Wallpaper changers, for Windows and Gnome 3
Posted: September 3, 2011 Filed under: GNOME, Windows | Tags: gnome 3, wallpaper switcher, windows Leave a comment »Unfortunately for my mental sanity, I recently found Wallbase. So I downloaded a bunch of wallpapers and decided that it would be nice to have them automatically rotated. So here’s what I came up with…
For my Windows Vista machine, I picked John’s Background Switcher. End of story.
Next up, the Fedora 15/Gnome 3 laptop. With Gnome 3, your options are limited; the only one I found was wp-show. So open a terminal and run the following commands (you’ll need git installed for this to work):
git clone git://gitorious.org/gnome-3-wp/gnome-3-wp.git
chmod +x gnome-3-wp/wp-show gnome-3-wp/tools/wp-show gnome-3-wp/tools/install
cd gnome-3-wp
./wp-show
A nice, self-explainable GUI should pop up. Pick the directory from which you want images to be used, pick the timeout, tick the Enable checkbox, hit Apply, hit Close. Easy as pie.
(Also, I’m sorry for not posting more throughout the vacation. However, school is going to start again on 12 this month, which means I’ll get bored as hell and start doing crazy stuff like trying to use Arachne as my main browser. And, of course, I’ll write all about it here. 
)
Get OS X Lion’s “natural” scrolling in Windows
Posted: August 5, 2011 Filed under: Windows | Tags: natural scrolling, windows 16 Comments »Long story short, download this, run it and you should be experiencing natural scrolling in its full glory.
If you like it, feel free to stick it in your Startup folder. If you don’t, feel free to press the Delete key. If you don’t feel like running some random .exe, get the AutoHotKey script from here and make your own.
You can also get this behaviour in Linux. Here’s a blog post on that.
P.S.: If you’re worried about my .exe gobbling up your precious system resources, you might want to know that it only eats up 272 kilobytes of RAM on my Vista machine.
The Powder Toy!
Posted: November 11, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: games, the powder toy, ubuntu, windows 2 Comments »What is “The Powder Toy”? Well, first take a look at this screenshot:
The Powder Toy is a physics simulation game. You can create a 2D scene using a variety of materials (walls, explosives, liquids, solids, semiconductors, etc.), set it alive and see how it evolves.
It’s available as a free download for Linux, Mac and Windows. The version in the screenshot above is 43 beta running on Ubuntu.
The last time I played Powder Toy was in sixth grade; I also translated the then-current Windows (not Linux) version into Romanian using a hex editor (xvi32). For any Romanians passing by, the translated (old) version can be downloaded from here.
Drifting off the topic of Powder Toy, I am now using Awn and a few Compiz plugins for window management, and eGtk Leopard plus the Faenza icon theme.
That’s it for now. Off to school. 
Cygwin SSH server on Vista
Posted: October 7, 2010 Filed under: Windows | Tags: cygwin, ssh, vista, windows Leave a comment »Today I turned on the Vista PC (a 2005ish Sony VAIO), encrypted all the files I left over there with TrueCrypt and tried to set up an SSH server. The result was, surprisingly, a success:
% uname -a Linux andy-hp 2.6.32-25-generic #44-Ubuntu SMP Fri Sep 17 20:26:08 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux % ssh Andy@192.168.2.3 Andy@192.168.2.3's password: Last login: Thu Oct 7 10:33:19 2010 from andy-hp Welcome to Cygwin! Andy@CandetPC ~ $ uname -a CYGWIN_NT-6.0 CandetPC 1.7.7(0.230/5/3) 2010-08-31 09:58 i686 Cygwin
Here you can see an SSH session from the Xubuntu laptop to the Vista PC, showcasing uname -a in its full glory.
The only gotcha I encountered was that I have to login with the username “Andy” and not “andy”. This post would be about a failure if I wouldn’t have discovered that.
Next up, turning an Asus Eee PC 701 into an Arch Linux server. And maybe also turning a 500MHz Celeron into a gaming console.
