Category Archives: Administrative

Linux Twitter Clients

I’ve been having pretty bad luck finding one that works for multiple accounts. I installed Choqok a few days ago, and was pretty happy with it until it broke today. When I launch it, it immediately sucks up about half the CPU, but doesn’t actually start, and leaves a pretty picture in the middle of the screen, independent of what application I’m using. I have to kill it to shut it down. Googling around, I’ve found this to be an issue if you have a lot of unread tweets, but since I can’t functionally start it, there’s no way to read them and fix it.

So then I tried Qwit, which installed fine, and went to Twitter to authenticate my three accounts, and said they’d been approved. The only problem with it is that it doesn’t either display or send tweets for any of them. Other than that, it’s awesome.

I’ve also tried Gwibber, which runs fine, except when I go to the Edit/Accounts menu, it does nothing.

So I’m back to using two different browsers (Firefox and Midori) for two of my accounts, and not doing anything with the third one (which is my book account). I’d like to solve this before the book is available, though, which is likely to be next week.

[Thursday-morning update]

OK, the solution I’ve found that seems to be working pretty well is the Tweetdeck app for Google Chrome. There may be one for Firefox, too, but I’ll stick with Chrome as long as it doesn’t act up.

[Bumped]

Light And Scattered Posting

I have a niece and nephew visiting from Michigan. We went out whale watching today from Dana Point (saw at least two blue whales and a mother and calf fin whale, and hundreds of common long-nose dolphin). Then Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach. Tomorrow, it’s California Adventure in Anaheim (where I’ve never been).

[Tuesday-morning update]

It was a long day, but we had a good time. Advice in the comments about getting there early for the Cars Racers is right — they were sold out of Fast Pass, and the wait was in the two-hour range for the bulk of the day. But we saw everything else (that we wanted to Bugs — the insects, not the Bunny, which is a different cartoon franchise– World was worth a miss unless you had little kids), and toward the end of the day, we went in the singles line, and only waited twenty-five minutes. Since the car seating is three and three, it’s not that big a deal to split up the party anyway, and it actually gave the kids an opportunity to race each other instead of being in the same car.

My overall verdict: like an alternate-universe Disneyland, with more California flavor (the restaurant we ate at had vineyards leading up to it), and with more modern, as opposed to classic characters. Disneyland has Cinderella’s Castle, CA has the Mermaid. Disneyland has Thunder Mountain, CA has Grizzly Rapids. Disneyland has Frontierland and Tom Sawyer’s Island, CA has the Redwood hiking/rope trail. I’m not a roller coaster connoisseur, but California Screamin’ seemed to pull some good gees, particularly backward at the launch. And I have to say that the World of Color light/water/flaming-gas-jets show was pretty spectacular. I was impressed by the power of the pumps that could generate eighty feet of head, and the precision and control over the valves. I’d never seen lasers painting on mist before. No one, including Disney, could have done this twenty years ago, I think, without modern computer technology. And we got a bonus of watching the early fireworks display across the way at Disneyland. So definitely worth a do once.

Data Disaster

OK, it’s not a total data disaster, but basically, it potentially means the loss of almost all my outgoing email for the past three years or so.

When I migrated to Fedora 19 over the weekend, I did it on a new disk, retaining the old installation on the old one. After I did so, I copied my old files over to the new disk from it. Unfortunately, rather than doing it from the shell with a ‘cp -r *’ I just used the GUI tool to drag’n’drop. Which means that I didn’t get the hidden files. Which contain all of my Thunderbird folders. I still have all incoming mail, because I’m using IMAP, but the outgoing was in those folders.

It shouldn’t have been a problem, but when I went back to grab the rest, I’m getting an error message that the drive can’t be mounted, and warnings that the drive is failing. Is the data still recoverable? And if so, by me, or do I have to take it to a specialist?

XFCE

Is there a doctor in the house? I decided to just go to Fedora 19 beta, since it’s going to be released in a few days anyway. It’s fine so far, except I’m running XFCE, and it refuses to give me a monitor size any larger than 1280×1040, so I’m losing about an inch on all sides with my 21″ LG.

I’ve changed the configuration in the settings editor to 1600×900, and the same in the display.xml file. But when I log out and back in again, it resets them to 1280×1040. I can’t find where in the system it’s getting this information, despite lots of grepping (is it misreading the signal from the monitor?), but it’s driving me nuts. And there doesn’t seem to be a configuration file for X any more.

Any ideas?

[Update a couple minutes later]

OK, it’s probably getting it from xrandr:

[simberg@linux-station ~]$ xrandr
xrandr: Failed to get size of gamma for output default
Screen 0: minimum 640 x 480, current 1280 x 1024, maximum 1280 x 1024
default connected 1280×1024+0+0 0mm x 0mm
1280×1024 0.0*
1280×720 0.0
1024×768 0.0
800×600 0.0
640×480 0.0

So how do I force a change?

[Late evening update]

Yes, the problem is likely some driver or new version of X or something inf F19 foxtrotting things up, because Fedora 18 recognized my monitor no problem. Just not sure what to do about it.

[Sunday morning update]

OK, I installed the latest Nvidia drivers from RPMFusion, and all is now well. It’s a beautiful screen, in fact.

My Computer Problems Are Mounting

Literally.

I just bought a new drive to upgrade from Fedora 14 to 18. So I load the new OS onto the new drive, which is drive 1, and keep my old installation as drive 2, figuring I can then just move the old data off it onto the new one. The problem is, it won’t let me. I can see the drive in the Gnome file browser, but my home directory has an “X” on it, and when I click on it, it tells me I don’t have permission to view it. I tried mounting it as root in the shell, and I’m not seeing anything on it that way. I know it’s all fine, because I can still boot from it and go back to the old system, but I can’t figure out how to access it from the new one.

Anyone have any suggestions?