Pictures and Code

Well, I’m a Windows XP user and i just wanted to try Linux. Why ? Because i found some really nice screenshots of a Linux desktop.

Its a theme for some X window manager called e17. I downloaded various Linux distributions and tried to install e17 somehow but without success. In the end i found elive , its some debian based distribution with pre-installed e17 window manager. I had to do the hd-install in my virtual machine and found this guide on how to setup. Than upgrade the whole distribution with apt-get. Some minor tweaks were made with the help of the people from the freenode irc channel #elive (big thanks to Thanatermesis). And finally i got the theme running. That whole e17 project is in pre-alpha state (0.3) so its very buggy, i had lots of crashes in various programs, some didn’t work at all.

After all i found fluxbox some window manager that seems to be made for custom skins. I grabbed the Suse 10.0 64 bit Eval DVD and now I’m going to install it on my real system. I found the fluxbox 64 bit rpm as well and the way is all clear now. Linux I’m coming ! Switching to the dark side of the force, i hope it will be fun.

update: Tried suse 10 (64 bit) with gnome and kde. Its not that easy to get all stuff installed for 64 bit OS. DVD-playback(mplayer), mp3–playback(xmms) and tv-playback(Zapping TV Viewer) were my biggest hopes. But when i have video-playback i missed sound-playback and vice versa. Its just too much effort to get all things running and keep em running. I’ll better try the 32–bit Suse 10 and see if its really easier to get things done.

The idea was to cut down the mysql usage in galleries. Just edit some exif-tag of some image (e.g. .jpg) and use it for storing information that you would usually store in the database. Im using the Pel-lib (php) for this approach.

My script scans some directory (default: “pics/”) for files, creates html-form elements for each, reads the exif tag (image_description) and puts em into the forms as initial values. On pressing the “write” button the new image descriptions are written to the files (chmod 666).

This is some very easy read and write exif data application. You can easily customize it to read and write your favourite tags.

Here you can see a demo.

You can download the php script here . The file structure in my sample is the following.

• /exif-writer.php
• /pel/PelJpeg.php
• /pics/image1.jpg
• /pics/image2.jpg

Dont forget to chmod all images to 666. Thats it, have fun.

Looking for some easy to use PDF-Maker and looking at Adobe’s price list, I had to find some free tool thats really easy to handle.

rarefind offers the Paperless Printer® . It works like a common printer in Windows XP. When you selected any document in any application to print, the software just asks you what format you prefer: PDF, HTML, RTF, EXCEL, JPEG, BMP. You press “OK” and its all done !

I found this tool pretty neat for using online fax services for sending some signed contract to my domain provider. In order to get the print view of a web-document you got to print it. But with this tool you just print it to some BMP file, edit it in your graphics editor(paint, photoshop, …) and send it to some online fax service (tiscali.de or fax.de for germany). So you saved paper and didn’t pay anything for the fax (fax.de gives you 10 free fax messages).

I just finalized my DScalerScheduler Project. Instead of using different modules as before there are now only 2 applications.

Just put the DScalerScheduler-folder into your TvBrowser-folder like on the picture above. In TvBrowser just set the scheduler.exe for your Capture-Plugin. Than set these parameters for recording.

{start_day} {start_month} {start_hour} {start_minute} {end_day} {end_month} {end_hour} {end_minute} {channel_name_external_quiet}

Set up the external channel assignments according to your channel layout in DScaler and thats it. The DScalerScheduler looks like this. I’ve added some extra buttons in order to test the initial functions with DScaler, so you wont have to wait for the first record to see if it works at all. And as before you can minimize the application to tray by double-clicking on the tray-icon.

You can download the DScalerScheduler here: download

It works with the new DScaler 4.1.14 and .Net Framework 1.1 .

Comments and reports are welcome.

Update:

I tried DScaler 4.1.15 and there is a new limitation.

Somehow things changed in 4.1.15. Don’t ask me why and how. But now you have to Toggle Menu to visible.

Its not possible to pass any other keys than [0–9] to DScaler with WM_CHAR. So I can’t implement the new key combos Shift+R and Shift+S.

Just for the info: DScaler is not meant to be a recording program for TV shows. Thats what they told me in their forums, so there won’t be any further support from them. So we have to deal with the problems and limitations.

Well, and about that remote launch of DScaler.exe … I don’t like it myself when apps start out of nowhere while playing games or watching dvds and so on, same with hibernate and shutdown. There are endless tools around the internet to do that functions and lots of people use em everyday (Shutdown Timer v1.0.3, Shutdown4U 3.6, and so on).