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Just found this out and thought it might be useful to someone else.

If you’re running KDE and using the GTK-QT Engine to run GTK applications (e.g. Firefox) with your native KDE styles like I am, you may notice that after upgrading your software or changing your KDE colour scheme that certain bits of GTK apps suddenly turn grey.

Well, easy solution.

K Menu > Control Centre (sometimes also Personal Settings or something similar) > Appearance and Themes > Colours. Then make sure ‘Apply colours to non-KDE applications‘ is ticked. Apply and restart your GTK apps (make sure the appropriate GTK Styles and Themes settings are correct).

Colours KDE Control Centre module Hosted on Zooomr

Hope this helps someone!

A couple of things today.

Gizbuzz has been given a fancy new redesign by our good friend Chris Van Patten (of PodDev and Comitar fame). The new theme is awesome and big thanks to Chris for the redesign!

And in other news, PodDev Episode 2 was recorded last night (after last week’s technical problems), so once it’s been through post production it will be ready for listening.

Until then…

I’ve played around a bit and now it’s time for the review, of Google Reader.

Check it out at Gizbuzz now (with screenshots!).

Now I love my Xgl, Compiz and KDE combination, but a few (minor) things have been broken in KDE since Xgl and Compiz took over my machine.

One of these things is the screensaver. You can set a screensaver with KDE’s tools and manually launch it by choosing Lock Screen, but the screensaver would no longer come on by itself regardless of what settings you chose.

Well, there is a solution. Thanks to Noiesmo’s Website for the tip. It actually requires bypassing the KDE screensaver handling and use the older, but Xgl-aware xscreensaver. So the first thing you need to do is install that. Check your distribution’s software management tools and search for and install xscreensaver. A couple of commands for popular distros:

Fedora:

$ su -c "yum install xscreensaver"

(K)ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install xscreensaver

Once that’s installed we need to make a script that starts the xscreensaver program when we log in so it can run the screensaver after the timeout. Copy and paste the following into your favourite text editor.

#!/bin/sh
xscreensaver -nosplash &

Save that as ~/.kde/Autostart/xscreen.sh (you might need to show hidden folders to see .kde). Now we need to make that script executable. Browse to ~/.kde/Autostart in the file manager Konqueror and right-click your new xscreen.sh script. Choose Properties, click the Permissions tab and tick ‘is executable’ before clicking OK.

Now we need to start xscreensaver in this session, so press Alt-F2 and type xscreensaver -nosplash & and press Enter. Now press Alt-F2 again and type xscreensaver-demo and press Enter again.
Here is where you choose your screensaver, set timeout options and settings etc. Choose your desired settings and close the program.

Your screensaver should now run after the timeout you specified in xscreensaver-demo. Fixed!

Watch out for the ugly unlocking screen, though, it’s not quite as pretty as KDE’s one.

No other word to describe this…

[via]

As part of my feed reader quest, I’m trying out Google’s Reader, which is a bit more fully featured than Personalised Home. I’m going to use it for a few days and then post a review at Gizbuzz about my thoughts.

In the meantime, you can see which feed items I’ve found interesting below:

(Apologies to anyone who came to an old, broken version of this post via the feed – I messed up the publish somehow and had to pull the old post and rewrite it)

It’s here. After some time of actually finding a free moment in which to do this, finding the strength to carry on despite my apparent inability to understand the stylesheet of this WordPress theme and finding the strength to avoid having an anti-Microsoft week following IE’s refusal to correctly render some of my tweaked CSS, it is here.

What am I talking about? Well, as you might have noticed, this blog is on peter.upfold.org.uk/blog. Not just peter.upfold.org.uk/. There was a reason, and this is it.

My homepage. It’s amazing to think how long I have been doing web design/development and still I haven’t actually ever had a homepage of my own, only a blog. So I built it and integrated it with the blog and used the WordPress style to help me a bit.

I’ll stop rambling and let you see it – my new shiny homepage.

What do you think? (I know, there’s an annoying message, but it can’t be called finished yet, can it? And “Peter Upfold Beta” sounds a bit too Web 2.0)

I guess one of the reasons I haven’t had a homepage per se up until now was lack of content. Website without content is a rubbish website, and eventually my homepage will have my blog, projects and scripts and stuff and various other content (“Me around the web” will get bigger) until it is in a state where it can be called 1.0.

Well, I’ll keep you posted on the upgrades as and when they happen, and any feedback is greatly appreciated.

Flash Player 8 (or 9) isn’t on Linux. Well, Flash Player 9 is being built for Linux, but in the mean time we Linux faithfuls are stuck with Flash 7. Flash 7 on Linux isn’t so bad, if you discount the instability, the ugly interface…

This hack is no longer needed as Flash Player 9 for Linux (beta) is out, but I’ll keep it up here just in case…

But let’s not go there. There is a workaround to run Flash Player 8 in Linux, albeit a messy and Wine-requiring one. Plus it only works on standard PC architecture at the moment (that is almost of you, just not people running Linux on PowerPC Macs and other funky hardware). I will try and show you how to do it. First of all, an apology. I can’t remember where I found this, so I’ve got no-one to attribute this to. If you found this out first or covered this somewhere, comment here and I’ll give you a link.

» Read the rest of this post…

A lot of WordPress-powered blogs recently got a load of comment spam. Nasty. In fact, I had to do a bit of a clean up job (and so did many people using WordPress), all because the Akismet spam database appeared to be down.

Akismet is an awesome service for WordPress-powered blogs which checks your comments against the spam database and either puts the comment in the spam bin, the moderation queue or straight onto the post depending on how similar it is to the spam.

Unfortunately, when the spam database goes down, as happened recently, all comments get let through … with disastrous results. So I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the Akismet guys for their great service; the fact that I don’t notice the spam when it’s working means Akismet is great.

According to their site:

One of the reasons we’re doing Akismet is we’ve built up a highly fault-tolerant infrastructure that can handle huge amounts of traffic and processing. However if something ever does go wrong your comments will simply go into the moderation queue.

Not this time, apparently.

But we love Akismet! (especially when it’s online!). No, seriously, we do. We love WordPress too.

UPDATE: The Akismet blog has an update on this – it seems to be back online and working for me. Apparently some new code broke the API, but it’s working again now. Thanks guys for the great service. Thanks also to Antony Pranata for (indirectly) leading me to this update (and linking to me in the first place!).