You may recall in my earlier post that I mentioned the GfxTablet project but complained that there was no support for left-handed users, but I just discovered something.

Under Xfce the configuration for Mouse and Touchpad:

Inside the configuration applet, you get to see all the input devices available on your system. On my system, I have the touchpad set as left-handed, because I prefer to work with my mouse buttons swapped (as I’m left-handed).

However, what you notice is that “Network Tablet” shows up on this list when the service is running:

So, select that, and:

Lo and behold, the Network Tablet is configured as right-handed. Which means that even though my touchpad is configured as left-handed, I can freely use my Android tablet as a graphics tablet without the annoying button switching I had to do before.

Now, I found this in Fedora, but it might also work under Xubuntu.

I’ve spent the most part of today (writing this at 11:40pm) installing and setting up Fedora on my laptop, moving over from Ubuntu. It’s always a pain setting up a new OS, and even more frustrating copying files to the new OS. I had over 35GB to copy and these were just work files. No movies, music, or games.

Setting up BOINC was a headache too. Finally got it working, but it keeps coming up with an error at loading. But it works, and that’s the important thing. On the plus side, I’ve Bitbucketted the setup script I’ve used so if I have to rebuild, it won’t take me as long next time.

I do a fair amount of work using git as version control, with SVN and CVS close behind, but I haven’t used any of them so much as a distributed version control.  However, since I’ve started using Bitbucket and GitHub, I have encountered many issues to do with DVC. One of the main ones is communication via proxy.

My workplace doesn’t allow communication through the net without it going through a proxy server and it is an major pain in the arse to get through. Fortunately, git allows you to configure git to use a proxy server:

To use a proxy server for HTTP communication:

git config --global http.proxy [proxyserver](http://user:password@proxyserver:9999)

To use a proxy server for HTTPS communication:

git config --global https.proxy [proxyserver](http://user:password@proxyserver:9999)

My company firewall also injects its own SSL certificate, which breaks SSL verification, so to get around that:

git config --global http.sslVerify false

I love linux and bash scripting. Whilst I am no expert, I really love the way you can pipe one application’s output into another.

One thing I don’t like to much about linux, however, is the case-sensitivity. “file.ext” is not the same as “file.EXT”, for example. On Windows, it doesn’t much care about the case of the extension, but on linux, it does. And therein is my problem.

My digital camera takes pictures and gives them a .JPG extension, which doesn’t show up on listings on my linux box where the application is looking for .jpg extensions. Sure, I can rename them manually, or macro together a simple bash script, but when you have to do this repeatedly, it gets quite frustrating.

So I did some research, and found out about the basename application. It serves two purposes. It strips out directory information to leave just the file name so that “dir1/dir2/dir3/file” becomes just “file” and optionally, allows you to strip out a suffix from the name, so for example to rename all .JPG files to .jpg in the current folder, I would use this:

for a in *.JPG
 do
   mv $a `basename $a .JPG`.jpg
 done

Here’s an example output

$ ls
file1.JPG file2.JPG file3.JPG

$ for a in *.JPG
> do
> echo mv $a `basename $a .JPG`.jpg
> done
mv file1.JPG file1.jpg
mv file2.JPG file2.jpg
mv file3.JPG file3.jpg

$ for a in *.JPG
> do
> mv $a `basename $a .JPG`.jpg
> done

$ ls
file1.jpg file2.jpg file3.jpg

GfxTablet (Graphic Tablet) is a project that consists of two parts – one is Linux input driver, and the other is an Android app. It turns your Android device into a graphics tablet and you can control your Linux machine with your tablet. There is no screen output on the android device and stylus/finger motion is transmitted to the Linux box.

The only downside is there’s no option for “lefty” mode for people like me. :(

It will be interesting to see how well I can use this.

rfc2822/GfxTablet · GitHub.