Nicolas Kuttler » xorg

Using recordmydesktop to upload to YouTube, Vimeo etc.

nicolas — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 13:10:51 +0000

recordMyDesktop is a great tool to make videos of what you’re doing with your computer. This can be very useful to demonstrate software features or to document workflows. By default, recordMyDesktop produces Ogg-Theora-Vorbis. If you want to share your files or upload them to a video site you’ll want to convert them to something more common.

mencoder out.ogv -ovc xvid -oac mp3lame -xvidencopts pass=1 -o out.avi

This will produce a video of good enough quality so that people can see what you are doing.

Here’s an example:

Please notice that mouse and click highlighting aren’t recordMyDesktop features.

My favorite Firefox Add-ons

nicolas — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 12:02:23 +0000

This is about the Firefox Add-ons I use. This really is a complete list, I like to keep my browser lean. I’m fully aware that most people will miss things like Adblock, Pixel perfect and greasemonkey, but I don’t use them.

Usability

Tab Kit: My favorite tab extension. Has many many features, I use it mostly because it allow more than one row of tabs and tab grouping/collapsing.

Clear Fields: This solves a quite annoying issue with Firefox and the xorg clipboard. Xorgs lets you paste things that you have highlighted with the mouse by simply clicking the middle mouse button. However, the previous contents of the search and address fields don’t get cleared. This adds buttons to clear those fields before pasting.

Development and Webdesign

Firebug: The swiss army knife of web developer add-ons. To quote from it’s description: “You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page”. Very power- and useful.

Gridfox: Indispensable while making grid-based layouts or aligning text to a base grid.

Live HTTP headers: This is rather esoteric, but very useful for JavaScript debugging and web app development.

Web Developer: This is what I used before Firebug existed, and it’s still useful today.

MeasureIt:This is very useful for quickly measuring the size of various elements on a page.

Privacy/Security

Cookie Monster: The best cookie manager I could find. I always block all 3rd party cookies, and by default no website is allowed to store cookies on my computer. Cookie monster makes it very easy to allow cookies for sites I visit. Another nice feature is to only allow session cookies for some sites.

Flashblock: Blocks all annoying flash animations. Can whitelist sites of course. A must.

NoScript: Blocks all (3rd party) JavaScript. Indispensable security tool and gets rid of most ads as well.

Accents in xorg

nicolas — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 17:54:14 +0000

Most of the time I’m a very happy vim user. Vim has superb support for inputting all kind of characters, see :help digraph and :digraphs. But from time to time I need to input accents etc. in other GUI apps.
A long time ago xorg in Debian did default to use deadkeys. I remember that I was quite annoyed by it, because typing ~/ required three key presses. However, somewhen in the past the keyboard behavior was changed to nodeadkeys which makes it kind of impossible to input accents as in é, è, or â. What’s even worse, I didn’t manage to override xorg’s auto-configuration of (**) Option "xkb_variant" "nodeadkeys, no setting of Option "XkbVariant" "nodeadkeys" did help.
Running setxkbmap de restored the dead keys for me. I should add that my system uses locale de_DE.UTF-8. This will be ok for some time, however, I think I really want to use the "xkb_options" "compose:rctrl" option, at least for the tilde.
Btw, I’m perfectly aware of xmodmap, but I really don’t like to mess around with it for such a simple requirement.

Switching to Openbox

nicolas — Thu, 28 May 2009 12:24:04 +0000

After a decade of windowmaker and fluxbox I’ve switched to openbox. I was motivated by the fact that some recent fluxbox upgrade left my decor-less urxvtcs visible on all desktops which was rather annoying. Somebody on irc suggested openbox, and after a few minutes I started to like it a lot!

What’s great about openbox:

it’s fast
it’s based on blackbox (but has been completely rewritten) and has a dock
it’s standards compliant
chainable key bindings
pipe menus, menu elements that are dynamically generated through small scripts
nice tools like ObConf and ObMenu

I like a minimal configuration, my main workspace has just two terminals:

The transparent task bar at the bottom is tint2. The 0.7 version has an integrated systray which is nice, however the debian package is slightly outated. If your version doesn’t support the systray download the source from the tint2 page. My version oddly had a binary included in the src/ folder. If you need to compile yourself, apt-get build-dep tint2, go to the src/ folder, type make and copy the binary to some place that’s in your $PATH.

The openbox wiki seems to have all the documentation that’s necessary, like per application window settings.