Syncing Tomboy Notes with Dropbox 11 October, 2008
…It’s just easy as creating a Tomboy folder inside Dropbox’s Shares and do a local synchronization! 
Posted in Dropbox, English, GNOME, Nessuna | 14 Comments »
GNOME Art Meeting: 10th October 20:00 UTC 10 October, 2008
I’m almost sure I will forget
However, for the guys like me that usually miss meetings today there’s our art meeting at 20:00 UTC [0] 
As always, channel #gnome-art on irc.gimp.org!
The Agenda so far is:
- Introduction, News
- Discussion of the Roadmap Draft by Hylke [1]
- Miscellaneous
If I won’t be online/in front of the PC, these are the three things I would like to see implemented as soon as possible:
- RGBA xsetting/environment variable (whatever gtk+ devs decides) to test also RGBA bugs inside applications. This could start in gtk+ 2.x and be complete for 3.0.
- Colorscheme support continuing the work of giusef (Giuseppe Fuggiano)
- Give the us the ability to theme the panel (with widget_register?)
Hope to see you!
[0] World Clock (check your local time)
[1] GNOME 3.0 Roadmap by hbons
Posted in English, GNOME, GTK, Icons | No Comments »
More Murrine Mockups/Glazestyles 4 October, 2008
In the last few days I’ve rewritten the drawing code for the second time since the last stable release (0.53.1), now the code is much more modular and permits easy additions/tweaks in the widgets appearance.
Adding a glaze style like this requires less than 20 lines of code for ALL the widgets and both RGB and RGBA mode!
This means that mockups are really appreciated.
Of course please donate if you want to help me in the development, for more/faster features
Posted in Donations, English, GTK, Murrine, Themes | 17 Comments »
Murrine Theming Contest? 2 October, 2008
To show all the possibilities given by the development versions of Murrine, and the new options it will support, I’ve thought about some kind of contest/brainstorm, where the best themes will be part of a separate package that will be out with the next release of Murrine.
The Goal
I’d like to see themes that uses all the new features, gradients shades, contrast, etc etc… to provide an original theme package, a not a simple colorscheme set
Themes should be submitted in the Murrine website, after registering. That will give access for optional voting and similar things.
Donations
Unfortunately this year will be really hard for me and I’ll have less spare time to code with the same free effort I had in the last years. So please consider donating, thinking that I’m a student and I can’t get money from my own due to the little spare time I have, that I’d like, if possible, to spend on free software: murrine, rgba stuff, gnome-do, clearlooks and much more
I really like to write a complete documentation for the development version of Murrine, as well as writing new cool themes for gnome-do!
Thanks for all your help!
Posted in Donations, English, GTK, Murrine, Themes | 3 Comments »
htaccess to redirect on DropBox’s public folder 17 September, 2008
Got tired of the long dropbox url for your public files? It is difficult to remember when you are on IRC and you don’t want to open nautilus and search for that file?
Do this with a htaccess!
You just need to follow these two easy steps:
- Create a new folder on your web server, for example “dropbox”. In my case I’ll have http://cimitan.com/dropbox or http://dropbox.cimitan.com
- Create this .htaccess file (with the dot!) and place it inside the “dropbox” folder:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/012345/$1 [L,QSA]Of course remember to change “012345″ with your dropbox user ID!
Result: http://dropbox.cimitan.com/screens/dropbox.gif
You can also play with symlinks in your Public folder! For example: inside my Public folder I’ve a subdirectory called Screenshots, which is symlinked to screens and tmp. They will work too!
Posted in Dropbox, English | 5 Comments »
Super-Silent Mediacenter on an USB disk/pendrive! 10 September, 2008
This is more a help post, rather than new code
The idea is simple: I want to get rid of all my hard disk noise, dvd drive (etc…) by running the system from an USB pendrive.
It will be fantastic, because your mediacenter applications (elisa, mythtv, mplayer…) will be loaded from the USB device in absolute silence.
The easier solution would be booting from an USB device if your bios supports it: unfortunately, PCs used as mediacenters are generally quite old and “boot from usb” is not supported.
Now comes two different hypothesis:
- Install GRUB into the HDD, then run /dev/sdb (USB device). I’m not sure GRUB supports it.
- Run initrd and kernel from the HDD, then mount the pendrive as root / partition.
…and maybe a third, if you have some ideas
Do you know how to manage/install that correctly, could you help me?
Posted in English, Multimedia | 18 Comments »
Three new smooth themes for Murrine (Chrome, Cream, Candido) 4 September, 2008
Today is the 3-C day: Chrome Cream Candido!
Since I would to show you the new contrast function, I’ve done 3 new themes that are using it to draw their widgets.
They require the latest Murrine SVN snapshot. Emerald themes are included.
You may not like them, they were created just to show the contrast function, not with the goal to be a killer-theme
Also, as they have a low contrast, you need to use a great LCD monitor to enhance their feeling, so in some CRTs they might look very odd (I hope not!)
As always, download is available in the Murrine Themes Gallery.
Posted in English, GTK, Murrine, Themes | 32 Comments »
New Contrast function for Murrine (Clearlooks soon) 4 September, 2008
Yesterday I’ve rewritten the contrast function of Murrine, now it works much better, increasing or decreasing the contrast of the whole window, with better results.
Below a comparison/testcase, where I used big values to show you better what this means. It’s not meant to be good-looking, but to show how the engine manages the values.
Of course adjusting contrast to smoother values will be really useful to improve the quality of your themes.
contrast = 0.2
contrast = 1.0
contrast = 1.5
Posted in English, GNOME, GTK, Murrine | 6 Comments »
ZenCoder: A Video Encoding software for the Creative Zen 28 August, 2008
Few days ago was girlfriend’s 22th birthday, and I gave her a Creative Zen with video support… to let her be able to cross the world watching her favorites cartoons and youtube videos!
During last nights I worked hard (yeah it was my first GUI ever, and first attempt with Gtk#) to give them another gift (it is a surprise), and now something is working: ZenCoder is ready!
ZenCoder is an usable frontend to mencoder, with a simple usage: just drop your videos on the Zen icon to start the conversion!
You can also choose the video (xvid scaled 320×240) and audio bitrate (mp3lame abr), skip conversions and view queued files.
Of course it supports RGBA colormap!
Yeah my girlfriend is both pretty and uses Linux, why I’m so lucky?
P.S.: If you have suggestions for improvements in the code feel free to poke me, this was really my first attempt in GUI programming, and it may have odd points. It also lacks of a good Makefile, an installation script and a .desktop entry. Please write me an email if you want to contribute.
Posted in English, GNOME, GTK, Murrine, Zencoder | 17 Comments »
Mockups for Murrine! 23 August, 2008
I know that there are a lot of things that could look better with murrine, starting for example from tabs…
So here’s an anonymous, no registration required, mockup-submission-service for murrine:
http://murrine.cimitan.com/node/add/mockup
So, please send all your ideas! (starting from notebook/tabs… eheheh)
Good luck!
Posted in English, GNOME, Murrine, Themes | 7 Comments »