Archive for August, 2009

James Adam Thorp

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

Given that the news is mostly out through twitter/facebook, I thought I would put some extra information here as a bonus to my blog readers :)

Heather went in for a checkup yesterday evening, and we got home at 1900, at which point she had her first contractions, and they continued sporadically from then. At around 0030 they were consistent enough, and frequent enough, that it was time to head out. We arrived at the Southern General at around 0050.

The labour was actually pretty quick, and drugless apart from gas and air this time. At 0240 Jamie popped out and had some skintime with Mummy. He weighed in at exactly 9lbs, which is 1lb 13oz heavier than Mira was! He fed a bit and then I got my first hold, and then he slept for a good while, during which the midwives did all the necessary cleaning up and paperwork and stuff.

I hung around until after they had bathed Jamie and Heather had a shower, and then headed home for about 0600. Jackie had been staying over for Mira (thanks Jackie!) and so I got 90 minutes sleep and she handled getting Mira up and breakfast before I took over. The rest of the day has been a whirlwind of texting, emailing, phoning and taking Mira to visit her new baby brother.

Mira, Hevs and Jamie

mrBen

Posted in mrBen | 3 Comments »

Preyer Meeting

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

Not what I normally get to see in my back garden in the middle of Glasgow. Sadly the photos are too shaky for public consumption, but this bit of video came out great:

mrBen

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Panel Tool

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

In the past year of using Ubuntu fulltime at work, there have only been a couple of consistent annoyances. One was that when booting up with 2 screens attached it would default to the external monitor, not the internal. I wrote a quick script which sorts that.

The other was that, when the previous occurs, or when playing games etc, the panel icons and applets seem to move around, rather than staying where I had carefully placed them. Now, the positions of all the applets and icons are stored in gconf, so I thought it would be a cunning plan to write to script to store/restore them, and here it is!

To run it you simply do:

$ python panel-tool.py store

which will store the positions of all the icons/applets in your top panel in a text file, and then

$ python panel-tool.py restore

when you want them restored to normal. This requires a restart of the panel, which is a bit ugly (it does a complete reload, which takes a few seconds) but it works!

Anyway – thought somebody else might be wanting this, so I’m releasing this version into the wild. It’s nowhere near perfect, I’m sure, but it WFM…

mrBen

panel-tool.py

(Save the file and rename to panel-tool.py due to hosting weirdness)

UPDATE
OK – there seems to be some issues with the login/out menu applet, and the clock applet. Sometimes they show up in the wrong place, although if you move them to where they should be and rerun panel-tool it seems to work itself out properly. I’ll see if I can resolve this (and do a proper config file as suggested by aq)

Posted in Computing, Linux, mrBen | 3 Comments »