keyword shortcuts in chrome

The following works by typing a keyword into the address bar (omnibar) and pressing enter to jump to a specific url. In Google's Chrome (as of version 59.0), this isn't available through the bookmark manager like it is in Firefox, but you can easily use the Search Engine Shortcuts feature in Chrome to work the same way.

How to create a keyword shortcut in Chrome

1. Right click the address bar (omnibar)
2. Select edit search engines...
3. Click on 'ADD' - which appears after the default search engines section
4. In the dialog that pops up:

• in the search-engine field - name your bookmark
• in the keyword field - enter your keyword shortcut string (what you will need to type in the omnibar to quickly jump to this 'bookmark'
• In URL field - type in the url you want to associate with the keyword

Placeholder for additional text

The url can contain a special placeholder: '%s' (without the quotes) that will serve as a placeholder for additional text that you can enter if you press tab after typing the keyword shortcut.

For example, I use a keyword shortcut that jumps to list of bookmarks on https://pinboard.com by given tag. For that:

• I use 'pint' (without quotes) as keyword,
• and https://pinboard.in/u:jaysen/t:%s/ as url.

Then to access all my bookmarks on pinboard that is tagged with 'todo' as example

• I type 'pint' in omnibar,
• press TAB
• type the tag I want to visit - in this example 'todo'
• and ENTER This takes me to https://pinboard.in/u:jaysen/t:todo/

Getting WikidPad running on Mac OS-X El Capitan

WikidPad, the excellent personal wiki tool and my knowledge-base of choice hasn't been working on my mac ever since my fresh install of El-Capitan, some time ago. There was some issue with the package installer for wxPython not running on El-Capitan, and just too much real work demanding my attention ... 

So I made do with the version on my Ubuntu desktop, and by accessing the sync'd plain text wiki files directly from my text editor - Sublime Text - on my mac. Good enough to survive with - but just barely so.

Today I decided that the time had come to end the pain, and so here is a brief log of the fix - to help anyone else that needs this, including quite possibly my future-self.

Instructions:

To start off with I chose to use an older version 2.8 of wxPython, because of numerous reports I'd seen on the WikidPad forums of errors while running under wxPython3

And as always, I use the latest release of Wikidpad - in this case version 2.3beta13_01.

1) Download wxPython from https://sourceforge.net/projects/wxpython/files/wxPython/2.8.12.0/ 

- I used wxPython2.8-osx-unicode-2.8.12.0-universal-py2.7.dmg

2) Change security on your mac to installs from all developers. You get a weird message saying that the package doesn't exist if you don't. 

3) The wxPython installer package now runs a little further before failing with another weird error to the same effect: 

The Installer could not install the software because there was no software found to install.

This apparently happens because wxPython is using a legacy script, and the bundled installers were deprecated and are (as of El Capitan release) unsupported. 

The solution was found on the following stack-overflow page: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/34402303/install-wxpython-in-osx-10-11

I'll repeat the instructions here. Use the name of your wxPython file in place of wxPython-ABC below (for the file we chose above replace wxPython-ABC with wxPython2.8-osx-unicode-2.8.12.0-universal-py2.7)

3.0) Let's assume that you have already mounted the dmg and you have moved the pkg folder to a working folder ~/repack_wxpython.

cd ~/repack_wxpython
cp -r /Volumes/wxPython/wxPython-ABC.pkg .

3.1) Use the pax utility to extract the payload file (pax.gz) from Contents/Resources to a folder that will become the root of your new package.

mkdir pkg_root
cd pkg_root
pax -f ../wxPython-ABC.pkg/Contents/Resources/wxPython-ABC.pax.gz -z -r
cd ..

3.2) Rename the bundle's preflight/postflight scripts, to preinstall/postinstall scripts, as required for flat packages, in a scripts folder.

mkdir scripts
cp wxPython-ABC.pkg/Contents/Resources/preflight scripts/preinstall
cp wxPython-ABC.pkg/Contents/Resources/postflight scripts/postinstall

3.3) Create the flat package using the pkgbuild tool:

pkgbuild --root ./pkg_root --scripts ./scripts --identifier com.wxwidgets.wxpython wxPython-ABC-output.pkg

4) Once that is complete, install wxPython from the new output package. If you use the version I did, that will be wxPython2.8-osx-unicode-universal-py2.7-output.pkg. Finally, wxPython should install!

5) Now, download WikidPad source from http://wikidpad.sourceforge.net/. The direct link for the version I used is http://downloads.sourceforge.net/wikidpad/WikidPad-2.3beta13_01-src.zip

6) Run WikidPad from source:

cd to directory where you unzipped the source - in my case:

cd ~/apps/wikidpad/WikidPad23 

then launch WikidPad with the following:

arch -i386 python2.7 WikidPad.py 

7) At this stage I got a python error from wxPython:

File "/usr/local/lib/wxPython-unicode-2.8.12.0/lib/python2.7/site-packages/wx-2.8-mac-unicode/wx/_core.py", line 3917, in Bind

    assert callable(handler)

AssertionError

8) Instead of tracking this down properly, I used a temporary fix by commenting out the assert: 

- open "/usr/local/lib/wxPython-unicode-2.8.12.0/lib/python2.7/site-packages/wx-2.8-mac-unicode/wx/_core.py", line 3917

- comment out line 3917

  assert callable(handler) 

9) Wikidpad opens and runs! .. but will only work on wikis using the Gadfly db - No SQLite wikis run. I saw the following error when trying to open my wiki:

ERROR: required data handler "original_sqlite" unknown to WikidPad

10) To fix this, I had to use homebrew to install sqlite3 with universal support:

brew install sqlite3 --universal

11) Then soft link the sqlite3 dynamic library into the WikidPad source folder

cd ~/apps/wikidpad/WikidPad23/

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libsqlite3.dylib libsqlite3.0.dylib

12) Try running again from source ....

cd ~/apps/wikidpad/WikidPad23

arch -i386 python2.7 WikidPad.py

... and WikidPad should launch fine now.

cinnamon 2.0.12 on ubuntu 13.10

Having in the past few days heard loads of praise of the Cinnamon 2 Linux desktop environment, from both friends and strangers, and now that installing Cinnamon 2 on Ubuntu no longer breaks Unity, I've decided to try it out on my primary Ubuntu desktop.

So, using the method below, I've started testing. A review of some sort should follow...

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gwendal-lebihan-dev/cinnamon-stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cinnamon

UPDATE (several hours later):

So far, I'm happy enough with Cinnamon-2.0. It seems to run with a smaller footprint, more stability and more functionality and configuration options than you get with the latest Unity and Gnome-Shell.

I did get a few random lock-ups during early reckless tweaking, but I've seen no recurrences since I stopped messing around with extensions, desklets and applets (some of them still only properly tested with earlier versions of Cinnamon).

Now, after several hours of work, the impression I'm left with is all positive.

In terms of workflow, I did find myself missing a few features of Unity's Dash and HUD, but the old desktop metaphors still seem to work better for me overall. And though this might have more to do with my long term familiarity with those, I also think it has something to do with a general lack of maturity in the newer approaches to the desktop environment being worked on.

Its still early days, but if nothing major shows up, I could very easily stick with Cinnamon as the desktop option I choose most often at login - at least until the others grow up a bit.

NEXT UPDATE (... in the morning)

I think I'm changing my mind .. The new day has found me missing Unity's simplicity and that task orientated Dash and HUD..  Ah well, I'll decide later, but just now I felt crowded and in my own way - I'm writing this after logging back into Unity ... maybe for a long while...



LATEST UPDATE (... two weeks later)

I've settled in to using and liking them both - with Unity ahead in the number of times it gets chosen at login.

fedora 17 .. todo list post install

So, a few days ago, I installed Fedora17, partly because I wanted a straight gnome-shell experience, and partly because I hadn't seriously tried a rpm based distro yet. The short of it is, that I'm really enjoying the standard gnome-shell environment - especially how customisable it is compared to Unity. So much so, that I think I'll be working off this linux partition for a while to come.

That said, Fedora did take significantly longer to get the everything installed than either Ubuntu or Mint does, mainly because it does not come standard with any non GPL'd software in it's default repository - but with a fair amount of googling, all was eventually sorted.

Now, only after all of the searching and tweaking, and more searching and installing was done, have I come across a good, comprehensive how-to that would have saved me loads of time if I had only stumbled on to it earlier.

Smashing Web's Fedora 17 Post Installation guide covers just about everything you would want to add to a fresh Fedora install. Here's a list (not complete) of the packages I've used from there:

Appearance and customisation:
yum install faenza-icon-theme
yum install gnome-tweak-toolyum install dconf-editor

installed some of the gnome-extensions listed there (will list these later.. possibly)

a better software installer:
yum install yumex

to enable the RPM Fusion repository just install (this allows you to get at some of the packages below)
yum localinstall --nogpgcheck http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

add the adobe repository for downloading Acrobat Reader, by running this at the terminal
## Adobe Repository 32-bit x86 ## rpm -ivh http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux ## Adobe Repository 64-bit x86_64 ## rpm -ivh http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-x86_64-1.0-1.noarch.rpm rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux

yum install flash-plugin nspluginwrapper alsa-plugins-pulseaudio libcurl

to play various Video formats:
yum install gstreamer gstreamer-plugins-good gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly
yum install ffmpeg ffmpeg-libs

dvd playback / ripping / players

yum install libdvdread libdvdnav lsdvd
rpm -Uvh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release.rpm
yum install libdvdcss
yum install vlc
yum install mplayer mplayer-gui smplayer gnome-mplayer

and my music player of choice:
yum install clementine

BitTorrent client and IM client:
yum install transmission
yum install pidgin

Tools:
yum install nautilus-open-terminal
yum install p7zip p7zip-plugins
yum install filezilla

IDE's:
yum install netbeans (no longer in repo - see below)
yum install eclipse
yum install spe
yum install geany
yum install cssed
yum install anjuta

....
To run yum you need to be in a terminal with root privileges.
just type:
su -
at a terminal, then enter your root password, and then paste in the yum install commands and wait for the installs to finish.

I found two commands that would not work from the howto. One was "yum install netbeans" - its been removed from the repo because it is no longer GPL compliant. Instead follow the instructions to install it here: http://www.matthewhughes.co.uk/netbeans-on-fedora-17/
The other was "yum install gnochm" - instead use:
yum install chmsee

installing AVG free anti-virus in ubuntu

you dont really need this in ubuntu, but its useful if you run windows as well, or if you want to test downloaded files for windows' viruses.

just copy-paste the commands in this ubuntuforum article into your terminal. Remember to change the .deb filename to that of the more recent version you downloaded.

a basic delicious hack

a quicksearch shortcut to get to your del.icio.us tags:

1. In the firefox bookmark menu, choose Organise Bookmarks..
2. in the Bookmark Manager, click on 'New Bookmark'
3. name it something like delicious quicksearch
3. Enter http://del.icio.us/jaysen/%s in the location field (replacing jaysen with your delicious username),
4. Enter d in the keyword field.

Now, typing d tag1 in firefox's address bar will take you to your delicious pages tagged with tag1, and d tag1+tag2+tag3 will take you to your pages tagged with all of tag1, tag2, and tag3.

simple, i know, but i haven't seen it on any delicious-tool-list sites, and i use it a lot, so thought it was worth mentioning.