed

I’ve never had a shortage of RROD Xbox 360s so when I needed to raise my monitor up a few inches, I had the perfect thing. Since my desk shares a wall with the utility room, I decided to move the tower in there and ran some extra long USB/Video/Speaker/etc. cables through the wall. This…

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Dual docks in elementary OS

Update: this tutorial is still valid for systems that don’t change monitors frequently, but if your system has frequent monitor changes, check out this post: https://heathpaddock.com/?p=854   When using two monitors in elementary OS the dock only shows on one monitor. I prefer to have it shown on both monitors. Here’s how it’s done: Open…

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New features in super-wingpanel

There have been a number of new features added to super-wingpanel recently. You’ll need to add the unstable repository to get these new features: sudo apt-add-repository ppa:heathbar/super-wingpanel-daily sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install super-wingpanel   Global Menus Thanks to +Francisco Javier Delgado del Hoyo for adding global menus. To enable global menus, you’ll need to do…

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Charging an iPad Air in Linux

The Backstory Today I plugged my iPad Air into my MacBook Pro (running Linux of course), but was promptly disappointed to notice the “Not Charging” message on the iPad. A friend suggested that the iPad would charge if the screen was turned off–and indeed it did–albeit very slowly. This behavior is a result of the USB…

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super-wingpanel

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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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