Starting with Git

Recently I’ve started to use Git more and more for various projects – code, university stuff and important dotfiles, just to name a few examples. Not completely used to the workflow yet, but I feel pretty comfortable with the basic Git commands now.

In the beginning I had a hard time grasping the concept of Git and version control systems in general. Two online resources helped me a lot in understanding Git, which I also want to share with you:

• The Git Parable
  After reading it, you’ll still have no clue how to use Git. But you will know for what purposes Git was designed, and what Git is. From here it’ll be much easier to learn the commands to use Git.
• Pro Git
  Online version of the Pro Git book; well written text and many pretty pictures make it easy to understand what happens “behind the scenes”. Goes through most stuff you’ll need to get started with Git.

Thanks go to Luca (einar77) and Ingo (neverendingo) for the tip about Pro Git.

How do you use activities?

A recent topic in the KDE Community Forums asks KDE users how they use activities in Plasma, or more specifically “Do you use activities or plasmoids extensively?”. It seems like many users don’t see why you would want plasmoids on your desktop (“they’re covered by the windows most of the time anyway”) or how activities can be helpful. So I thought I would share my setup here and in the forum – maybe it’ll give you some inspiration.

The wonderful world of Go

No, not World of Goo.

Go is a wonderful board game. The rules themselves are very simple, but the game itself is fascinating. It’s a bit like Conway’s Game of Life – with a few simple rules you can create something really interesting. However, the similarities pretty much stop there.

A game of Go

Interests

Lately my blog posts have all been about KDE, a Free software project that I’m interested in. However, since this is also a personal blog, I’ve decided to write a bit more about myself. Therefore I’ve added a category called Interests, where I’ll write about my hobbies and interests.

I’ve always had a lot of hobbies. When I was a child, I usually had one or two activities every weekday (except on Sundays). Many were dropped due to lack of time, but I’ve also picked up a few new interests. I think I’m pretty open to new things, as long as they look fun or seem useful.

Regardless of how much I enjoy a hobby, it’ll only be just that – a hobby. I don’t plan to take either to a professional level.

Still, I want to work with something I’m interested in. The scientific world seems to be perfect – a place with constant new challenges, a place where you’re relatively independent and learn new things every day. Of course it won’t be perfect all the time. specially not in the beginning I would guess. But it’s hopefully interesting enough to give me something to blog about besides the usual KDE-related stuff.

Mouse shortcuts with xbindkeys

Note: This isn’t directly related to KDE. However, since there isn’t such a tool for KDE at the moment, I figured some KDE users might find it interesting as well.

I recently bought a new mouse for my desktop computer, more specifically a Logitech Corded Mouse M500. Up until then I had been using an old mouse with two buttons and a scroll wheel. Now I suddenly have two extra mouse buttons, and a scroll wheel that you can tilt to the left and right. Let’s see how to take advantage of this.

KDE Community Forums and Feeds

Good news ahead for all the people who don’t like forums in general, but still want to know what’s going on.

The Feed option has been available for a while and makes it possible to create personalized newsfeeds to follow specific forums and subforums. That’s nice, but sometimes it’s not enough.

If you follow Planet KDE you might have heard about the recent improvements on forum.kde.org, including the better search system. It’s faster, it allows you to search for common words (such as ‘kde’) and it offers more options to give more accurate results. However, that’s not all. Now it’s also possible to display the results as a newsfeed, which means that you can make highly customized feeds with posts that you’re interested in.

Below I’ll show you have to make such a feed with an example. If you want to play around with it yourself,  head to Search.

Update October 10, 2009: Feed has been removed. You can use Search to archive the same thing.

Spin that spinbox

Do you remember this guy? In my previous blog post I asked the KDE community what you thought it was, and after many good guesses Kmetamorphosis finally nailed the answer: it’s for voting on questions in KDialogue.

Another person commented that “if it looks like a spinbox, it acts like a spinbox then probably it’s a spinbox. Only it doesn’t apear to be spinning”. Right, I guess we can call it a spinbox. If you’re the type who likes to spin spinboxes, I have good news for you – the first KDialogue opened recently, which means that you can spin to your heart’s content¹ over in the KDialogue forum!

Don’t forget to take the opportunity to ask Jonathan Riddell one question or four – the more spinboxes, the better right? As someone said, there are no stupid questions (as long as they follow the rules) – only good ones and less good ones. And that decision is in your hands.

Take me to the first KDialogue now »

 

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¹ You can only vote on each question once, though.

 

What is this?

Let’s see if you’ve done your homework lately – can you guess what this is?

Hint: it has something to do with the KDE Community Forums.

(If you’re a regular visitor to the forum channel, #kde-forum on freenode, you’re not allowed to answer. )

The Road to KDE Devland – step 4

The end of summer

Whew, long time no see! After the summer vacation I’ve had my hands full, so I never found the motivation to sit down and write this. Sorry about the delay.

This step marks the end of summer and will show you what I’ve achieved in these two months. But first something about Qt.

Record screencasts to animated GIF files

Since a few people have asked me how I recorded the Plasma HowTo screencasts, I decided to post a short HowTo here. And is there any better way to show this than with an animated GIF? I can almost hear you saying “of course not!”, so here we are:

A typical record session

I use byzanz to record my desktop. It works as a GNOME panel applet but can also be used from the command line. Note that it depends on quite a lot of GNOME libraries and requires Composite to work (according to the website).

[Update October 19, 2009: I tried to remove most of the GNOME libs and byzanz still seems to run fine.]

Now back to the screencast above. I usually do the following steps: