In my never ending quest to find the ideal text editor here is another installment. Since I have been using VIM as my default command line editor for years I thought I give it a try for basic GUI editing as well.

Install and set desktop app & icon

sudo apt-get install
vim vim-gnome
sudo wget --output-document=/usr/share/applications/gvim.desktop https://raw.github.com/leogaggl/misc-scripts/master/gvim.desktop
sudo wget --output-document=/usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/gvim.svg http://gfxmonk.net/images/vim-logo/vim-logo.svg
sudo update-desktop-database

Set MIME defaults

vim ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list
#add or edit the following mime type and add others as needed
text/plain=gvim.desktop;

I just had one of my old hand-me-down phones returned by my offspring in a great condition (junior is very careful with his equipment – well done young man !). This doesn’t happen all too often shows that the Nexus S is a decently built phone. This is also a good example of breaking the built-in obsolescence of modern phones. This particular unit has served me well for nearly 2 years (my average is one year) and served 2 kids after that.

I am currently looking into the use of Django for one of my extra-curricular projects and needed to set up a development environment on Ubuntu. This is the log for future reference and hopefully useful for anybody needing to do the same.

Dependencies & Django Installation

Core Dependencies & Django

sudo apt-get install apache2 apache2-mpm-itk libapache2-mod-wsgi mysql-server python-django python-mysqldb

Optional add-ons

For my purposes I need a few more additional modules

There are several reasons why you might want to run different Apache Virtual Hosts as separate users from the Apache user account. My most frequent usage is on my development machine to allow running from my home directory.

The most commonly recommended option for this purpose is MPM-ITK (a quick hack would be to add yourself to the www-data group using “sudo usermod -a -G www-data USERNAME”)

sudo apt-get install apache2-mpm-itk
sudo a2enmod mpm_itk

Modify the virtual host config file in /etc/apache2/sites-available

One of the annoying things with Synology NAS servers is the fact that a video file moved to the filesystem does not automatically appear on the DNLA share on client devices. It needs a re-index of the media files.

You can log into the HTML Admin Console and start a re-index, however this will be a full re-index and most likely take ages to complete. A quicker way is to connect to the SSH Console and issue the following command:

With the demise of the Medibuntu repository and libdvdcss not being hosted in the main Ubuntu repos due to licensing issues a new repository is needed from 13.10 upwards. Thanks to the good folks at VideoLAN (makers of the awsome VLC Video Player) there is a ready and updated source available.

wget ftp://ftp.videolan.org/pub/debian/videolan-apt.asc | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb ftp://ftp.videolan.org/pub/debian/stable ./" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/libdvdcss.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:rolfbensch/sane-git
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sane sane-utils imagemagick tesseract-ocr pdftk libtiff-tools libsane-extras exactimage wput

Install scanbuttond

Download the “Debian Experimental” package from http://pkgs.org/download/scanbuttond

sudo dpkg -i scanbuttond_0.2.3.cvs20090713-14_i386.deb

This step is only for the Fujitsu ScanSnap support. For other scanners you can probably install from the Ubuntu Repository

Scanner config

vim 40-libsane.rules
#add this line
ATTRS{idVendor}=="04c5", ATTRS{idProduct}=="11a2", ENV{libsane_matched}="yes"

Permissions

sudo adduser saned scanner

Useful command lines for troubleshooting

Since I had a few trouble getting this scanner to work properly I found the following commands highly useful in locating the issue.

Whilst EVINCE is a very capable PDF Viewer, if you have a need to fill in editable PDF forms it is required to install the Adobe PDF Reader.

sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ precise partner"
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install acroread

PS: If anybody is aware of an Open Source alternative to the Adobe Reader for editable form please leave a comment !

Or as an alternative title “Liberating your Galaxy S4 Hardware from Samsung Bloatware”.

Unfortunately there is lots of (ad-infested) blogs and forums with dodgy pieces of information on this topic and I found it pretty hard to get descent concise information. So hopefully this might help some poor Linux User liberate their phone. Whilst this has been tested on a Samsung GT-I9505 S4 International LTE device (JFLTEXX series) it should be applicable to other similar Samsung phones that are not fastboot capable (ie. all but the Galaxy Nexus range).

I have been planning to set up a SMS Gateway for sending and receiving SMS messages via a headless utility unit (Raspberry Pi) for a while. Since I had a leftover Sierra Wireless AirCard 880U from Telstra in Australia I wanted to re-purpose this unit with a spare SIM card. Unfortunately it was very hard to find any good setup manual for this particular combination and took some time to fiddle & debug. This is the working setup for future reference and hopefully it helps somebody.

Now that Twitter has totally killed their V1 API there is no official way to get Twitter feeds via RSS. Which is a real shame as RSS is a well accepted Open Standard for this type of information :-(

Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/) by Jurgen Appelo```xml The Twitter REST API v1 is no longer active. Please migrate to API v1.1. https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/overview.

One of the most annoying features in Ubuntu from 12.10 onwards are the pesky notifications popping up asking if you want webapps support everytime you visit a supported webpage?

Whilst you can disable this in Firefox’s browser options: Firefox > Preferences > General: Uncheck “Prompt integration options for any website”.

However I prefer to remove the browser extensions entirely.

sudo apt-get remove xul-ext-unity unity-chromium-extension

NOTE: Take care – unfortunatly you can not remove the following as their removal will cause Unity to fail !