Another thing for Gnome Deskbar: a converter that converts one unit to another. Enter “23m in feet” and immediately get the answer that that distance is 75.46ft. Inspired by Google Calculator’s similar behaviour, you can download the program and drop it into your ~/.gnome2/deskbar-applet/handlers folder. You’ll need to have GNU Units installed as well (install the “units” package in Ubuntu). Some examples:
Does this only work for a specific version of Deskbar? I have 2.14.2 (Ubuntu 6.06) and it’s not doing anything.
Posted by joeljkp on September 6th, 2006.
joeljkp: that’s the version I’ve got. Have you enabled the plugin in the preferences window for Deskbar?
Posted by sil on September 7th, 2006.
Ah, forgot about that. Thanks!
Posted by joeljkp on September 7th, 2006.
Your download link above is broken, it gives a WebDAV error: “Could not open the requested SVN filesystem”.
Posted by Alex on November 25th, 2006.
Am I doing something wrong? I had this working back when you first released it, but I can’t get it going now on feisty (Deskbar 2.17.90). I can’t see it in the list of plugins in the preferences.
Posted by sheepeatingtaz on February 8th, 2007.
I have much the same problem as the last poster (fiesty beta). The converter entry does not appear in the list of plugins in the preferences. Note I have tried a different plugin (hostname lookup I think) which works ok.
Would you mind checking this issue out?
Thanks for writing this – it saves me running ‘units’ in a terminal.
Posted by Aaron Hochwimmer on March 26th, 2007.
I’ll take a look when I upgrade to feisty, which will be shortly.
Posted by sil on March 26th, 2007.
Hi
Just alter line 14 of the script. Turn
import deskbar.Handler, deskbarinto
import deskbar.Handler, deskbar.Matchto make the script work under feisty. Don’t forget to install the units package and enable the plugin in the preferencies dialog.
Stuart, thanks for that cool plugin :)
Posted by papo on May 20th, 2007.
The suggestion from papo don’t work for me in Feisty.
Converter is always hidden.
Posted by Nick on May 26th, 2007.
Hi
You can run
/usr/lib/deskbar-applet/deskbar-applet -w
from a shell to gather more information about the problem. This runs th deskbar applet in standalone mode and gives a lot of information about what’s going on. No need to instsall the debug package.With the original plugin, I got this:
Error loading the file: /home/mathias/.gnome2/deskbar-applet/handlers/converter.py.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/deskbar/ModuleLoader.py", line 91, in import_module
mod = pydoc.importfile (filename)
File "pydoc.py", line 259, in importfile
raise ErrorDuringImport(path, sys.exc_info())
ErrorDuringImport: problem in /home/mathias/.gnome2/deskbar-applet/handlers/converter.py - : 'module' object has no attribute 'Match'
After having altered line 14 as discussed, I get this:
Loading module 'Converter' from file /home/mathias/.gnome2/deskbar-applet/handlers/converter.py.
Please also note that Converter is hidden as long as the regexp does not match: Here be dragons does not trigger Converter, while as 10 ly in parsecs does.
Also note that Converter has to be enabled in the prefs.
Posted by papo on May 27th, 2007.
Great stuff. Thanks for that.
Any way to make it support the “€” character for euros ?
Posted by Romain on May 27th, 2007.
About the plugin not showing on Feisty, it seems that Python requires a line:
# coding=utf-8
added at the top of the file as per PEP 0263: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/
Kudos for writing such an awesomely useful plugin, by the way. :)
Posted by zanglang on May 28th, 2007.
Thanks zanglang–that worked perfectly!!
Posted by Robby on June 10th, 2007.
In addition to the line 14 change and the utf-8 change, if you just installed units, you have to restart to get it to work.
To really emulate Google Calculator, you need to get together with this guy and make a plugin that does both, like Google Calculator. Then I can type “3+4″ and get “7″, type “2 inches in mm” and get “50.8 millimeters”, or mix it up and type “15 V / 3 ohm” and get “5 amperes”. ;-)
(And while you’re at it, recognize things like uF that Google doesn’t recognize.)
Posted by Endolith on August 9th, 2007.
And a date and time calculator would be good. Like http://www.timeanddate.com
Google calculator can’t do this yet, but it’s hard to do this stuff in your head.
Posted by Endolith on August 12th, 2007.
[...] Pero aún hay más y es que si esto del terminal no es lo tuyo o no te termina de convencer, también existe un plugin para el deskbar-applet, llamado converter deskbar. [...]
Posted by La otra bola de cristal - on August 15th, 2007.
[...] Fuente-> La Otra Bola De Cristal Fuente del Script-> Converter Deskbar Enlace Relacionado->Curioseando Con Units [...]
Posted by Linux Music » Blog Archive » Instalando el applet Converter en Ubuntu on August 19th, 2007.
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Posted by Instalando el applet Converter en Ubuntu: Linux Music 2.0 on January 26th, 2008.
Hi! I kinda stole this from you and made it 2.20-compatible (new API).
And I changed the link in live.gnome.org.
Feel free to steal it back if you want to update it.
;-) Johannes
Posted by JohannesBuchner on February 11th, 2008.
Johannes: that’s absolutely fine with me! Good work.
Posted by sil on February 12th, 2008.