larryni.me.uk » Firefox

How to get the HTC Tattoo to scan QR codes

Laurent — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:20:08 +0000

I recently got a HTC Tattoo and had problems scanning QR and bar codes on my monitor. If you have a Tattoo then you probably know how crappy the camera is. It has no autofocus which makes close-ups really blurry and small codes near impossible to scan.

Try it out with these examples:

I cannot scan the small one on my 21″ 1920×1080 screen, the bigger one scans great. Luckily they resize very well.

I’m using Firefox with the Image Zoom extension installed. When you come across a QR code that won’t scan, right-click it and hold the button, then zoom in using mouse wheel. Scan again, and bingo.

Disable that annoying DiggBar

Laurent — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 11:25:28 +0000

The new DiggBar really annoys the tits off me – I cannot see which link I’m going to when I’m on Digg’s front page and before I bookmark something I have to remember to close the damn thing or I end up with the short Digg URL bookmarked. Even worse, some morons start submitting the short URLs to other sites like Stumbleupon and I even came across submissions on Reddit. WTF! It’s not like your browser can’t handle long URLs. And if i want to submit a page to another social site then I’ll use a bookmarklet or one of the many submit/share buttons found on most pages.

You can disable it in your Digg profile settings:

click the My Profile link at the top of Digg’s front page
click the Settings tab
click viewing preferences under Options on the right and select Never show DiggBar for external links under Site-wide Preferences
save the changes.

To automatically get rid of the bar on pages that you come across out in the wild you can use a Greasemonkey script like DiggBar Killer or Anti Diggbar.

Update: check out my follow-up post if you run your own website.

Associate .torrent files with uTorrent running under Wine

Laurent — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 12:56:30 +0000

One of the applications I couldn’t let go of when I switched from Windows to Ubuntu was uTorrent. Unfortunately, as you need to run uTorrent using Wine, there is no direct way to automatically launch uTorrent when you click a .torrent link in your browser. Up until now I had a workaround – I created a separate folder in which I saved the torrent files and told uTorrent to watch it for any new files. It works great, and the torrents appear pretty much instantly in the download list. This obviously only works as long the app is running in the first place.

Now I just came across this post on the Ubuntu forums. All you need is a small script which you get Firefox (or any other browser you’re using) to launch when a .torrent link is clicked. Do the following:

From the terminal create a new file for the script:

sudo gedit /usr/bin/utorrent

Now paste the following into it:

#!/bin/sh cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/utorrent if [ "$1" != "" ]; then var="`echo $1 | sed 's/\//\\\/g'`" var="Z:${var}" wine utorrent.exe "$var" else wine utorrent.exe fi

Make sure the path to the uTorrent folder is correct, then save.

Set the file permissions:

sudo chmod a+x /usr/bin/utorrent

(Update: if you are having problems with the above script then try Adam’s solution down in the comments)

All you need now is to open your browser’s Preferences and tell it to launch your new script when you click a torrent file. Works like a charm.