Thoughts

Blog Moved

2011-12-15T19:22:00.001+02:00

New blog and homepage in http://torturedmind.org.

'Life of Helmut' texts

2011-09-03T12:59:00.003+03:00

Moved...

Life of Helmut

2011-06-23T13:25:00.001+03:00

Moved...

Leather Subwoofer

2011-05-13T20:12:00.002+03:00

Moved...

Custom Bokeh

2011-01-06T17:38:00.001+02:00

Moved...

My amplifier has editable text

2010-12-29T03:55:00.000+02:00

N900 + Digikam

2010-02-19T12:51:00.003+02:00

One thing N900 has been good for is logging gps coordinates for photos. I'm using eCoach to log gps data. Although "eCoach is an application for recording and managing sport activities with Nokia N900" it works nicely for recording gpx file for photos too. Initially Digikam didn't read the gpx file eCoach produced but it's now fixed.

Unit conversion

2010-02-18T15:42:00.003+02:00

Some progress in KUnitConversion library, converter runner and applet.

In runner add case insensitive matches to first unit too.
Fixed €, ¥, and £ symbols.
Add frequency, angle, force and acceleration.
Added mmHg to pressure (BUG 217601).
Converter applet now sorts combo boxes (BUG 198115).
In KDE 4.4 if user does not give unit default unit is used. Now there is mostCommonUnits() function in library and it is used in runner to provide more default conversions (BUG 204292).
Show unit symbols in runner results.

Triple Head Setup, part II

2009-12-16T19:34:00.004+02:00

At the start of the year I was wondering if I could buy just one monitor and have a triple head setup with it. In the end it was just easiest/cheapest to buy two new 1920x1200 monitors. Other one of the old 1280x1024 monitors went to use but other one was still standing on the corner of my desk. I though that it could run another X server and work as view only screen for some plasma applets and perhaps for occasional TV. I grabbed some left over wood and metal plate and did myself a 0€ monitor stand and so I ended having triple head setup after all.

Rocking

2009-06-22T12:50:00.003+03:00

It's been pretty cold start for the summer but it seems it's getting warmer now. Never the less last week was nice. First Metallica and then AC/DC concert. My son was with me in the Metallica concert. It was his first rock concert and not a bad one to start with, not at all. Guitar Hero Metallica is played even more now than before the concert...

I wanted to test python plasmoids and made 'Now rocking' applet. It proved to be good experiment with python plasmoids and was a good test case for plasma too. Translation, config and initial size for scripted applets got fixes along the way. It has custom animation, widgets and toolbar but hopefully in 4.4 I can use more standard Plasma stuff and get it simpler.

Unit conversion in 4.3

2009-03-06T13:40:00.008+02:00

Library

I wanted to use conversion code outside runner so now all conversion code is in a library. It also has few new categories: currency, energy, fuel efficiency, power, pressure and time.

Unit Converter Runner

Converter runner now shows all conversions that text matches.

Unit Converter Widget

I got permission from Gerhard (original author of unit converter widget) to convert widget to use same library converter runner uses. Now widget has same categories and units runner has.

Some people have complained that there is no way to know what units Unit Converter Runner supports. Hopefully these changes to runner and widget help also on that.

Hmmm, no wonder my head hurts...

Triple Head Setup

2009-01-28T11:14:00.002+02:00

Currently I have this kind of setup:

I have been happy with it, but since I have GeForce 6150 on the mother board I was thinking adding one more display so my setup would look like this:

After reading about multi screen setups it seems that it is currently impossible though. Supposing that I want to move my windows from screen to screen (xinerama/twinview) and have composite enabled. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

2008-07-22T23:26:00.003+03:00

1.5% population of Finland saw Iron Maiden last weekend (in Helsinki & Tampere) . Finnish people rock!!!

LCD Weather Station

2008-07-04T16:33:00.006+03:00

Made a little LCD Weather Station applet to the playground. It also contains general lcd QGraphicsWidget that could be used in other similar applets. Basically it's just svg widget that has functions to turn on/off svg items, with helper functions to handle item groups and seven segment numbers.

Math Book

2007-12-13T21:21:00.000+02:00

Since I do not do math every day I usually have check equations from some math book/net. SpeedCrunch has several dock widgets and I thought that some kind of math book widget would be nice. After mockup got positive feedback I wrote something to start with. Since writing simple browser with QTextBrowser is an easy job, that did not take long. When talking to Helder Correia he noted that this could be a more general book widget that could also show help etc. I think the result look promising especially considering how little time it took to make it :-)

Buying a laptop

2007-10-11T19:18:00.000+03:00

I went to buy a laptop. Asked the guy what hardware this very cheap laptop had inside and happened to mention that I'm going to install Linux to it. When I was leaving he got curious and said so you are going install Linux to it. I said Yes, and said that I have used mainly Linux for a long time and my desktop computer only has Linux. Then he went ahead and asked so you have graphical desktop there and that kind of stuff...

SvgWidget testing

2007-09-21T14:20:00.000+03:00

To test the new SvgWidget I made a hdd monitoring applet. Bar meters are too big and not very pretty but basic functionality is there :-)

Learning Plasma part II: Widgets

2007-09-20T20:07:00.000+03:00

I needed some kind of meter widget. It was good time to learn something about Plasma widgets. SVG widget was born that can act as a meter (analog/bar). Well just watch the video and you know what I'm trying to tell.

Learning plasma

2007-09-18T21:03:00.000+03:00

I like to learn things by doing things. Playing with rss and news applet taught me something about engines and applets in plasma. During that I think I also managed to fill panel-devel mailing list with several questions... It's far from perfect but it's at least a start.

KMediaFactory for KDE4

2007-09-07T08:47:00.000+03:00

KDE4 version of KMediaFactory is in pretty good shape. I have had lots of incompatibility problems with ImageMagick and ffmpeg in KDE3 version. ImageMagick is not needed anymore (Qt4 replaced it) and I'm only using ffmpeg binary, so I hope those problems don't haunt me anymore (famous last words...). Otherwise it's just a port from KDE3 version. KISS was the main principle when I started this project and I like to keep it that way.

Where do you hack?

2007-06-02T13:34:00.000+03:00

I just moved my computer to downstairs and have now whole room for my things :-)

And view from the window:

KHotkeys

2006-09-26T10:49:00.000+03:00

After installing Kubuntu Linux I was once again using xbindkeys and xvkbd to get those extra buttons in mouse working. There should be an easier way to do this, so I checked KHotkeys. I quickly noticed that there is lot of things you can do in KHotkeys but not assign extra mouse button to events. So back to the xbindkeys and xvkbd. They work great, but are propably too complicated for novice users to configure.

While playing with KHotkeys I found the GUI to be a bit messy. So I designed new GUI for KHotkeys...