beardy's blog

Month: October 2010

  • Fixing missing menu entries of Opera and Skype in Debian GNU/Linux

    Unfortunately the third-party packages of Opera and Skype do not contain menu entries for the Debian menu system. Not very surprisingly one might think, but I just think it’s sloppy. If you, like me, like the Debian menu system and want Opera and Skype available in it, do the following to solve that, until the packagers have included the menu entry files themselves:

    (Update: I noticed that Opera has apparently had a menu entry in its package before, but has now removed it. It’s explained in this post, but I still think that was a bad choice.)
    (more…)

  • Modems & Bulletin Boards, The Computer Chronicles

    This Sunday’s video (I will from now on try to post atleast one video from this series, or another, each Sunday (even though it technically is Monday in this part of the world)) is about modems and bulletin boards (BBS:es). I also have to recommend the movie/series “BBS: The Documentary” which is very interesting and well made.

    From high-tech trysts to selling black-market software, computers users are talking.

    Guests: Ezra Shapiro, Byte Magazine; Rory O’Connor, InforWorld; Matthew McClure, The Well; Donald Ingrim, Alameda County DA; George Morrow, Morrow Computing

    Products/Demos: CompuServe, Byte BBS, The Well

    Let’s hear your thoughts and comments after watching the video, enjoy.

    Related posts:

  • 3 WordPress plugins

    Advanced Permalinks dashboard screenshot
    Advanced Permalinks dashboard screenshot

    Yesterday I decided to change the permalinks structure of this site. I wondered if WordPress had redirection built into to the core, but it seems it does not yet. But there are many plugins, like always, providing the needed functionlity. At first I looked at one called Redirection, but it was not really what I was after. If seems to do most things one could want regarding redirects and 404 logging, but I only wanted to simply redirect my old “YYYY/MM/DD/postname” structure to “/postname”. I then tried another plugin called Advanced Permalinks, which does exactly what I wanted. After installing it, its options/functionality is found under Settings->Permalinks->Migration in the WordPress administration dashboard.

    This allows you to move from one permalink structure to another one, and have the old structure be forwarded to the new, for each post. I used the “/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/” structure before, but I switched to the “/%postname%/” structure. Now, with the Advanced Permalinks plugin my possible old links in to my articles are forwarded properly.

    The second plugin I installed and tried yesterday was Optimize DB, a simple plugin that just does what the name says, optimizes the MySQL database with one click. Seems to do its work well too. For my little site it wasn’t that much to optimize, but a few kilobytes atleast.

    The third plugin I installed, and which you can see the effects of in this post, is Lightbox Plus, which handles the viewing of images fullsize in an overlay frame using javascript, instead of opening the image directly. Click on the image in this post and see.

    Are you using any of these plugins and have anything to add? leave a comment.