Getting Shrinkable Tabs with Epiphany

One of my grudge against Epiphany is that its tabs goes off-screen when I open lots of tabs and I need to scroll through the tabs to find the tab I wish to switch to. This gets really annoying when I have like a dozen or more of opened tabs.



Googling around, and I was pointed to this epiphany extension from Epiphany 3rd Party Extensions page : Only One Close Button.

From the description:

Only One Close Button

Author: Stefan Stuhr

This extension has several purposes. The first is to get rid of the close buttons on all tabs. The second is to make the tab width more flexible; instead of a fixed width they will scale, so that there will first be overflow with many tabs open. The third is to make a close button available as a toolbar button.

The name might not tell me that is what I want, but the description do. So, I grabbed it, and here goes:



The close button had to be added manually using "Customize Toolbar", and because the Extension purpose is to make theres Only One Close Button, I couldn't get the close button to appear on each tabs like how Firefox handle it. Anyway, having all tabs appear on the same page have much more value than the close button.

Some side stuff,

I have been using Firefox3 for quite a while now. It is promised that FF3 will have better memory management. During the alpha, memory consumption does looks reduced, but lately, it got back like how it was during FF2. With constant 200-300MB of consumed swap and physical RAM maxed out, it gets annoying sometimes (I keep monitoring the RAM/Swap utilization using the gnome-system-monitor panel applet). Closing firefox frees my RAM from 150% to 80% utilization. So, I'm back to my old habit of cycling between epiphany and ff depending on my needs. But firefox still maintain as my primary browser because of the flexibility of the tabs. Now that Epiphany tabs are "better", I guess I can switch Epiphany as my primary browser, and FF and secondary. Midori browser is good too as another backup browser, but lately its been crashing when I start it (and the tabs follow the default Epiphany tabs).

Separate taskbar / window list on dualhead GNOME

I noticed this just now when playing around with the panel on my dualscreen setup.

If both screens have a panel with window list on it, the window list will only show the windows of the screen where it resides.

Cool feature.

IOSN Accessibility Workshop for the Visually Impaired

Yesterday, I joined Khairil Yusof (Kaeru) for IOSN Accessibility Workshop for the Visually Impaired at Malaysian Association for the Blind, KL. It was organized under Free/Open Source Software Society of Malaysia (FOSS-SM) and United Nation's International Open Source Network (IOSN)

I'm still waiting for Kaeru to post a blog about it as he has the most details. But here's my part of the story.

It was very interesting to be there where we actually get first hand information about the blind's concerns about accessible websites and softwares, income opportunities, technical skills, etc. There are blinds who have a high technical capability but their talent are ignored due to their condition.

Orca works great too, though we haven't field test it yet. The GNOME HIG helps for making applications accessible and that is great. However, as usual, the voices are monotonous. It would be great if we can have clearer and nicer voices.

I tested their braille monitor too on my Fedora laptop. At first it couldn't work, but after a little googling I was pointed to brltty, a tty viewer to braille monitors. Brltty, on text-only linux, works very great!. It's very interesting seeing that Fazlin (one of the blind person who attend the workshop) can explore the shell , as perfect as a sighted person, using the braille monitor!. Kaeru and I was quite excited seeing a great opportunity for them to try to get some income as linux/unix sysadmins or open source developers. Its hard nowadays to find people who appreciate the shell even from the sighted - I blame Windows for that - and seeing how the blinds can benefit from the shell, it made us quite excited and happy. If they can try taking LPI and pass it, I don't see any reason why they couldn't find income from it.

However, I couldn't get the braille monitor to work with Orca, I've launched brltty, yum'ed for brlapi, python-brlapi, Pyrex, configured Orca to use braille output, but still, it could not print the braille characters. The braile monitor printed something on but Fazlin said that it printed (I don't remember the exact sentence) "Terminal is not in text mode". Do anybody know what I missed? Anybody know how to fix this and make stuff works?.

FOSS-SM will continue to work with MAB for this research and try to help the visually impaired to have similar, if not same, opportunities for them in accessing information and knowledge easily , finding employment and income opportunities in the ICT world, help them lead a better life and on the same time, spreading the love of Free/Open Source Software throughout Malaysia and the world. I am looking forward for the next meetup for this project and see how I myself can try utilizing and improving stuff for them and maybe push some stuff back to Fedora upstream (Docs, guide, packages, custom tools etc).

p/s: Kaeru want ubuntu for them, I want fedora for them :P - at least theres already one Fedora spin for the visually impaired - SpeakupModified

HOWTO: Making QT apps on GNOME less ugly

On Fedora GNOME installation, QT applications by default, look darned fugly. This is because there are no settings that point the QT apps to the correct style and themes. Solving this is easy:

First,
yum install kdebase kdeartwork

Then,
kcontrol

Open ``Appearance and Themes > Style`` and change your KDE style to one with better looks, apply and save it.

Done.