Talia Carbis

Twitter Addict

Some of you might know that I’m a twitter addict. So when I was reading Andrea’s blog and found this post, I thought I would give it a whirl!

This is my tweetcloud. It shows all the things I tweet about. Obviously I am a bit obsessed with myself and my blog posts (it’s not entirely my fault, it automaticaly tweets when I have a new post!!), but you get that.

If you’re in twitter, then add me as a friend! I’m Sunshinetalia.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall…

My computer is currently set up on my dressing table. That means that a HUGE big mirror is behind it. I’ve come to use this mirror not just for checking my beauty inbetween blogging and browsing, but also for putting those pesky USBs back into their places.

Unfortunately my computer is old, and uses old USB, so  I can’t get much to work on those multi-USB things you put in. But with the mirror behind the computer, and the tower sitting on an angle, it is easy peasy to see where the USB goes without having to move the actual computer. In fact, I don’t even have to move me!

So there’s a tip. If you’re plugging things into the back of your computer, put your set-up in front of a mirror, it’ll make like easier!

Adobe Plug-in

For ages now I haven’t had the Adobe plug-in for Firefox installed. It’s popped up (as it does) numerous times to ask me if I’d like to install it, but as I go through the process, it doesn’t work.

Since Wordpress.com has decided to show it’s blog stats with adobe now, I thought it was time to try it another way. The manual install. I guess this is a ‘how to manually install adobe plug in in firefox’ post. I guess I should have named it that…

I go the package from the adobe site, and downloaded the .tar.gz file.

Once it was downloaded, I opened it in archive manager, and extracted the files. I extracted them into my home folder, as this is the easiest place to access from the terminal.

In the terminal I typed:

:~$ ls
Desktop    firefox                Flock Blog Posts              Pictures
Documents  Firefox_wallpaper.png  gtwitter.exe                  thunderbird
Examples   flock                  install_flash_player_9_linux
:~$ cd install_flash_player_9_linux
:~/install_flash_player_9_linux$ ./flashplayer-installer

Copyright(C) 2002-2006 Adobe Macromedia Software LLC.  All rights reserved.

Adobe Flash Player 9 for Linux

Adobe Flash Player 9 will be installed on this machine.

You are running the Adobe Flash Player installer as a non-root user.
Adobe Flash Player 9 will be installed in your home directory.

Support is available at http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/

To install Adobe Flash Player 9 now, press ENTER.

To cancel the installation at any time, press Control-C.

I pressed enter, and basically just said ‘yes’ or the equivalent, any time it asked me for the remainder of the installation.

DON’T have firefox open while you do this. If you do have it open, then close it when it prompts you later in the installation.

Now it will be installed, and all you have to do is open mozilla and check! I went to this site to check it out.

Installing Ubuntu

I’ve just installed Ubuntu again on an old tower Luke and I brought back from Melbourne that his Aunty Carol, and Uncle Greg use to own.

I thought I would document what I’ve had to do to it after installation to get it looking and doing what I want.

1. Changing Firefox’s icons.

I don’t know if it’s just because I installed using an older Ubuntu disc, or if that’s just the way it is, but I like the regular Firefox icons. This forum helped me heaps. I used the information AFTER the red writing.

My terminal looked like this:

talia@Talia:~$ sudo gedit /usr/local/bin/restore_mozilla_icons
Password:
talia@Talia:~$ sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/restore_mozilla_icons
talia@Talia:~$ sudo restore_mozilla_icons
Replace the Mozilla Firefox program icon (y/n)? [y] y
Replace the Mozilla Firefox document icon (y/n)? [y] y

Do you want to divert the original packaged files to alternate locations
(make the changes permanent) (y/n)? [y] y

Downloading and replacing icons. Please wait….. done !

Shall I reload the panel to apply the changes (y/n)? [y] y
talia@Talia:~$

2. Thunderbird.

I also had to install Thunderbird, as it didn’t come with Ubuntu. I just downloaded it off the mozilla website, then opened it with archive manager and extracted the contents into my home folder.Then I clicked on ‘thunderbird’, one of the last things in the folder. I clicked run, and it ran for me. Sweet. I then dragged it into the panel at the top, and wolah, it was there, easy to use!

Unfortunately there aren’t the right icons for it, and I am still figuring that one out…

I’m a little disappointed with how Thunderbird is working for me at the moment, and so I am trying something a bit different. I’m just going to access me gmail (which lets me access all my gmail accounts from the one main one, and all my RSS is google reader. I’ll write another post about that one soon.

3. Shared Folders in Ubuntu.

This is something that I’ve only just discovered this time round with Ubuntu, and just wondered why it didn’t work on my old computer.

System-> Administration -> Shared Folders

A box comes up and I chose to share it with Linux/ Windows systems, because the other computers in the house are windows. It downloads the packages and installs it by itself.
I selected add, and then chose the file that I wanted to share, named it, and wolah, it’s shared. I made a point of adding my desktop as a shared folder as well because often I just quickly put things on there to access easily and imediately.

4. Keyboard Shortcuts.

System -> Preferences -> Keyboard Shortcuts. I changed the shortcut for closing a window to a simple Alt+q. I know that I really should have changed it to Ctrl+q, but on Luke’s apple the apple button is where the alt key is on my keyboard, and it’s easier for me to keep them both the same.

Again, this is something that frustrated me on my old computer, but with a bit of digging around, I’ve managed to change that this time round!

5. One Click Select.

Luke introduced me to the one click select, and I quite like it. Once I tried it it really just made sense to only click once instead of twice. To get this happening I opened a window, just one with some files or whatever in it. Folder -> Edit -> Behaviour -> Single Click to Activate Items.

It’s that easy.

If I can suggest a tip for those who are trying this out for the first time, HIGHLIGHTING is the option if you just want to select something, but you don’t want to open it.
6. Changing Open Office.

At the moment I’m trying to print out my assignment, but as you may have figured, I haven’t set up the printer yet. So I’m having to save my documents onto a USB (still got yours Luke!) and take them out to another computer and print there. I did this just now, and none of my files would open- they were all saved as Open Office files!

It’s really easy to change this so that every time you save, it saves as .doc .

Open Open Office -> Tools -> Options -> Load/Save (you will need to press the little + button to open it) -> General

Now go down to ‘default file format’ and where it says, ‘always save as’ select the most recent Microsoft Word option. Done.

To change the file extension of what documents you’ve already worked on, just right click and select rename, then arrow over to the file extension, delete . odt, and replace it with .doc .

Gmail

I am loving my decision to move to Gmail, particularly now that they’ve got a bunch of new things out. 20MBs of attachment size, and lots of things that were around before, like updating conversations (email histories), and gmail on your mobile.

Two new things that I really like, and that have made my night, is not only the ability to have multiple gmail accounts accessible from the one default log-in, but now also OTHER email addresses! I have added me Uni email, s0079405 (@) student.cqu.edu.au, and also my old hotmail account.

Being able to have multiple accounts was one of the reasons that I used Thunderbird before, only I could never get the hotmail or webmail to work. Now I don’t need to worry because it’s all there on my main email, 87purple.elephants (@) gmail.com.

One of the other things that I like is being able to press ‘forward all’, and forward all the messages in a conversation, not just the first one. Similar to ‘reply all’ which is something else I’ve only just discovered and LOVE.

One of the things that I love about Google is that it all fits together so nicely! From Google Docs, or Picassa, to Blogger, to Gmail, and all the rest in between, it just works.