bobafred

There are some minor things that bother me with the default Firefox install on Ubuntu. An example of this is when you single-click in the address bar. Instead of selecting the whole URL, the cursor goes to the end of the line. I hate this. Had to be fixed.

Google led me to this post at Scatterism that provided the fix for this and a few other things. Be sure to check out comment #4 for the fix to using the Backspace button as Back in browsing history.

I had 19 episodes of Lost on my Tivo. 21, if you count the two recap episodes. The episodes stretched all the way back to the first half of the season up through the finale a few weeks ago. There were commercials for shows that had yet to debut and have since been canceled. And those for theatrical releases of movies that are already on DVD. It got to the point where I would record things that I actually wanted to watch and they would be gone in a day or two without me seeing them because the Tivo was just too full. Something had to be done.

So, I contacted Atlanta’s resident Lost expert, Seth about a month or so before the season finale. I asked if the second half of the season got better and if it was worth my time to try and catch up. He suggested that I either wait until the season was over and just watch them all over a weekend or wait until they come out on DVD and watch then. I chose option one.

I’m glad I kept them all. I don’t know if it was because I was watching four episodes at a time, but the second half of season 3 was very entertaining. It was so easy to get back into the story by not having to wait a week in between cliffhangers. And there were plenty of them to follow. Also, the finale was excellent. I’m really looking forward to next season now.

Thanks to Seth for his expert advice!

Since my move to Linux, I’ve had to explore new options for things I did in Windows. One such thing is uploading photos to flickr. Flickr recommends jUploadr on their tools page for cross-platform uploading, so I figured I’d give it a spin.

jUploadr is Java based, so you’ll need a runtime installed first. By default, the latest versions of Ubuntu come with GCJ installed, which is the GNU Compiler for Java. It seems that GCJ doesn’t fully support all that needs to be supported for jUploadr to work, though, so you have to do some work to get things prepared.

Here are the steps I took to get jUploadr up and running:

1. Install Sun Java: This was actually pretty easy thanks to the great documentation at the Ubuntu site. Follow the instructions for Installing Sun Java and you should be good.
2. Uninstall GCJ: This isn’t really necessary, but I like to keep things tidy. I used the Synaptic Package Manager to find and remove GCJ. This is nice because it also finds and removes other packages that rely on GCJ. Again, tidiness is good.
3. Download, uncompress and remember where you put jUploadr.
4. Lastly, I created a custom application launcher in the panel at the top of my desktop. Right-click on the panel > Add to Panel > Custom Application Launcher. Then just tell it where the jUploadr shell script lives and you’re good. Or, you can double-click on the script and select run. Or, you can run it from a terminal window. There are many options here.

Something to note is that if you try to uninstall GCJ before you have another JRE installed, Synaptic will also try to remove OpenOffice and any other applications that require Java support. Don’t do that.

jUploadr is pretty nice. You can set the title and description for a photo before you upload it, which you can’t do with the official flickr Windows uploader. Also, you can add tags for individual photos instead of for all of the photos that you are uploading. You can create sets and add photos to them, or just add photos to already existing sets. I haven’t really played with it enough to offer up more than that, but it’s nice and zippy, so I’ll keep it.

It should also be mentioned that jUploadr works with Zooomr, and may even be their official uploader. I think I read that somewhere.

Finally, there will probably be more posts like this as I find things that might be helpful for people trying to migrate to Linux.