#sh Blog - Entries tagged as Tips & Tricks

I recently signed up for a sipgate base account. If you choose the basic tarif you can get a free landline number without paying anything, as long you don't use it to call out. This handy for people with have a phone flat to call landline phones.

Sipgate uses standard SIP technology to forward calls to VoIP clients. Hence you can actually use it with any client soft- and hardware supporting SIP (s.th. which wouldn't be possible with Skype). Sipgate has a own windows client you can use if you use windows, which is already pre-configured for the use with sipgate. If you use other plattforms you have to set it up yourself.
For Linux there are two major SIP apps. One is Ekiga* and one is Empathy (relying on the telepathy framework). If you want to use Empathy for SIP, you should first install the telepathy-sofiasip package from the repository. Otherwise nothing happens when you add a new SIP account.

In debian based Distros just use: apt-get install telepathy-sofiasip

After that you can just add a new SIP account with Empathy, using your details from the login area of sipgate.

I was not aware until yestereday is that it's possible to import your Facebook Calendar into any Calendar Software / PIM that supports iCal and Web calendars.
To make that possible you just have to open your Facebook Event overwiew:



By clicking on that link you can open a pop-up that presents to you the link you will need to insert, when you create a new calendar in your favourite calendar client. Almost all PIM and calendar apps support iCal nowadays.

If you are a GNOME-Do user, you may have noticed that the Mozilla Thunderbird® icon doesn't look nice when appearing in GNOME-Do. That's because the logo is upscaled to fit the size of the Do bar. That scaling is made necessary, because the icon-size of the icon that Thunderbird puts into /usr/share/pixmaps/ by default is too small. To get a crisp logo in Do the logo should be about 128x128px (like the firefox.png you might find in pixmaps). To replace the thunderbird.png with a larger icon you can take the 256x256px icon from /usr/lib/thunderbird-3.0.6/chrome/icons/default/default256.png. Copy that file into your home-directory (or somwhere where you have write permissions). Then use GIMP to scale it down to 128px. After saving and renaming the file to thunderbird.png you can then copy it as root to /user/share/pixmaps/ replacing the old icon.

Copy-command:
sudo cp thunderbird.png /usr/share/pixmaps/

After restarting GNOME-Do, you should see a nice crisp Thunderbird icon. Like that:

A few day ago I stumbled over the desktop widget "Conky". Convinced by the nice configurations some people had running, I decided to give it a shot. Conky is quite flexible and powerful, that's why it has it's own kind of scripting language.
The script for the individual configuration is stored in the .conkyrc file. I spend the last few days tweaking my configuration, starting with the one from here. For my configuration to run you need to install at least parts of the conky-colors package which also delivers you the fonts you need.
I didn't really install the conky-color package though, just downloaded and unpacked it. The scripts I needed I copied into a hidden folder in my home directory (.conky-scripts/). The conkyVinyl Script for the cover art was modified by me. You also need an account for weather.com to use the weather Script, as explained in this post.
I ended up with the design you can see in the screenshot. The fastest way to get my setup is to unpack this ZIP-File in your home-directory and rename conky-scripts to .conky-scripts and conkyWeather.conf in .conkyWeather.conf (after you added your settings in there) and install the three fonts. After that you can use my .conkyrc as provided underneath. I hope you like it!
[My conky-config after the jump.]

Ubuntu Jaunty (9.10) has the nice new dark look for the status icons. But this is only working if you use the "Humanity-Dark" icon theme.

I wanted to have another icon theme, but keep the nice dark status icons. So I had a look at the Humanity-Dark icon folder in /usr/share/icons/ and discovered, that this is only an overlay of the normal Humanity icon theme. So this overlay could be used for my favourite icon theme as well. So I just made a copy of the Humanity-Dark folder (if you want to make a new folder in /usr/share/icons you have to be root of course) and changed the name of the new folder to Colors-Dark (because I want to inherit from the gnome colors theme). In the Colors-Dark folder you have to modify the index.theme file, to use another theme than the Humanity one. First you should change the name to avoid confusion. For example Name=Colors-Dark. After that the important part comes: change the inherit value to your prefered icon theme. For example Inherits=gnome-wise if you want to use gnome wise. That's already everything you have to do. If there is any icon-cache file you better remove and recreate it. You can use gtk-update-icon-cache to create a new cache. Now you have your nice new icons being used, when you choose the Colors-Dark theme, but the dark ubuntu-icons stay.

Als ich Ende April Internet für meine neue Wohnung bestellte entschied ich mich für den lokalen Kabelnetzbetreiber, nämlich Telecolumbus. Meine priortät war, das ich in der neuen Wohnung Internet nahtlos weiterbenutzen konnte und deshalb schon vorher per Internet bestellte. Deshalb entschied ich mich auch für den Kabelanschluss, ich konnte im Internet über die Adresse bestellen, die Dose war schon in der Wohnung, Internet für diese Adresse verfügbar, d.h. es hätte eigentlich schnell gehen müssen. Allerdings hatte sich nach einer Woche außer der obligatorischen Bestätigungsmail überhaupt nichts getan. Das machte mich mistrauisch, da mir nichtmal das verprochene Modem zugeschickt worden war und das sollte nun wahrlich nicht länger als 2-3 Werktage dauern.
Ein Nachfragen bei der Hotline erbrachte nur eine kurze Auskunft, das ein neuanschluss bis zu vier (ich wiederhole 4) Wochen dauern könnte! Mehr Informationen konnte mir man anscheinend nicht geben. In den nächten Wochen geschah wirklich überhaupt nichts. Eines Tages ging ich dann mal zu einer nahen Telecolumbus Filiale hin. Dort wurde mir auch promt gesagt das ein neuer Anschluss eigentlich sofort gehen müsste. Der Mitarbeiter vor ort machte auch gleich meinen Vertrag klar, das Modem konnte ich sofort selbst mitnehmen (keine Portokosten) und zu Hause sofot lossurfen. Mein Internet Auftrag htte sich wohl in die ewigen Jagdgründe der Telecolumbus Verwaltung verabschieded!


Merke: Wer einen Telecolumbus Anschluss haben möchte, sollte sich den am besten persönlich in der Filiale abholen. Die Internetbeauftragung ist wohl nur placebo!

To use the build in printserver of the Samsung router SMT-G3210 with Linux, you usuall have to know which print-protocol is used. Since I have the router at home already I wanted to use it for printing over the network. I just had to plug in the usb of my printer into the router and the printer was already recognized, as I could see in the routers webfrontend. Know I didn't know how to set the printer up on my Ubuntu system. Checking out the routers manual I couldn't find any hints. Finally I hit the right protokoll, it's AppSocket/HP JetDirect section you have to use. You just have to enter the IP of the router and press next. After you finished the rest of the normal procedure (choosing the driver/name) it should work.



I hope that helps others finding themselves in the same situation!