as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

Dan Williams:

NetworkManager mobile broadband support…can most likely use your GSM mobile phone…if you add the appropriate stuff to the HAL .fdi file.

Blimey, that’s excellent. What would be required to get .fdi files for loads of phones into HAL by default, so it Just Works out of the box? For a given mobile phone model, will the serial port always have the same settings, or does it depend on who your phone company is and so on as well? It’d be brilliant to have this all working with no configuration required.

(PS. Dan, I couldn’t use OpenID to log in to leave this as a comment on your site; it didn’t recognise http://www.kryogenix.org/ as an OpenID for some reason.)

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:

Download Converter Deskbar now!

Deskbar already has an excellent example plugin to search the PyGtk documentation. Since I’ve been working on Jokosher, which is a PyGtk app, I use it all the time. It’d be useful if it also searched the GStreamer Python bindings documentation as well, and now my version does. Go and grab pygtk_api and drop it into your .gnome2/deskbar-applet/handlers folder (and restart Deskbar by removing it from the panel and readding it, or logging out and back in) to have it work. Just type the name of a Gst object and you’ll be able to link directly to the page describing it. (Note that some of the pages may not yet exist, but that’s because Gian Mario Tagliaretti is still working hard on the docs for the Python GStreamer bindings.)

More from Stuart’s House Of Deskbar Stuff: Gmail Deskbar. A Gnome deskbar plugin to search all your mail at Gmail. Grab Gmail Deskbar for yourself now! Edit (as described below) and save into .gnome2/deskbar-applet/handlers.

Notes:
The plugin requires libgmail: install from your distribution (it’s python-libgmail in Ubuntu) or from libgmail.sf.net.
You will need to edit the plugin and hardcode your Gmail username and password into it; look at the file and edit the part at the top where username and password are specified. Yes, this is not good. I would like to use the Gnome keyring to store the username and password, but it’s restricted to internal use for the Gnome desktop and not for applications, and it’s not available for Python anyway. As soon as it’s a public API and wrapped for Python I’ll be happy to use it. If you’re not happy with hardcoding your password, and I don’t blame you, then feel free to not use it.
Like Delicious Deskbar, it demonstrates how to embed your own custom icon in a plugin rather than depending on an external file; convert it to an XPM with the Gimp and then embed in the file.

Let me know if it works for you.

Update: licenced under the GNU GPL version 2.0.

Lots of people use delicious for bookmarking, including me. So I’ve written a plugin for the Gnome deskbar applet that searches your del.icio.us bookmarks. Download Delicious Deskbar below and drop the file in the .gnome2/deskbar-applet/handlers/ folder in your home directory. By default it will search all of del.icio.us for the tag you enter, but you can configure it to search just your bookmarks through the Preferences window.

Deskbar’s a nice thing to work with, in case I haven’t mentioned this. I think it could do with some more visual flashiness, myself, and I also wish that stuff like this went in Library/Deskbar Applet/Handlers rather than the hidden .gnome2 folder — that’s one thing that the Mac people definitely got right!

Update: fixed a bug when using multiple search terms in deskbar.
Update: licenced under the GNU GPL 2.0.

Download the latest version.