Tag: ubuntu

One of the major problems I run into with video conferencing tools is how many of them are not at all accessible. I'm a keyboard-only user so if I need to hover a pointer in a particular area of the screen and then click an icon to mute ... then I can't do that. And if you mute me when I join because there are a lot of people here, then I can't participate at all. To work around this, I need a one-liner to mute (and unmute) my mic ... so here it is.

There are a couple of specific web pages I use in separate windows from my other browser tabs, so I can always find them. However this quickly leads to a too-many-browser-windows problem. Instead, I have been turning them into basic standalone applications with a javascript tool: nativefier and I thought I'd share my recipes.

Having created a couple of .desktop files lately to make launching apps easier, I thought I'd write myself a quick reminder of what I did and how it works. If it's useful to you too, then great! I have one application in a weird path, and another that needs a specific environment variable set for it to work.

With all the video calls, twitch streaming and product demo work I've been doing recently, I've been building up a library of tricks for using my android devices within the video content I produce from my laptop, so I thought I'd share. I've worked remotely for many years but I think there's more of us not going back to the office any time soon, so strong video communication skills are important!

I'm the proud owner of a Streamdeck XL but as an Ubuntu user, the tool support isn't great. There's a Python library that gives a bit of a GUI but I found it hard to use and I'd have needed to put each piece of functionality as a commandline script that this program could call. Instead, I am using go-streamdeck to create a custom application - and I'm having fun! Today's example adds a single button that runs a command to take a screenshot.

When I upgraded my computers to Ubuntu 20.04, I noticed a weird problem with OBS when using an old Wacom Bamboo tablet (because, have you ever tried to use OBS without a pointing device?). I couldn't actually click anything! The pointer seemed to be ... pointing to the wrong place …

I did a fresh install of Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa on my laptop, and was surprised at what happened when I went to install python:

$ sudo apt install python
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Note, selecting 'python-is-python2' instead of 'python'

Um, what?

It …

I'm an Ubuntu user and I enjoy most server-side scripting languages but I haven't done much Ruby and I never get the feeling that Ruby is pleased to see me when I do. Something is always out of date or has an incompatible dependency or ... and since I don't use …

I know this will happen to me again at a bad moment so I'm putting it here on my blog and hoping I can find it in my future hour of need ...

My work machine is a Windows PC, with dual boot to the Ubuntu partition that I actually use …

PHP 7 is released but for those of us who don't usually compile our own PHP, it can be a long wait for our preferred distro to release the packages we want. For Ubuntu, I'm using a PPA which allows both PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.0 to be installed, including things like extensions, at the same time. It was very easy to set up (I'm running Ubuntu 15.10 but this process should also work on older versions back to at least 14.04 which is the previous LTS) so here's a quick walkthrough of what I did.

I have been doing more screencasting lately, so I thought I'd share some recipes here, for my own future use and in case anyone else wants to use them. I capture my videos using Kazam on Ubuntu, usually by resizing my second monitor to 800x600 and then capturing that. Kinda eye-bleeding to record but looks good in playback and also works well either in tiny web view or on a big screen. I also screencapture my android device and for that I use Screen Recorder.

Edit: I mostly used OBS for video from around 2019.

I have a thinkpad laptop with a touchscreen and a swivel so it can fold up and pretend to be an oversized tablet. I like it a lot, but the touch screen interface hasn't been all that useful since I normally use this machine docked and then it maps the …

In this series of posts about my screencasting toolchain, I've already written about using wmctrl to resize windows accurately and about using Kazam to capture snippets of video from various applications. This post describes my adventures in trying to glue the video snippets together.

If you've ever seen a live demo, you will know that these things are fraught with danger. Even if the wifi works, the presenter knows what they are doing, and nothing crashes, you'll often end up watching someone explaining something to their laptop in detail, or clearly demonstrating their inability to type. Either way, it doesn't make good, informative content, which is why I never ever demo in a conference talk - I'm there to entertain and time is always of the essence. At this point, you can probably guess why I'm writing a blog post about my screencasting toolchain - I simply pre-record whatever it is that I want to show in the talk.

On an ubuntu platform, I've had a few false starts with video over the years, and mostly avoided it. But now my "Debugging HTTP" talk really does make more sense if you can see the process of something broken, what the tools show, and how to understand that information and fix the problem.

I'm working on a bunch of screencasts at the moment (more posts to come) and one of the things that tripped me up the most was getting all the windows the same size, so that the resulting videos are the same size and can easily be put back together. Enter …

Quick post because this tripped me up the other day: When you use a vanilla ubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" installation, it will come with PHP 5.4, which is excellent news. However the default php.ini doesn't set the timezone, so you will see an error like:

It is …

I had the weirdest problem the other day so I thought I'd write it down! I uploaded a toy script for someone, but it had images in it and they wouldn't load. The image files existed, and I could request everything around them, files in other subdirectories were okay; the …

Hmmm ... mods-available ?

This week, someone sent me a very large file using something called faspex. To begin with, it sent me a link to click on to download my file, but then started telling me "for best results, install a plugin". And apparently "for best results" means "to download this file in any way".

Since relaunching this site, with actual design rather than several shades of pink thrown together, I've become more aware of being consistent in presentation. With this in mind, I wanted add the same fonts to Ubuntu that are used here.

This year I moved my whole presentations toolchain over to LaTeX and PDF, and where I added diagrams (which doesn't happen a lot!) I used graphviz to generate them. Graphviz is a way of describing items and their relationships in a textual manner, and rendering them into a graph - and the results can be saved as an image, or included in LaTeX documents.

I found graphviz frustrating at times but on the whole it draws clean, symmetrical graphs far beyond anything else I can manage, even if I do use a mouse or tablet. Since I'm not able to use a pointing device on a regular basis, and I'm marking up my presentations in text also, it turned out to be a really good fit. I thought I'd share how I got on with it and some of my own graphs - as much to remind me next time conference season comes around as anything.

Apache on Debian. Ubuntu

When I first started using Ubuntu, I was coming from a distro journey that started with FreeBSD and took in Mandrake and Gentoo along the way; I hadn't worked with any Debian-based systems before and was new to the way that Apache is configured on those platforms.

I've been using Gearman lately in a project that I'm working on, and of course a month later when I came to deploy the code, I had to look up all over again what was required for a gearman server in order to put it on the new platform. Here is the short version for my future reference (and yours, if you like)

Last week I reinstalled my aspireone, which I've had for quite a while but which is really excellent for events. I put the latest Ubuntu Netbook Remix onto it and it installed like a dream, with peripherals and powersaving all working correctly. It says something about the positive experiences I've had with *buntu installs lately that I even did this over the wifi!

The weird thing was that I don't really use Gnome on other machines as I prefer KDE, and I hadn't seen the Unity desktop before (as I understand it, this is a lightweight gnome replacement - it still looks and smells like gnome to me), so there were a few things that were "missing" as far as I was concerned. Easily the most annoying is the Alt+F2 shortcut, I don't really care what GUI I'm using, I mostly just run things from that! I also realised that I now had workspaces, but that there was no keyboard shortcut to switch between them (I don't use a mouse, so it's keyboard or nothing for me).

Enter a wonderful utility called gnome-keybinding-properties.

I was playing with pecl_oauth last week (more about that in a later post) and when I tried to install from PECL, it grabbed the files, ran the configure step but stopped with an error status during make. This is bad news for those of us who are ubuntu users …

Last weekend I went to Liverpool (my first visit there!) to attend OggCamp for the second year in a row. This isn't a part of the software community I normally interact with, but I accidentally went to a LUGRadio event once a couple of years ago and have been hooked …

Recently I've been using bzr-svn when I'm working with subversion repositories; its a bridge between a local bzr repository and a remote subversion one. I travel fairly frequently and the pain of being disconnected from the server, unable to diff or log, and then either unpicking everything I've done or …

I've been having issues with the presenter console on both my ubuntu machines since upgrading to Karmic (9.10). One is a Thinkpad T400 running kubuntu and the other is an aspireone netbook running ubuntu netbook remix. Neither wanted had a working installation after upgrade and I couldn't get the …

I have written about screen quite often, mostly including my .screenrc file and showing how to have named tabs for the various screen tabs you have open. When Ubuntu Jaunty came out, I found it had some quite cool enhancements that made the customisations for screen really easy by default …

Since upgrading my work machine to karmic koala, I've noticed that my sound had stopped working. There were some broken packages in aptitude and Skype knew there was a problem as it notified me when I tried to make a call. I saw some issues reported with karmic, notably this …

I wrote a while ago about the new version of screen in Ubuntu Jaunty. Screen is an application which lets you run lots of tabs inside one terminal window, then disconnect from screen and reconnect again later. You can turn on and off a whole bunch of notifications which appear …

A while ago, actually quite a while ago in May, I put the Ubuntu Netbook Remix version of Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope onto my lovely blue Acer Aspire One netbook.

The way this works is that on another machine (or I guess on an existing OS on the netbook …

This is a mini-primer on using xrandr to configure a second screen under Linux, but first I'll start with some background.

I've been a linux user for a few years now but when I started working for Ibuildings I started giving presentations, either as a speaker or when delivering training …