And that pretty much is the history of logic!
And going through this video, I’m astounded at my own ignorance.
Ah, this post is from my much beloved WLW!! And it remembers me 
– I’d set up WLW as keyword and it picked it up and linked to it – that’s something. And by gawd, WLW is an all around kick-ass blog client. I miss it deeply when I’m in my tux avatar. And now after diving deep into Linux, I see some awesome aspects of MS Windows. Sometimes, as in the case of time, an interesting dilemma turns up.
If you look at your watch, what time do you keep? UTC or your local? I think most of you and perhaps I too would laugh at this absurd question – not a doubt, I’d keep local time! And when you look at that clock on your screen what you expect is local time, and maybe you track a few other zones, like I do, so you want some other times too, but clearly – you do want local time.
Now, with default settings, in Linux you see your local time showing correctly when you look at the graphical clock. However, behind the scenes, Linux at the hardware level works on UTC (Universal Coordinated Time – I know it’s odd that the T and C are jumbled but look it up yourself!) and the developers thought it a great idea.
Microsoft shows local time on the clock, but with the difference that the machine’s time is set to the same. Which makes sense too, unless you fiddle a lot with time zones. However, put Windows and Linux on one machine (like I did) and you run into a nightmare with some fun discoveries for relief.
To resolve this you have to do one of two things:
For Linux you’ll find quite a few sites showing you how to fix things, but for Windows, I was lucky to hit upon Arch Linux’s wiki entry which tells Windows that RealTimeIsUniversal – indeed! However, use it with care if your location uses DST.
I’ve got laugh about this! For now this is what will make me happy. I’ve been musing about how to reconfigure sound on my debian install, which I posted about (Darn, I do miss Windows Live Writer – I could link to previous posts… *sniff*)
Ha, so this Qumana thing has a blog control manager where I can see a list of my old blogs and copy links! So here it is – the link to my last post on sound. I’ve got Jackd working now. What I did, based on a suggestion on the debian-user list, was to keep PulseAudio and route its output through Jackd. Not recommended, but it works.
sound card <== alsa <== jackd <== pulseaudio <== gstreamer | alsa
Now, I’m on a different problem. My headset. Sound’s too weak and they work unpredictably – which is why I started this whole thing in the first place. Looking at this diagram, I see I need to refine it a bit.
There is a slight difference in a key stage.
jackd <== pulseaudio – it’s not straight forward. You have to create Jack’s sinks and sources using pactl – i.e., using PulseAudio. Which means my actual setup is a bit stranger 
sound card <== alsa <== pulseaudio <== jackd <== pulseaudio <== gstreamer | alsa
Why?! Oh well, beyond me at present. But it clarifies why I can’t see the headset (sink) on my connections in the Jack control. I need to go lower and work on the pulse/alsa layer to create a sink and source for the headset. Now that I have an idea of what needs to be done. I’ve got to figure out the how.
I’m learning.
And happiness is … figuring it out.
Posted in Tech
This is progress! A user posted a question about deploying an extension across multiple users. I got interested and so looked it up and I’m getting somewhere with this stuff I’m poring over.
Now if you’re here as a user, all you need to do is point your browser to this url, you’ll see all the installed extensions and the option to enable them:
https://extensions.gnome.org/local/
As an admin, here’s what I posted:
This page gives you the bare bones of what needs to be done:
https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Extensions
In short you need to do two things:
1. Install the extensions system-wide or per user
2. Enable the extensions
Step 1. Install the extension system-wide or per user:
If system wide then they need to be copied to the folders:
/usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions and
/usr/local/share/gnome-shell/extensions.
If per user then in folder:
~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions
The name of the folder is the extension name that you’ll use in the next step.
Step 2.
Enable it. Enabling involves using gsettings like so:
gsettings set org.gnome.shell enabled-extensions "['<name of folder>','<name of folder>']"
So on my machine, it is:
gsettings set org.gnome.shell enabled-extensions "['ext-helper@amanda.darkdna.net', 'dock@gnome-shell-extensions.gcampax.github.com']"
And there it is – the heart of the script. To an admin this should make sense.
And here’s the rough script for you:
Should work on Debian 7.
#!/bin/bash
apt-get install gnome-shell-extensions
gsettings set org.gnome.shell enabled-extensions "['ext-helper@amanda.darkdna.net', 'dock@gnome-shell-extensions.gcampax.github.com']"
Paste the text into a file with an extension .sh and set it’s permissions to executable.
Posted in Tech
Looking at some troubleshooting logs, I saw really cool logs of terminal sessions. When they were short, I figured that they’d been recreated (i.e. typed in again), but with longer logs, I guessed there had to be a logger. That got me started. Yes, indeed there is! And it’s one of the most basic things in linux, esp as a new user!
Just type "script <filename>" into a terminal you’re on and the recording starts to your <filename>. If you leave out filename, it’ll create a file called typescript and log all the output from the terminal screen there.
Image courtesy: 
Some rights reserved by T045TBR0T
Posted in Tech
On debian-user I found a noob posting about resources to learn about Linux. Since I’m only a few steps further than him, I figured I’d just post all the resources everyone shared with no particular edits.
Here they are:
http://tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/intro-linux.html
The Geek Stuff: http://www.thegeekstuff.com
nixcraft: http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/
HowtoGeek: http://www.howtogeek.com
Howto Forge: http://www.howtoforge.com
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/
The Debian Handbook may be useful. It’s available on a running Debian system by installing the ‘debian-handbook’ package, or online as a free download at http://debian-handbook.info/
http://www.tldp.org/guides.html
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-tutorial/ although obsolete is still gives you a good grounding
Posted in Tech
Blogging on Linux is a nightmare! Well, I enjoyed Bloglilo on KDE, but if you’re not a fan of KDE (like me) then having to install a ton of stuff for Bloglilo seems a waste. And I strongly object. I tried a couple of blog clients like BloGTK (the installer forgets to mention that it uses gtksourceview2), Drivel, and Gnome Blog, I’m beginning to miss the simplicity of blogging with Windows Live Writer. Even the simplest concept of being able to post an image through a desktop client is … unavailable! And I think under windows there are a ton of blogging clients – not to mention WLW!
Arrgh – I’m using Qumana and frankly it’s a Java based client so quite portable, but wtf?! Tags are not supported. Or if they are, it’s like text inserts in your blog post… I think that could be a project to work on. A freaking blog writer for Linux. And to be evil, I’ll just write it for one oddball distro, and forget the makefile…
Just a bad tux day..
Tags: Linux, Blogging, Windows Live Writer
