Personality By Filetype

I had to reboot my PC at work today which is unusual - normally I just lock my PC when I go home and continue where I left off in the morning. It occurred to me that I had a lot of Microsoft Word documents open, and each and every one was a work in progress.

I think it was right then that I realised that my job had changed significantly. I'm still involved in tech. support, but moreso now - especially since I have an off-sider to do my bidding - I'm concentrating on policy, documentation and management issues.

Crazy!

12 months ago I would have had multiple copies of Firefox/IE and PuTTY open as I was debugging a website and configuring Linux, 6 months ago it would have been multiple copies of Notepad with random pastings in them and now it's a shift to Word.

Again, crazy!

I wonder how this will develop...

Customising KDE - Service Menus

Well, it's been probably over a month since I've had to boot back to Windows for anything of susbstance. I'm now hapilly running Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE) and all is good. My current mind bend involves getting myself set up for video editing which includes being able to convert from this codec to that codec, and understand about a billion commandline options.

This post is for one reason really - to make sure that I don't lose these two handy URL's. The first details how to make your own custom actions for files (the items that appear under "Actions" when you right click a file) [http://www.tuxmagazine.com/node/1000172] and the second is a quick HOWTO for how to add "Send via email" to the Actions menu [http://www.kde-forum.org/artikel/14019/How-To-add-Send-Email-to-right-click-Actions-menu.html].

Here's another useful link: http://developer.kde.org/documentation/tutorials/dot/servicemenus.html

I've just thrown this together to give me some actions to resize image files before I upload them. I'm not sure if it supports multiple files at once, but it looks like there's support for this via the %F variable (read the pages for examples, or check back later).

[Desktop Entry]
X-KDE-Submenu=Resize For Web
ServiceTypes=image/*
Actions=ResizeForWeb1024;ResizeForWeb800;ResizeForWeb640

[Desktop Action ResizeForWeb1024]
Name=1024x768
Exec=convert %f -resize 1024x768 %f

[Desktop Action ResizeForWeb800]
Name=800x600
Exec=convert %f -resize 800x600 %f

[Desktop Action ResizeForWeb640]
Name=640x480
Exec=convert %f -resize 640x480 %f

(save this in /home/bob/.kde/share/apps/konqueror/servicemenus/resize-for-web.desktop)

Now, when you right click on an image file (any file that matches the mimetype image/*) in Konqueror and choose Actions, you'll see a "Resize for Web" menu with 1024x768, 800x600 and 640x480 in it. Be warned, it will overwrite your original file.

By the way, you need to have ImageMagick installed (as the 'convert' tool that I am using it part of that package).

That's all for now!

Gifts Galore

We've received many gifts for Linus - err, I should say Linus has received many gifts! It's been so busy that normal priorities have kind of gone out the window. I just wanted to blog this to say a quick thanks to all and to let you know that we do appreciate the gifts very much and we'll do our best to give you all a call to catch up as soon as we can! Thanks thanks thanks!