I’ve been using Synapse for a few months now. This software is invaluable to my experience on my PC because: # I can *quickly* do what I want to do without fighting with a big, hierarchaial menu # It doesn’t require any huge dependencies (I use XFCE, so I don’t want something that requires Gnome or KDE libraries)
Unfortunately, the documentation is non-existant. So when I wanted to be able to configure Synapse to execute a custom command when I typed a custom keyword, it took me a while to figure it out.
This post explains how to define custom commands in Synapse to execute custom commands in your terminal. For example, I’ll show how to make “Google Drive” open a firefox window to https://drive.google.com
Michael Altfield
Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡
I recently reformatted my hard drive–switching from pure Gentoo to the Sabayon fork. Sabayon did for Gentoo what Ubuntu did for Debian. It’s generally a lot easier to use, but–unlike Ubuntu–it doesn’t sacrifice functionality for ease-of-use.
Michael Altfield
Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡
In Ubuntu–and most gnome-based linux distributions, for that matter–the default PDF viewer is Evince Document Viewer. However, a much better alternative PDF viewer exists: xpdf
In my experience, xpdf uses only about 5% as much RAM as evince!
Michael Altfield
Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡
You must be 18 years or older to read this post. NOT SAFE FOR WORK.
I upgraded to gutsy recently. One thing I don’t like about ubuntu is that (unlike gentoo) your options for screensavers are severely limited. In Gentoo, you can select 1 screensaver, or random screensavers of your choice. In Ubuntu, however, you only have two options: 1 screensaver OR random screensavers (where you can’t select WHICH random–it picks a random screensaver from the whole lot).
I guess that Ubuntu released a bunch of new screensavers with their release of Gutsy. Every now and then I’d see a new one that I’d either like or dislike. However, one stood out from the rest: WebCollage.
WebCollage randomly picks pictures from the internet and displays them as a collage. It’s a cool idea, but we all know that 75% of the internet is porn. This screensaver is NOT SAFE FOR WORK.
Michael Altfield
Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡
I just got the wireless working on my new laptop in ubuntu (thank god for forums), and I was disgusted to find that from my room I got ~20% signal quality. I knew the problem could be with the laptop or the wireless router, but since I can’t do anything about the laptop I did some tests with my router by using three different antennas.
Michael Altfield
Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡
