What I'm up to...

nospam@example.com (muesli) — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 23:50:00 +0000

If you're still visiting this blog and wondering why it's been oh so quiet as of lately... well, things have changed, haven't they? Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus came around the corner and blogs were suddenly too much hassle to maintain and keep uptodate. To put it technically: Blogs are pull-mode, social networks are push-mode.

Twitter trained me like a little monkey, so I'll keep it brief: The awesome Tomahawk Player is what I'm up to. It's a new kind of music player, allowing you to socially interact with your friends and (existing) social graphs, as well as turning the "Web 2.0" in media players up a notch. It leverages the wonderful services of YouTube, Spotify, Google, Grooveshark, Last.fm, Echonest, OwnCloud, Ampache, SoundCloud, Official.fm, Ex.fm, Rdio, Jabber, Twitter (to name just a few) to create a new listening experience which breaks existing boundaries. Open Spotify playlists and play it from your friend's music library, YouTube or one of many other services. Why not import the top tracks for a Last.fm tag and have the songs play from Spotify? It's up to you. Share your favourite tracks and playlists directly with your friends and listen to theirs. Coming to a system near you, whether that is running Linux, Windows or OS X.

"Tomahawk gives us a look into the future of music players, and this future looks bright!" - hypebot.com
"... groundbreaking open source media player" - Evolver.fm
"The social media player of tomorrow" - ZDnet

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It's like someone rewrote Plasma from scratch

nospam@example.com (muesli) — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 15:12:49 +0000

Ever since I switched to KDE4 I kept having the weirdest issues with Plasma. The problems ranged from small design glitches to freakishly strange behavior which rendered Plasma unusable every now and then. Today I've solved (almost) all of those issues, which, as it turned out, could all be fixed within a minute. But let's not jump to the cause & workaround just yet.

Let me give you a few examples of "weirdness" that I got way too used to over the last few months (or even years):

- Having filetransfer jobs shown in the notification area of the taskbar made this area constantly resize itself. It kept flickering and jumping all over the screen.
- Items in the systray would overlap each other. Some items would simply miss their caption entirely.
- KRunner would start up at fairly random (but constant) position in the top-half of my desktop.
- The Activities widget on the other hand would leave a huge gap below it and the desktop border.
- ... I could go on, really ...

Today I simply couldn't stand starring at all those glitches anymore. I had enough of it. No, I didn't install Gnome, I haven't made the switch to Windows 7:

I did something way more desperate and pathetic: I've switched around the way my monitors are connected to the DVI outputs. Now my primary desktop (from KDE's point of view) is also connected to the primary DVI output. That already solved some really weird issues I kept experiencing on a daily basis. The other thing I did had an even more dramatic impact though. One small change in xorg.conf and suddenly Plasma behaved just fine - "as if someone rewrote it from scratch".

Old:
Option "metamodes" "DFP-0: nvidia-auto-select +0+0, DFP-1: nvidia-auto-select +1680+150"

New:
Option "metamodes" "DFP-0: nvidia-auto-select +0+0, DFP-1: nvidia-auto-select +1680+0"

The old option caused my monitors to line up at the bottom of the desktop. The new option lines them up at the top border (y-coordinate: 0).
I can already imagine all kinds of havoc that this could cause if you don't keep account of that gap in your calculations. I bet you can, too.

Finally: I can't tell you how great and polished KDE 4.6 suddenly feels. It's been a while I've been that proud of it. And all because of two extra digits in a little text config file.

muesli's Blog - KDE

What I'm up to...

It's like someone rewrote Plasma from scratch