I just upgraded my Firefox addon PlasmaNotify, so that it can be installed on Firefox 4 and 5. I committed the changes to Mozilla so that the Addon should upgrade itself within the next view days. I promise to be quicker on the next Firefox major releases!
Impatient users may download the addon in advance over here.
The addon itself is inteded for Linux and integrates the Firefox download notifications into the KDE Plasma notifications.
Yesterday, I wanted to install the recently released Service Pack 1 for Windows 7, because I run a Windows 7 in parallel to me beloved Linux, because I need it from times to times for my job. Unfortunally the installation failed shortly after the start dialogue with an unknown error message (error 0x800F0A12). This article tells you, how to fix it.
My HP Envy 14 has a great display that HP entitled radiance display. It features great brightness, brilliant color contrast and a reasonable resolution of 1600x900px for a 14″ display. Unfortunately, the display looks rather bluish. This post tells how to correct the colors with Linux.
In various blog comments, my visitors kept complaining about the Flash headlines. This has come to an end right now!
Den ganzen Beitrag lesen…
Yesterday evening, I added the first animation to the KWin dashboard effect: Saturation and brightness of the background do now change over a configurable time span when the dashboard appears. The smooth fade of the background adds some eye candy without being to obstrusive (hopefully).
I posted the according patch to the KDE review board. If everything works out fine, the patch will be in trunk for KDE SC 4.6 before code freeze.
For everyone that only knows my Twitter account @ademmer: I use to blog with the same account name on the free microblogging service Identi.ca, but here solely in English and only about Linux/KDE related topics. Follow me and end the mess of this account having only three followers until now!
Don’t be afraid having to install new software: Most Twitter-Clients can already deal with Identi.ca. KDE Users may use the excellent Choqok for example!
I just commit my work of the last weeks to KDE SVN trunk: The initial version of the dashboard effect plugin for KWin. This makes the plugin an official part of KDE SC 4.6 which will be released early in 2011. Yay! :) To celebrate this event, I opened myself an ice cold bottle of beer!
What are the next steps? Well, I will enhance the plugin during the next weeks: Implement animations and change the blur effect to resemble the logout effect: The logout effect blurs the screen edges more than the center of the screen which looks pretty nice.
If you would like to test the plugin in its early stage, grab KWin 4.5.60+ from SVN trunk and compile it yourself. If you like to play more on the safe side, just wait until your favorite distro provides beta or RC packages of KDE SC 4.6.
In my last posting, I mentioned that my notebook eats by far more battery when running Linux / KDE than running Windows 7. Even though I identified (and fixed) that this was due to the switchable graphics (both cards were running and sucking power), I was eager to optimize the power consumption. After some research, I came up with the following solution.
Because I travel a lot for my job, I looked for a portable alternative to my DELL XPS M2010. As nice as the huge display was – the 20″ machine was just unsuited as cabin bagge or for mobile usage. Not even to talk of some very special examinations during the security checks on airports.
After very thorough research, my choice fell upon the HP Envy 14, which offers in my opinion the best compromise between portability, power and design. I bought it right away on the release day.
Meanwhile, I have sent my patch of the dashboard effect plugin to the KDE review board. Aaron Seigo and Martin Gräßlin (both KDE core devs) have given me valuable remarks for enhancing my code. Additionally, they proposed changes in what my plugin should actually do: It should come with fancy animations, but skip the configuration options for brightness and contrast. The reason is, that users would most probably not understand why the optical configuration of a Plasma view cannot be done in the Plasma settings but window effect settings. I can fully agree to this.
I recently finished rewriting some parts of my code, so that I can start implementing the animations. Before that, I will – as soon as KDE 4.5 was branched and the trunk opens again for new stuff – commit the current state of my work to SVN. This enables KDE devs to compile my sources and follow my development efforts. It also raises the chances to find problems in time when more people are testing.
Stay tuned!
