NFS Shares

Modifying both mine and my wife's ubuntu Desktop machines (both running 9.04 at the time of this writing) to mount our music folder (on the MythTV box on the lounge room) locally.

The music is on the media box (called mythty) in the lounge room, at /media/ourmusic

Using NFS, to mount manually it's:

sudo mount mythty:/media/ourmusic /media/ourmusic

(That's servername:serverpath localpath)

Edited /etc/fstab to add:

mythty:/media/ourmusic /media/ourmusic nfs rw rsize=8192,wsize=8192

Using True Type Fonts with Ubuntu

My wife does a fair bit of crafty stuff, and often finds weird and wonderful fonts to use with her creations. Often they're Windows TTF font files, which aren't linux native.

I simply get her to copy the fonts into a particular directory, and then run the following script.

sudo cp *.ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/username/
sudo cp *.TTF /usr/share/fonts/truetype/username/
mv *.ttf /home/username/Fonts/installed/
mv *.TTF /home/username/Fonts/installed/
sudo fc-cache -f -v

You can get all the bacground and other information you'll need in this article on the Ubuntu Wiki, which is where I got a lot of the info for this post.

It simply copies the files into a folder I created to hold installed TTF fonts, (/usr/share/fonts/truetype/username/) which will work for everyone, and then move the filed from the "todo" folder into a backup folder for reference. ( /home/username/Fonts/installed/ )

You'll have to restart any apps (Such as open office) to see the new fonts, but there's no need to log out or reboot.

Note, I commented on this issue a while back, here's the previous post.

Ubiquity

I've been playing around with Mozilla labs ubiquity plug in in recent weeks. It's still in beta, and far from fully featured, but even so it's quite impressive.

Tonight I was reading comments on a boing boing post where a few of the commenters had used ROT13 to obscure spoilers. There are plenty of good sites to do the conversion for you (I'm too old/lazy to do that sort of thing in my head these days) but I thought to myself that this would be a perfect for for a ubiquity command.

I know the world isn't really crying out for a ROT13 utility, but I thought it would be a good way for me to test the waters in writing some browser code. My javascript-fu is far from strong, but it was surprisingly easy. I spent far more time futzing about with publishing it than I did writing the code itself.

You can check out my notes here. Even if you've no interest in my almost embarrassingly trivial utility, check out ubiquity for it's own sake. If you're a power web-user, you won't regret it.