August 22nd, 2010

Making Firefox and Thunderbird Less Ugly in KDE4

Mozilla uses the GTK for its applications’ GUIs. As every KDE user knows, KDE uses QT (KDE4 uses QT4.x), and GTK applications look ugly in KDE. There are ways of getting GTK applications to look not as bad in KDE (qtCurve). However, these typically are a custom qt theme, which is not what I want (I’d rather skin the few misbehaving applications).

Luckily, for Firefox there is a very good theme called Oxygen KDE. You want version 2.0.1 or newer. It works very well, and applies to any Linux distribution. Thunderbird has something similar, named Oxybird. The original works with Thunderbird 2.x, you’ll want Oxybird 2 for Thunderbird 3.1.x. I have not tried Oxybird with Thunderbird 2.x, so I can not speak for it in that environment, but in Thunderbird 3.1.x it is not as polished and will not give you the same KDE look and feel that Oxygen KDE does for Firefox.

July 9th, 2010

Using Harmony Remotes With Intel CIR Recievers

Posted by John Havlik in Guides

It’s really simple. So simple that I felt like an idiot when I did not get it to work right away. If you have a motherboard from Intel’s Extreme or Media series, you probably have CIR headers (some other manufactures have them as well, but it’s rather hit or miss). CIR is an acronym for Consumer InfraRed, is a standard of sorts that allows us to do fun things like turn on our HTPC with a standard IR remote. Best of all (sort of), it doesn’t require a USB adapter.

July 2nd, 2010

Battlefield Heroes Server Admin in Linux

Posted by John Havlik in Guides

Yes, you can run BFHCC.exe in Linux under wine. You just need to use some of the Microsoft libraries (OLE32 is just one of many that are needed). If invoked from the same directory as BFHCC.exe resides, it will load your settings just fine. However, it won’t let you warn, kick, or ban players (the pop up menu when right clicking on a player name does not work). Additionally, it runs kinda slow (I am running a 64bit kernel with a 32bit Wine install for compatibility reasons).

The other, somewhat more powerful, Battlefield Heroes server manager, Ness Manager, works perfectly in Linux. Best of all it doesn’t need Wine to run. This is thanks to it being completely written in Java. Naturally, you need a Java run time environment (JRE) installed for this to work. To install it you may need Wine (it’s a .exe installer), but once the files have been installed, you’ll notice they are all .jar files. Copy these to a place you can access easily. To start Ness Manager all you need to do is type java -jar BFHNessManager.jar while in the directory where you have Ness Manager installed in. Ness Manager works exactly as it does in Windows, which is great, and runs fast compared to BFHCC.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

May 26th, 2010

Set Phonetic Nickname in Teamspeak 3 on Linux

Posted by John Havlik in Guides

Most gaming clans use VoIP software to communicate in game, one of the most popular applications for this is Teamspeak. Starting in Teamspeak 3.0, a text-to-speech engine is included to provide notifications of players entering and leaving channels (among other things). By default, Teamspeak will try to pronounce your nickname, not always a good thing when the nickname contains your rank (e.g. “|sgt| mtekk”, we want everyone to hear just “mtekk”) as the engine pronounces “|” as “vertical line”. In Windows and OS X you can use “Set Phonetic Nickname” under the “Self” menu. In Linux, the prompt will open, but the text box is disabled. This is due to a text-to-speech engine not shipping with the Linux version of Teamspeak3.

So how do we set the phonetic nickname in Linux? Well, it’s really simple. Go to “Connections > Connect”. In that prompt click the “more” button. You should now see a field that is labeled “Phonetic Nickname”.

Alternately, you can dive into the Teamspeak configuration files (like I did). Under your home directory there should be a directory named “.ts3client”, in a terminal you can see it using ls -a ~/. Within .ts3client there should be a file named “ts3clientui_qt.conf” open this up with your favorite text editor (e.g. nano: nano ~/.ts3client/ts3clientui_qt.conf). Scroll down to the bottom of this file, there should be a section named “[Connecting]” the last field should be “LastUsedPhoneticNickname=” just append to this setting your phonetic nickname (e.g. “LastUsedPhoneticNickname=mtekk”).

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

April 2nd, 2010

Check Image Dimensions Without getimagesize()

Posted by John Havlik in Guides

In a forthcoming project, it was necessary to check the dimensions of a remote image before deciding to cache it or not. While the PHP native function getimagesize() exists, it has some pitfalls. The biggest being: it relies on allow_url_fopen being enabled. While allow_url_fopen is not inherently dangerous, many web hosts do not have it set to prevent issues caused by inexperienced users (including Weblogs.us). Additionally, getimagesize() will retrieve the entire image—a waste of bandwidth, and time. This guide will cover finding the dimensions of images in the PNG and GIF formats with a word on JPEG and why it makes life difficult.

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