Richard A. Johnson

Since I have gotten my new laptop I have quickly become annoyed that when I plug in my external USB wireless mouse my synaptics touchpad is still active. The touchpad is fine when I am not using an external mouse, but I can’t stand tapping it while I am typing. So yesterday while making some jokes towards Cody Somerville and Martin Meredith on writing a program to fix it, they said a quick script could take care of it in the mean time. So what I did is wrote an elaborate, super hacker, elite bash script that starts with X. So you want to see it? Well, I can show you that and not have to kill you afterwards! Here it is:

mousecount=`grep mouse /proc/bus/input/devices |grep Handler |wc -l`
if [ "$mousecount" -eq "1" ]
then
synclient TouchpadOff=0
else
if [ "$mousecount" -gt "1" ]
then
synclient TouchpadOff=1
fi
fi

What this does is executes the grep command and assigns the output to $mousecount. The first “if” statement tests to see if only 1 mouse is active, in my case it would be the touchpad and no external mouse, so it will insure it doesn’t get deactivated. If that doesn’t test out, the next “if” statement will see if it is equal to 2, meaning I have more than 1 mouse attached, the 2^nd being the external USB wireless mouse. If it sees 2 mice, then it will execute the “synclient TouchpadOff=1″ command disabling the synaptics touchpad.

Pretty easy I think. Now if someone can come up with an even better way of doing this, please keep me informed. My little script is rather hackish, but it does what I want it to. I would love to see an application do this automatically when I plug or unplug my external mouse. Any takers

This is just a temporary fix, as it seems there is no sendq in Konversation currently. If you were using Konversation, and were hanging out in #ubuntu on Freenode this evening, you will have noticed a couple of what I like to call e.tards decided to bring in bots and fire off a bunch of CTCP requests to users. Well, you X-Chat users and IRSSI users may not have noticed this (yes, even a better argument for me to go back to IRSSI), but people using Konversation, without some tweaks got killed by the server with an excess flood message.

No need to worry, you can continue using the great IRC client, Konversation, and continue doing so without getting those annoying CTCP requests. And is this an easy fix or what.

In Konversation, goto Settings -> Configure Konversation, and then click Ignore. This will open up the Ignore dialog. Click New, select CTCP in the checkbox below, and then for pattern type *. Click OK, and now enjoy your CTCP safety. Your setup should look similar to the image below. Click it for a larger view.

Well, this morning while messing with a massive set of concert series speakers, I hooked them up to the computer and decided to mess around with Google Video and YouTube and take a look at some drum solos. Crazy, insane, flat out stupid, are just some of the words the neighbors told me after deafening the neighborhood

Anyways, one thing I noted was that the audio was not synchronizing with the video at all with Firefox. I could tell if this was my computer or my eyeballs shaking with the insane amounts of SPLs my eyeballs were receiving. Well a quick search of the forums, and wallah, it’s fixed and working quite well. If you are experiencing this same issue, give this a try: (Make sure you have the Universe Repositories enabled)

sudo apt-get install alsa-oss

After that was installed, I issued the following command:

sudo sh -c "echo FIREFOX_DSP=aoss >> /etc/environment"

And everything works peachy. Now, because this worked for me, doesn’t necessarily mean it will work for you. My setup consists of the AC’97 sound system on board my Abit AT7 Max motherboard. I would recommend you check out the rest of the forum post, and see if there is anything else in there that will help you out. There are other tweaks the person who created that post displays, however, I only did the one shown above, and it worked for me. If this is going to mess something up, let me know before I kill my setup

NOTE: If this breaks your computer, I am not at fault, and either is the person who wrote the howto in the forums. I highly doubt any damage will occur, but if it does, don’t try and sue me, I am a student with no money! And if you have a massive set of speakers, Check out that 12 year old kid, or the Slipknot drum solo, and crank it up. Also note the guy with the buckets is very fast and Derek Roddy is super fast. Derek actually caused massive popping as the voice coils couldn’t respond quick enough at about 203843080243db