Panel indicators for Unity

If you just want the system load indicator panel applet back just use this.

A whole lot more applets are listed in this answer.

Html Notifications

Chrome has a simple API spec for doing "desktop notifications" from webpages. There's even a quasi-standard "editors draft" at the W3C for it.

Luckily someone has been nice enough to write a Firefox add-on to implement the API in Firefox (open source).

Unfortunately some sites such as Flowdock only sniff for the presence of the API in the DOM instead of actually doing a call to the API to ask user permission as suggested by the spec itself and so fails due to the different approach taken by the add0on vs the implementation in Chrome.

Luckily this is easily fixed by pre-approving Flowdocks url via a property in about:config

key: extensions.html5notifications.permissions
value: {"www.210computing.com":0, "mydomain.flowdock.com" : 0}

Pretty JSON and Dark Ubuntu

Do get Eclipse using a dark theme to match dark background syntax highlighting plugin you need to set the gtk theme using myunity (from this answer on SO).

Pretty printing JSON with bash using just Python:

echo '{"foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum"}' | python -mjson.tool

Pretty JSON using an add-on in Firefox.

Using NodeJS and the pretty-data module to make a simple shell script.

Mp3s

So out of box install of Ubuntu 12.04 now includes mp3 encoding (as well as decoding using fluendo decoder).

But theres this issue with VBR encoding (which is set in default gstreamer pipeline for mp3 encoding). And yes its been open just over 6 years!

Still I learnt about a handy tool called "mp3check" (and id3v2), exactly the kind of toold I'd been looking after for ages.

Of course the correct solution is to use a decent cdripper like the cli-based abcde.

Getting Android Emulator accelerated

On Ubuntu 10.04 or later install KVM as follows:

1. sudo apt-get install qemu-kvm libvirt-bin ubuntu-vm-builder bridge-utils
2. install 2.3.3 Intel Atom Image via Android SDK Manager
3. run:   emulator-x86 -avd <avd_name> -nosound -qemu -m 1024 -enable-kvm

NOTE:  the -nosound is necessary due to current bug with android emulator on Ubuntu

Plain Text Please

Can't believe I only noticed this feature in Chrome this morning to paste plain text into any input field.

Firefox has the functionality in a add-on.

Countdown and android.os.*

So I needed a countdown timer for an Android project I'm working on and after building a simple one myself, a came across android.os.CountDownTimer - who knew android shipped with one!

That got me interested in having a browse through andriod.os.* package to see what else the Android devs had squirreled away in there...

Turns out a whole bunch of handy stuff!  Like:

• An simple API inotify
• PowerManager
• Filesystem stats
• a persistent, system-wide, blob-oriented "logcat"
• the very handy AysncTask