First, you’ll need to make sure some prerequisite packages are installed: the package that provides the “amixer” binary, and some variant of awk. Open an XFCE terminal window by clicking on the XFCE “mouse” logo in the XFCE panel, then clicking “Terminal”. Become root by running the following and entering your root password:


su -


Then install the appropriate packages — here’s how to do it in Debian:


apt-get install alsa-utils mawk


Once the packages are installed, drop root privileges:


exit


Then let’s pick a place for our scripts to live. This example will assume that they will go into a ‘bin’ directory underneath your home directory; so, let’s make sure that exists:


mkdir ~/bin


Now, on to the scripts. Copy and paste the following script as “~/bin/alsa-toggle-mute”. Probably the easiest way to do this with a stock Debian system is to start the ‘nano’ editor with:


nano ~/bin/alsa-toggle-mute


highlighting the script below, and then using your middle mouse button to paste the script into the nano terminal window, then using “Ctrl-x y ENTER” to save the file:


#!/bin/sh
#
# alsa-toggle-mute
#
##########################################################
#
# AMIXER: path to your 'amixer' binary
AMIXER=/usr/bin/amixer
#
# CONTROL: sound card control to adjust: run 'amixer' to find this
CONTROL="Master,0"
#
# LEVELKEY: pattern on 'amixer' output lines to search for that provides
# the current control level
LEVELKEY=Mono:
#
##########################################################
#
$AMIXER sset $CONTROL \
`$AMIXER sget $CONTROL |
awk "(/$LEVELKEY/) { if (\\$NF == \\"[on]\\") { print \\"mute\\" } else { print \\"unmute\\" } }"` > /dev/null


Make the script executable:


chmod 700 ~/bin/alsa-toggle-mute


Then attach it to the hardware mute button with the XFCE keyboard settings manager GUI. Click on the XFCE “mouse” logo that should be on the edge of your XFCE panel; click “Settings” from the pop-up menu; then click “Keyboard”. Click on the “Application Shortcuts” tab. Then click “Add”. XFCE will ask for a path to the command; enter the full path to your alsa-toggle-mute script, e.g., “/home/username/bin/alsa-toggle-mute” — of course, you will have to substitute your username in that command. XFCE will then pop up a box waiting for the “Command Shortcut” — at this point, press your hardware mute button.

That should be it! Your mute button should now work.

Now let’s add support for the volume-up button. Save this script to “~/bin/alsa-volume-up”:


#!/bin/sh
#
# alsa-volume-up
#
##########################################################
#
# OFFSET: amount to increment/decrement the control level: e.g., -1
# decrements the volume, 1 increments the volume; values with
# a greater absolute magnitude will decrement or increment the
# control level more quickly. Use "$1" if you wish to pass
# the offset in from command line parameters
OFFSET=1
#
# AMIXER: path to your 'amixer' binary
AMIXER=/usr/bin/amixer
#
# CONTROL: sound control to adjust: run 'amixer' to find this
CONTROL="Master,0"
#
# LEVELKEY: pattern on 'amixer' output lines to search for that provides
# the current control level
LEVELKEY=Mono:
#
# LEVELFIELD: awk field number of the current control level
LEVELFIELD=3
#
##########################################################
#
$AMIXER sset $CONTROL \
`$AMIXER sget $CONTROL | \
awk "(/$LEVELKEY/) { print \\$$LEVELFIELD + $OFFSET }"` > /dev/null


Make it executable:


chmod 700 ~/bin/alsa-volume-up


Attach it to the hardware volume up button by following the same instructions as for the mute script (above), but in place of “/home/username/bin/alsa-toggle-mute”, use “/home/username/bin/alsa-volume-up”. And rather than pressing the hardware mute button, press the hardware volume up button.

Then let’s handle the hardware volume down button. This time we will take a shortcut. Rather than copying and pasting another script, we’ll just copy and edit the volume-up script that you’ve already saved:


cp ~/bin/alsa-volume-up ~/bin/alsa-volume-down


Then edit the ~/bin/alsa-volume-down script in nano to change the line that reads “OFFSET=1″ to “OFFSET=-1″:


nano ~/bin/alsa-volume-down


.. edit the script, then use “CTRL-x y ENTER” to save.

Then, as before, attach the script to the hardware volume down button by following the same instructions as for the mute script (above), but in place of “/home/username/bin/alsa-toggle-mute”, use “/home/username/bin/alsa-volume-down”. And rather than pressing the hardware mute button, press the hardware volume down button.

One solution is to use 7z instead, which is found in the p7zip-full debian package. For some operations, 7z is three orders of magnitude faster than tar. Here are some timings that illustrate how much faster 7z is:

#4.5GB archive listing using tar
time tar tvf fifteenthcensus00reel2149_jp2.tar 
 
(output suppressed, timing stable whether file cache is warmed or not)
 
real	2m1.876s
user	0m0.444s
sys	0m7.740s
 
#4.5GB archive listing using 7z with cold file cache
time 7z l fifteenthcensus00reel2149_jp2.tar 
 
(output suppressed)
 
real	0m10.419s
user	0m0.080s
sys	0m0.124s
5:28 PM
 
#4.5GB archive listing using 7z with hot file cache
time 7z l fifteenthcensus00reel2149_jp2.tar 
 
(output suppressed)
 
real	0m0.145s
user	0m0.052s
sys	0m0.040s
 
 
#extraction of last file in a 4.5GB archive using tar
time tar xvf fifteenthcensus00reel2149_jp2.tar fifteenthcensus00reel2149_jp2/fifteenthcensus00reel2149_0185.jp2
 
real	2m3.545s
user	0m0.436s
sys	0m7.824s
 
#extraction of last file in a 4.5GB archive using 7z and a hot file cache
time 7z e fifteenthcensus00reel2149_jp2.tar fifteenthcensus00reel2149_jp2/fifteenthcensus00reel2149_0185.jp2
 
real	0m0.104s
user	0m0.036s
sys	0m0.036s

Our new personalized email newsletter aggregates all the events your friends are attending into one simple email digest. You can set the email frequency anywhere from once per day to once per week. Here is a short example of what the email might look like, most emails will have more events than this.

If you think Zaggle is useful, please help spread the word by posting this link on Facebook, Twitter or anywhere else with lots of friends: http://bit.ly/zeemail

I made myself a tshirt a couple weeks ago on Spreadshirt. They’re awesome! A lot better than any other print-to-order service I’ve tried like Cafe Press and Zazzle. The shirt is based off of this one that I saw a friend wearing. I didn’t like what it said though so mine says something different :-) You can’t see the whole phrase in the photo above but you can see it below (in a different font).

Well, here it is, the first rough cut of a Facebook Connect website that gathers all your Facebook events into one handy place. Check it out! and let us know what you think …

OK I’m certainly not all that and a bag of chips, but set to roll out in one week for a 565 mile bike trip to LA (over 7 days — I’m not *that* crazy 8-) I wanted to see if there was a nice/cute way to make me:

• take pictures with my ifone
• use the facebook app (to either take a picture or select one from ifone)
• upload to facebook
• have it automatically show up on my site

the first 3 are easy-peasy.  you throw money at the problem and get the ifone with its legendarily crappy cell service and the free facebook app.

for the last point, i searched around wordpress plugins and found “fotobook” plugin (which also comes with two default disabled widgets).

it’s a liddle scary — you login to facebook while it’s “bugging” you, but once you done that (and given it your car keys) it figures out all your photo albums.   you can pick which albums you want to show/hide.   you can login/auth more accounts/people too (but so far I only love myself).  to make my left-hand column “NEW TRACEY PIX” on

my wordpress site

show up, I enabled the “photos widget”, set it to “most recent”, and tweaked the underlying PHP code to make a simple link to my facebook “mobile uploads” public page.

I think there’s an “update all albums” button somewhere, but there’s also simple instruction to “cron a get of url [X]” every X period of time so I did that.  Next, I tested it and “voila!” 5 minutes later, and then a few hours later when Hunter tagged me in some pictures, the left-hand widget updated as if by magic.

I guess this sort of thing excites me.  May be old hat.  I know raj got tikirobot auto-posting the twitter feeds so maybe he’s figured something like this out already too.

neat, no?

For some reason, almost no one uses upstart. Even Ubuntu’s services use traditional /etc/init.d scripts instead of upstart scripts. I think this might be due to upstart’s non-existent documentation. There is no man page for upstart, and multiple people I know who have read the online docs somehow missed the three important commands that control upstart jobs: /sbin/start, /sbin/stop, and /sbin/status!

Here is how it works: put an upstart script in /etc/event.d. Let’s call it /etc/event.d/foo. This script is now immediately available under upstart. Just type sudo start foo. That’s it.

I converted Ubuntu’s /etc/init.d/lighttpd script to a much shorter upstart script. The big advantage of this is upstart will restart lighttpd if it dies for some reason. This is what the upstart script looks like:

#this is an upstart script that  starts lighttpd
 
start on runlevel 2
start on runlevel 3
start on runlevel 4
start on runlevel 5
 
stop on runlevel 0
stop on runlevel 1
stop on runlevel 6
 
respawn
exec sudo -u www-data lighttpd -D -f /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd-infobase.conf

That’s it! Save this script as /etc/event.d/OL-lighttpd, and then type sudo start OL-lighttpd. You can kill off the lighttpd process and it will get restarted.

If you want to configure your lighttpd to write out a pid file, you can use pre-start and post-stop script to prepare and clean up the pid file:

#this is an upstart script that  starts lighttpd
 
start on runlevel 2
start on runlevel 3
start on runlevel 4
start on runlevel 5
 
stop on runlevel 0
stop on runlevel 1
stop on runlevel 6
 
 
pre-start script
    #make sure there is a place to write the pid file (optional):
    mkdir -p /var/run/lighttpd > /dev/null 2> /dev/null
    chown www-data:www-data /var/run/lighttpd
    chmod 0750 /var/run/lighttpd
end script
 
respawn
exec sudo -u www-data lighttpd -D -f /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd-infobase.conf
 
post-stop script
    #remove pid file (optional)
    #add server.pid-file = "/var/run/lighttpd/lighttpd.pid" to lighttpd.conf file to have it generate the pid file
    rm -f /var/run/lighttpd/lighttpd.pid
end script

If you want to stop lighttpd, just type sudo stop OL-lighttpd. You can also type sudo initctl list for a list of all jobs under upstart.