Occasional Thoughts

Do you have a Notebook running Linux?

Do you frequently use it in different network environments with different proxy configurations?

Are you sick of frequently reconfiguring all the applications that have their own proxy settings like the web browser, the Java IDE, the desktop and the applications that uses its settings, the other desktop environment that uses other settings... and so on?

If your answer to these questions is yes, yes and yes then read on. The solution I present here allows you to configure proxy settings in any of your applications just once and will even change the proxy settings automatically as soon as you connect your laptop to a network.

There are already some documented methods on how to access your Google Calendar with KOrganizer.

In case you really want to have a (almost fully working) 2 way sync, you may check out the solution using the GCALDaemon that is described here. The GCalDaemon is a server that runs locally on your system that serves as a kind of proxy to Google Calendar. However it's major drawback is that it is written in Java. Thus you need to have a JVM running all the time just to be able to access the server. Well, I don't want to waste these resources on my Laptop.

Another possibility is to simply access the ICal address using a remote calendar directly. Well, this has the drawback that you can just access the calendar read-only. But for me a read-only access is OK. Google Calendar provides a nice web UI to enter events so I am fine with that restriction. I am more interested in getting Reminders for my events as I tend to forget the time while I am working.

But both solutions mentioned above have a major drawback: They only work while you are connected to the Internet. There are so many occassions, when I just wanted to check my calendar when I don't have an internet access like on the hallway when I just would like to see where the next meeting is located. So for me it's more important to have a calendar synchronization that syncs with offline data. But the solution is simple and may work not only with just KOrganizer, but with every application that works with ICS files. So here it is:

Choqok KDE Twitter Client

So I tried the KDE Twitter plasmoid. But Twitter is really not so important to have it on the desktop all the time. In addition KDE Twitter provides basic Twitter access only. There is no possibility to access other services like identi.ca or an integrated access to twitpic. I wanted a Twitter client that is not restricted to just Twitter, but lives in the system tray, is running unobtrusivly in the background, but always there at a keyboard press to publish a thought.

As a Linux user the search was over pretty quickly: You have a problem, you google an Application to solve this problem and a nice soul has already the answer for you. Then an apt-get install and you're happy.

In case of Twitter my solution is Choqok.

Update: In case you do not get updates anymore upgrade to Choqok 0.6.1.

Just tried to upgrade to Kubuntu Jaunty from Intrepid and recognized that my 3 years old notebook is too old to be worth for ATI to be supported.

Jaunty comes with a new XServer and needs the FGLRX 9.4 drivers from ATI. However ATI stopped support for several older cards as discussed in the Ubuntu Forums. There are even some never cards affected, so in case you wish to upgrade, first make sure that FGLRX 9.4 supports your chipset.

Unfortunately the Open Source radeon driver is - in my case - way too instable to work with. I had complete X server crashes after just a couple of minutes each time I've booted.