My experience with Ubuntu blogged

For the post Ubuntu and my Canon IXUS 850IS in gThumb I needed to enter two hyphens (gthumb --import-photos). So I simply typed it in the wordpress editor, nothing evil thinking in the visual editor. The result was one dash instead of two hyphens: gthumb --import-photos. Not even the code view respected my wish.

With my HTML knowledge I thought the easiest way would be to enter the character code of the hyphen (-). This simply worked. If you edit your post you have to replace them again.

Note: To enter - I had to type in #45. Puh that’s a bit annoying, most notable when you edit the post and the same game begins again

Note2: As I see now there are much more problems, than the double hypen. Iy ou want to type in an ampersand or another special character you have to enter the HTML-Code everytime you edit the post. E.g wordpress replaces my #45 everytime I edit the post with a hypen (-)
Does anbody know, how I can turn off this AI? (Is it possible on www.wordpress.com too?

For the previous post Add a place to Places in Nautilus for time saving I needed a screenshot of the dialog opened. This is only possible, after one click with the mouse on the listbox. For a screenshot you need to go to Applications -> Accessories -> Take Screenshot which closes the dialog.

I needed a solution to get a screenshot after I clicked on the dialog. I thougt a time delay would be the easiest way to do this. So I open the bash and typed in: ping -c 2 localhost;gnome-screenshot which gives me a time of two seconds to navigate to my dialog.

Easier way (thanks to acadavid): gnome-screenshot –delay 5

Explanation:

• ping -c 2 localhost pings the own computer twice. One ping last approximately one second. The c stands for count so you can type ping -c 10 localhost to ping the own host ten times and get ten seconds to do what ever you want.
• ;gnome-screenshot: The semicolon sepearates the two commands, so that the gnome-screenshot is called after the ping command finished. The gnome-screenshot is the program which is called if you click Applications -> Accessories -> Take Screenshot. To get the name of such an application right click on Applications -> Edit Menus. Right click the entry you want the command for and choose Properties.

So you see: Everybody needs bash

When I am working with OpenOffice.org or another application I often want to save my files to /media//media/sda5/docs/study/1introdcution/2. Semester. Always navigating to this folder is a waste of time and annoys me. So I thought there must be a way to have a direct link to the directory like Desktop or Home Folder.

The way to get an entry like the one above for OOo is easy:

1. In nautilus go to the directory you want to to have an entry for, like /media//media/sda5/docs/study/1introdcution/2. Semester
2. In the menu click Bookmarks -> Add Bookmark or simply press <cntrl>+<d>

Now you are done. You can now see your bookmark in Places and the file dialogs.

After using Ubuntu now for a while I am searching for a macro program like AutoHotkey. I found nothing on the net, so maybe you can help me out.

I used AutoHotkey for the following tasks / search for a macro program which can do the following:

• text replacement: I type br# and it gets replaced with best regards, Alex
• url opening: I mark a word and press a shortcut which opens my webbrowser with a specified URL like http://dict.leo.org?search=%s where %s is the marked word.
• hotkey for direct access to folder: I press for example <super>+1 and nautilus opens with eg. /media/backup/
• hotkey few folder: I press eg <cntrl>+<n> and a new folder is created and highlighted for renaming (or a dialog is presented where I only have to type in the name)
• paste as plain text: Strip all special markups in a text (like copied from firefox) and paste it.
• get pixel color: Press a hotkey to copy the pixel-colour under the mouse pointer to the clipboard or display it.

Do you know such a program which can perform all or a part of these actions? Let me know!

Lifehacker has a nice article: Feature: Automate Repetitive Typing with Snippits. Snippits does not support all the wanted features, but helps a lot.

For my birthday I got a new Canon Ixus 850IS. For MS Windows and Mac OS X there are discs with drivirs available. After my old Canon Powershot S30 worked so nice with Ubuntu I did not thought there could be any problems with a new one ^^.

I plugged the camera in and gThumb opened with a the import dialogue. So I clicked the import button … and received an error. Hmm it was an IO-Error and as a newbie to Ubuntu I did not know what to do.
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