I’m pleased to announce the 0.1.1 release of the MythStatusScreenlet. This release now is “theme-able”. I know Screenlets are theme-able already, but the standard theme support really just supports changing the background and other externally loaded graphics (png and svg). UPDATE: It appears I am running an old version of screenlets (0.0.14) and versions 0.1.2 and above have a lot more theme support.

In MythStatusScreenlet 0.1.1, I’ve extended (subclassed) the Screenlets utils.ini_reader to load extra options for the theme. These options control the layout and style of all the elements of the MythStatusScreenlet. As a proof of concept, I’ve quickly built a few other themes including “mythbuntu” and “glass”. I’ve renamed the default mepo theme to mepo-transparent, and created a new one for mepo that has a black background. This is because of a comment on the download page saying that a user sometimes found it hard to see the screenlet when backgrounds were changed.

Additionally, there is now support for GTK popups using the Screenlets Notifier class. The MythStatusScreenlet will popup a Notifier window when MythTV starts or finishes a recording.

I’ve tried to add mouseover tooltips too. However, I’ve found it to be quite unreliable, so it’s turned off by default.

I recently built a new MythTV machine. I installed mythbuntu 8.04 on it, which installed MythTv 0.21  Since then, my myth box no longer presents the Temperature information. I suspect a few other people might have the same problem (based on a comment on the gnome-look site), so I’ve fixed the code to only try and display the Temperature information if it is present. However, this means that I can’t easily test the Temperature display when building the themes. Please post a comment if you have this working, or have problems with it. Does anyone know if Temperature info is no longer presented in Myth 0.21, or is it a MythBuntu thing?

As usual, downloads are at gnome-look.

I love Firefox 3, and have been running it on my Gutsy desktop since Beta 3. Firefox 3 now integrates into your desktop’s skin/theme really nicely, and the upshot of this is that on Linux with Compiz you get to utilise window animations within Firefox.

This sounds great, except that the AwesomeBar and search bar can end up actually being more distracting than useful. The default Gutsy animations in Compiz Fusion (and possibly in Hardy too) are “Glide 2″ for open and close animations. Firefox’s AwesomeBar and SearchBar animations use the “Utility” window type, so you can just remove Utility from “Glide 2″ and add it to another effect. I chose Fade since it was there already, and just added it to the list. Here is a screenshot to better explain it.

Since I did’t want the gliding for open or close I added it to Fade, and removed it from Glide 2 in both the Open and Close Animation tabs.

Or, if you want to disable the AwesomeBar completely and go back to the Firefox 2 style, you can apparently set “browser.urlbar.maxRichResults” to “-1″ in Firefox’s about:config page. The comments in this post explain how to do that.

Announcing the long awaited update to the MythStatusScreenlet to support Ubuntu Hardy Heron.

After spending quite a lot of time trying to get ElementTree working, I gave up and just rewrote the XML parsing using simple regular expressions. I know it’s a hack, but at least I have something that should work in Hardy.

# RELEASE: 0.0.3
# – No longer uses xpath, so should now work in Hardy

You can download the latest file from gnome-look. As usual, let me know if you it doesn’t work for you.

I’ve released a new MythStatusScreenlet. The release notes are below.

# RELEASE: 0.0.2
# – Now supports MythTV 0.20 and 0.21 xml formats
# – Better handling when backend goes away/comes back

You can download the latest file from gnome-look.

As mentioned on the MythStatus screenlet page, I’ve tidied up some of the code and posted a tar on the Screenlets Website.

The MythStatus Screenlet polls the XML info page of MythTV’s backend (normally port 6544), and parses the XML information to display the status of your backend. It shows the next ten upcoming recordings, highlighting in red, any that are currently recording.

It also shows Last Guide Update status, a disk space graph, Load Average and Temperature as provided by MythTV’s XML status page.

It’s over two years since I posted my experiences with amaroK. At the time I was impressed by the meta information like album grouping and album art lookups on Amazon.

Two years later, and I’m still using it. So obviously it’s stood the test of time. I’m using the Xine engine in amaroK, and have the multimedia keys on my M$ keyboard mapped using xbindkeys (config below) I am still on version 1.3.9, on Fedora Core 4, so some of the dcop stuff might now be redundant.

Some things I would recommend for listening to music on Linux

Use the Xine engine in amaroK

I think the sound quality is better than gStreamer, and file support is broader.

Rip to FLAC

amaroK/xine sounds great, so make sure you’re using a good source file. Disk is cheap these days.

Use replaygain to losslessly “normalise” your track volumes

replay gain uses tags to tell your player what volume to play your files at. There is a replay gain script for amaroK, which reads the replay gain comments out of the file, and adjusts your volume for you.

Rip with ABCDE

Add the following to your /etc/abcde.conf to tell flacenc to use add the replay gain comments to encoded music. FLACOPTS="--replay-gain"

As mentioned above, I use xbindkeys to bind commands to certain key presses. This is especially useful for making use off the multimedia keys on keyboards. My keys just call the DCOP commands in KDE to tell amaroK to stop/start/pause,adjust volume. I’m not sure if newer versions of amaroK still use DCOP, but for now, it works for me

from ~/.xbindkeys when using Microsoft multimedia split/ergo keyboard.

    "dcop amarok player stop"
    m:0x10 + c:164

    "dcop amarok player playPause"
    m:0x0 + c:162

    "dcop amarok player prev"
    m:0x0 + c:144

    "dcop amarok player next"
    m:0x0 + c:153

    "dcop amarok player volumeUp"
    m:0x10 + c:176

    "dcop amarok player volumeDown"
    m:0x10 + c:174

I rebuilt my work machine to Fedora Core 4, and couldn’t be bothered recompiling BeepMediaPlayer with MP3 and iTouch, WMA etc.

So I googled around a bit and found amaroK getting good ravings. The first few versions I tried were really unstable (running under XFCE), but recent versions have improved greatly. It’s still a bit flakey when the network is busy (downloading a large file) and playing music over the network, like from a share. It goes into squeaky fastforward mode, and then locks up if you have not changed tracks by the time it (quickly) gets to the end of the current track.

There are some Killer features for me though.

• Album Art lookups on Amazon
• On Screen Display (OSD)
• Grouping of tracks with rankings and stuff.
• RSS Podcasting support (I don’t have a iPod though, so have not tested the external device support)
• Wikipedia lookups for artists is also a nice touch.

The things I am currently living with are:

• no WMA support, or AAC I think (although this is possibly more a limitation of gStreamer than amaroK. I should check that)
• The Network contention issue mentioned above
• Can’t change volume from command line (I use xbindkeys for mapping my Multimedia keys to amaroK commands like next, previous etc)

All in all. I can live with this stuff for now, and the killer features really are keeping me amaroK’d up for the time being.