Productivity

I use a Logitech Performance MX wireless mouse, on Ubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish), with Gnome 3.30.2 Ubuntu 20.04, with Gnome 3.36.2. This mouse uses regular 1.2V AA NiMH rechargeable battery1, which usually lasts 3 months on a single charge The problem is that Ubuntu’s power system tries to detect how much voltage is left, and either the voltage sensors or the calculation algorithm is completely broken, so it starts to show notifications 6-8 weeks before it really runs out. ...

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is finally out, and with it you now have Gnome out of the box. I’ve been using Gnome for several years, and have enjoyed its minimalism. It took me some time to make it work like I wanted (keyboard, extensions, application menu, etc), but I’m quite happy with everything. Or almost everything. One thing I enjoyed over the years was the ability to customize my keyboard shortcuts. I have dozens of shotcuts - to center windows on my screen, to open programs, start and stop Spotify, to run macros, to log in to my remote servers, and so on. ...

I’m currently working to add voice recognition to some of my embedded projects. The requirements are: Must be able to listen continuously Run on embedded ARM processors (particuarly Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone Black) Good accuracy on a limited set of words (English only) Decent performance, particularly on low-power CPUs My first thought was to use Google Speech API. The accuracy is great, and it’s reasonably fast. But it is also limited to only 50 calls per day, so it wouldn’t satisfy requirement #1. And I don’t like the idea of streaming all of my personal conversations to anyone. It’s already enough to have NSA listening to my phone calls… ...

[](http://xkcd.com/979/) (note: this post was updated in May 2020 to reflect it works with Ubuntu 20.04 and Gnome 3.36.1. It has also been tested with Ubuntu 18.04 and Gnome 3.28.1. Original title “Using .XCompose with Chrome and Sublime Text”) If you use US International keyboard on Linux (e.g., if you write in Spanish or Brazilian Portuguese), you know the royal pain of having to press space after the compose character (typically '). Contractions like can’t, won’t, Mary’s, etc are a struggle, as you have to press space after ', otherwise you’ll get canť, wonť, Maryś, etc. ...

Google Now is finally available for iOS since earlier this week. But for those using Google Apps for Business will receive an annoying “your administrator hasn’t enabled Google Now for your domain”. Fear not, the solution is easy. You just have to enable Google Now, which is buried under Setting / Mobile / Android Setting / Enable Google Now. For detailed instructions, check Scott Hanselman’s tutorial, which has fancy pictures and all the details. ...

FileZilla is great, but the default configuration is to save all configuration files & sites to local folders. Here’s an elegant solution to change the default directory. Just copy fzdefaults.xml.example from [FileZilla's install dir]/docs and place it in: Linux/BSD: ~/.filezilla Mac OSX: Contents/SharedSupport/ Windows: put in same directory as filezilla.exe Alternatively you can also point to a shared folder on Dropbox, and share your config and sites across multiple computers. Just make sure you have a strong password on Dropbox, for obvious reasons. ...

I migrated to Sublime Text 2 a while ago, and not looking back. It’s by far the best editor I’ve ever used. Its packaging system is simple and efficient. But one thing that annoys me is the lack of synchronization across different computers. Not anymore. The solution is rather simple. You can just move three directories – Packages, Installed Packages, Pristine Packages – to your Dropbox, create a symbolic link for each directory (ln on Linux/OSX, mklink /d on Windows), and your packages will always be perfectly in sync across multiple computers - even using different platforms. ...