Monday, May 05, 2014

Uberwriter Ubuntu 14.04 trusty .deb

Uberwriter is a very nice distraction-free text editor.

As of currently there are no .deb packages for Ubuntu 14.04 trusty on the web, so I've rebuilt the latest package available from the ppa (link).

Here it is:
uberwriter_13.10.02-trusty-testbuild_all.deb

Saturday, April 19, 2014

Cards Against Humanity - All White Backgrounds Version

I have modified the stock Cards Against Humanity PDF from http://cardsagainsthumanity.com/ to use all-white backgrounds, so I could print the cards with my inkjet printer and not cry for all the wasted ink.

Doing it was surprisingly hard: I had to use a combination of pdfedit and recolor.pl.

All credits for the original game go to the original authors, I just repainted the walls.

Download:
CAH_MainGame_AllWhite.pdf (Mirror 1)
CAH_MainGame_AllWhite.pdf (Mirror 2)

sha1sum is 602f8cbf92af1933e9613812e7610fa629c1a13f, have fun!

Monday, January 20, 2014

Fixing the brightness keys skip steps on Ubuntu 13.10 / 14.04 LTS -- my solution

As explained in http://askubuntu.com/questions/173921/why-does-my-thinkpad-brightness-control-skip-steps sometimes there are multiple things fighting to do the job when you press the brightness keys on your laptop.

In my case, it seems like both the gnome-settings-daemon and the brightness switch for the video driver were both trying to adjust the brightness, so whenever I pressed I button, it adjusted twice.

Now while the proposed solution
sudo sh -c 'echo -n 0 > /sys/module/video/parameters/brightness_switch_enabled'
worked, it stopped me from adjusting brightness on a tty (ok not a biggie), but especially I've noticed that leaving brightness up to gnome is slow and sluggish.

So instead I thought I'd disable gnome instead. There's a lot of old information relating to gnome-power-manager and other deprecated configurations, but I managed to discover that gnome-settings-daemon uses the gsd-backlight-helper (on my system it is installed as /usr/lib/gnome-settings-daemon/gsd-backlight-helper) to do its work.

To disable it, I just did
sudo chmod -x /usr/lib/gnome-settings-daemon/gsd-backlight-helper # For Ubuntu 13.10
sudo chmod -x /usr/lib/unity-settings-daemon/usd-backlight-helper # For Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
You do lose the brightness OSD, but that's a price I'm willing to pay.