Global Hot Keys for Songbird in Linux

First, let me preface this by saying I used to love Amarok, but I feel Amarok 2 is just a bit too far off par for me to continue using.  It all really came to a head when I was listening to a 4-disc set, which all had the same Album name, and I couldn’t sort them by disc, or even by track number.  In the end, I broke down and installed Songbird on my Ubuntu desktop.  I should also mention I am a Gnome user, so these instructions may not work for you KDE users.

Now Songbird has come a long way since I tried it a while back, but it still has a lack of global shortcut keys on Linux.  A very helpful user of the Songbird community released an add-on which enables Command Line Support.

Now that I’ve set up my machine with Global Hot Keys, I’ll show you how to do so as well.  Here’s a step-by-step:

Note: If you are using the .deb installed from gotdeb, there is a wrapper script located at /usr/bin/songbird
Open this file as root in your favorite text editor. At the bottom of the short file, you’ll see:

./songbird

You need to add “$@” to the end of this line, so it should look like:

./songbird "$@"

This will allow the command line arguments to be passed to the actual binary.

· Run “gconf-editor” either from a terminal or the run dialog.  This will bring up an window to edit the gnome configuration options.

· In the menu list to the left, go to “apps” -> “metacity” -> “keybinding_commands”

· I used the first 3 commands as follows (double click on the line to edit):
- command_1: /usr/bin/songbird -pause
- command_2: /usr/bin/songbird -next
- command_3: /usr/bin/songbird -previous

· Once that is done, you will want to go back to your menu list on the left, and find the “global_keybindings” folder (“apps” -> “metacity” -> “global_keybindings”)

· Inside this folder, You should see run_command_1 through run_command_12.  You can now set you desired key bindings.  Personally, I set them similar to Amarok (since I’m used to them.)
- run_command_1: <Super>c
- run_command_2: <Super>b
- run_command_3: <Super>z

If you run into any problems during this process, or just want to keep in touch, you can contact me on twitter or leave a comment below.

Posted in linux, songbird, ubuntu at April 29th, 2009. No Comments.

Use wget to download large directories recursively

Have you ever wanted to recursively get a web directory? Or how about a web site?

If your a linux user, you can use wget (man wget for more info). Wget is a non-interactive network downloader. Mac users can try to get a binary <a href=”http://www.statusq.org/archives/2008/07/30/1954/”>here</a>.  Wget is a very powerful tool for many reasons, but it can be quite useful if you want to download multiple files from a site.

A few days ago, I complained that I didn’t have many fonts for use in designing, so a friend linked me to <a href=”http://www.fonts500.com”>fonts500.com</a>.  My first thought was “Wow, I want all of these fonts, but I don’t want to click all of those links, spread over 5 pages.” Enter wget!

wget -r --level=2 -A zip --quiet http://www.fonts500.com/

A little explanation of the command:

The -r is to be recursive.

The –level=2  sets the maximum depth (we don’t want to go too far off the page)

The “-A zip” sets the file inclusion parameter, which means we only want the zip files.

–quiet is just to squelch output, just a personal preference.

And lastly, the URL you want to use.

Hope it helps!

Posted in Bash, wget at April 15th, 2009. 1 Comment.