Linux: Spotify Track Notifier with added D-Bus love

I've recently updated the spotify notifier example I'd previously posted as an example along with my spotify screensaver script. First, I made an update to have it listen to the PropertiesChanged signal. Annoyingly for some unknown reason this signal isn't visible in D-feet which had led to the erroneous assumption…

Updating Vim to Use Plugins From Branches

I decided the other evening that I should refresh my vim plugins to pick up any updates that have landed since the last time I updated them. The downside is that every time I want to do this, I have the pain of manually re-installing the updated files into the…

FOSDEM 2011

Photo by geekgrunge Last weekend I attended FOSDEM in Brussels. Here's a few of my chosen highlights: James Turnbull - DevOps - More than Marketing This was a good overview of the devops mentality, and how operations and developers can work together more effectively for the greater good. In his…

Android: Force Moving Apps to an SD Card

This isn't anything new but I thought I would share my experiences of trying to free space on my HTC desire by forcing apps to be movable to the sd card using the android SDK on linux. WARNING: Ensure you have a backup of any important data before you start…

A Geek's Christmas Present Wishlist

As Christmas will shortly be upon us here's a round-up of awesome things that are on my Christmas present wish-list. Moleskine notebooks Moleskines are the de facto standard notebook of choice for designers and hackers alike. Best thing is if you like using a notebook you'll always need more of…

Spotify ScreenSaver Toggle with D-bus

UPDATE! - see This post for the latest version of the spotify screensaver toggle The latest version of the spotify client for linux (0.4.8) has added partial mpris support. This is great as it means controlling spotify via D-bus is far easier than the previous hacks using wmctrl…

Fake SMTP server with Python

The other day a colleague was testing some code which relied on sending mail to a local mailserver and it was failing when the mailserver couldn't be found. Needing to install postfix seemed overkill so I decided to look into what could be done to make a fake smtp service.…