About ten days ago, I released a couple of “Made on Ubuntu” badges to put on websites made in Ubuntu. Now I have decided to make some general “Made on Linux” buttons, and I’ve decided to rename the project “Made on Linux” - as that includes Ubuntu as well.

So far, these are the changes I have made:

• Added four more badges featuring Tux.
• Added some nice JavaScript effects to show and hide the sample code.
• Changed the text to reflect that this is now not only for Ubuntu.
• Changed the URL to blastfromthepast.se/linuxbadges
• Added a redirect so that people who visit the old URL get sent to the new one.

Things still to do:

• Add more badges for various distributions.
• Make it easier for people to just copy’n'paste a little code into their website and have the badges be displayed.

Be sure to visit the site now, and please email me if you’re planning on using any of the badges!

“Made on Linux”

In the Mac iLife suite there’s a web page builder application that many Mac users seem to be using to create their personal websites. Being that this is an evil Apple application, the program automatically slaps a badge saying “Made on a Mac” on the footer, as to advertise to the world that any moron can create a website with a Mac.

A member at Ubuntu forums had noticed this, and put forth the idea that Ubuntu users should get a similar badge to display on their websites - that is, if they made it on Ubuntu. I kind of liked the idea, even though it might be seen as slightly unfair to Linux users who are using other distributions -  but on the other hand, the only people who would click on such a badge are people who don’t already know what Ubuntu is. In other words, Mac or Windows users.

So I sat down and created some badges…

Fast forward a few hours, and not only had I made 4 awesome looking badges, but I had also created a pretty neat website to hold them all!

If you have created a website on Ubuntu, go get one of the badges!

If you are a programmer, designer, student, freelancer, or just really, really like stumbleupon, you know how important caffeine can be for you late at night. Well, your computer needs it too! When you’re busy playing a game or watching a movie, your computer has nothing to do, and might just fall asleep, unless you give it a little boost of extra energy.

Mac users have been able to do this for some time now, by using this little piece of software. But the only option for our poor Linux powered computers seems to have been never to fall asleep at all, or fall asleep while we’re busy watching Mel Gibson show off what’s under his kilt. That is until now!

Thanks to Brad Smith, there is now an application that tries to mimic the functionality of the Mac application Caffeine. If you didn’t quite what I was trying to say with the previous two paragraphs, here’s how it all works.

Installation

Go to this site, scroll down a bit to the “Installation Instructions” part, then just follow the directions given to you.

Usage

A coffee cup looking something like the image below will appear in your system tray (edit 2009-07-02: New icons. Fetch the newest version from launchpad).

If you click it, it’ll fill up with coffee, instantly giving your computer a boost of caffeine to keep it awake - disabling both the screensaver and sleep mode! Why is this useful? Well, some applications allow your screensaver to kick in even if you’re running a full screen application - for example when you’re playing a game or watching a movie. Of course you can go in and manually disable sleep mode and the screensaver, but that’s a lot of hassle for something that should be automatic. With caffeine, all you have to do is click the little applet.

It will now look something like this.

So… Why are you mentioning this?

Hehe, because I’m a narcissist, of course! Guess who made those icons? Yup. Yours truly. Note that the screenshots on the project home page are outdated, and that those are the old, not-so-pretty icons.

But that’s not the only reason. The other reason is that I like how this tiny program represents how you don’t have to be a master hacker and spend 4 years constantly working on a project to make a meaningful contribution to the community. All you need is a comfortable chair, some knowledge of a programming language (Caffeine for Linux is written in Python) and a few hours of  your time.

But before you rush off to install the latest and greatest contribution to the open source world, you might want to note that this is the very first release (0.1), so it still has some major issues, and really only works well if you’re running Gnome. The KDE support is still dodgy, and support for other DEs is still far away.

If you want to help with the project, I’m sure the author would be very grateful. Below you’ll find a link to the announcement of Caffeine for Linux 0.1.

Caffeine: Not Just for Beverages Anymore

Wordle.net is a free web service that creates word clouds from text that you input. Just like with the oh-so-trendy tag clouds, the size of the individual words change depending on the frequency of the word in the inputted text. There are also multiple configuration options for the alignment of the words, the font to use, and what color scheme to apply.

With the help of that service, I’ve created a Blast from the past themed wallpaper that I figured I’d share here in case anyone is interested. It’s made using a combination of Wordle, Gimp and Photoshop. It’s completely free, and it’s under the Creative Commons license, so you can do pretty much whatever you want with it.

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It’s no big secret that I absolutely love Bash. It’s such a simple, yet versatile tool. Ever since I first discovered the power contained within it, I’ve written plenty of scripts to automate tasks that would otherwise take me a long time to do manually. Sometimes I write scripts so that my little brother can do certain things that would otherwise require him to use relatively complex command-line tools. But what would be the point of replacing a command-line tool with another command-line tool?

Sometimes a graphical user interface is what’s needed - and that’s where Zenity comes into play!

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