ads' corner

When I make changes in OpenStreetMap, I often need to extract the object colour from a picture or a video, as example for a building, bench or a roof. This collides with a feature in KDE which I really like: Dim Inactive Windows.

The setting is in the KDE settings, under Desktop Effects -> Dim Inactive. As the name implies, it dims (makes them a bit more dark) all non-active windows - which makes it visually clear which window is currently active. Quite useful.

For picking a colour from a picture/video I’m using KColorChooser, which provides the colour in Hex code - exactly what I need in OSM.

However when KColorChooser is the active window, and all other windows are dimmed, it extracts the wrong colour from the picture/video - the colour which is already dimmed. Not what I need. Therefore when I do OSM edits, I temporarily disable this feature.

I’m a (more or less) happy KDE user, ever since the KDE 3 days. Before that, I used fvwm2 for a long time, but that is a different story. It also happens that I never really reinstalled my home directory - the oldest files I can find are from 1997, and that is pretty much when I switched from an old Slackware system with self-compiled updates, to something with a more modern distribution. That means, that all the time from 1997 to today, I carry the same /home/ads across my computers. The home directory grew from a few MB to 133 GB today (maybe I should clean it up, but then again it’s cheaper to buy a bigger harddisk).

It also means, that I never deleted my KDE config, even when upgrading to KDE 4 or Plasma.

The (for me) most annoying “feature” in KDE 4 was the konsole behaviour: every new window was opened in the last saved size. Those who (like me) open dozens of terminal windows each and every day will understand the annoyance of this non-deterministic behaviour. In addition, early KDE 4 versions always ignored the default settings for the window size (and also ignored the according commandline parameters), priority was given to the saved session data. In the meanwhile (KDE 4.3) the software was improved and with some manipulations konsole can be forced to start with a fixed size.

I have shell accounts on different servers. Sometimes - especially if new Debian/Ubuntu/Redhat/Fedora updates are available - I have to open a ssh session to each server. That takes time and too many keyboard clicks and being a lazy admin I thought this job can be scripted.

Sometimes I use the “Run command” functionality in KDE (Alt+F2) to start a program - that’s faster than clicking all the way through the menu until I found the entry and given the fact that the dialog is saving a history I usually only type one or two characters and have the full command line available. But the command history grows and grows - and sometimes I want to remove old and no longer used entries (like gaim which is pidgin now). That’s not possible ouch at least not in the “Run command” dialog or in the preferences. The Mozilla/Firefox-way (Shift+Del) also does not work.

Time to descend into the personal .kde directory and dig in some config files …

I need a direct connection between my electric water boiler in the kitchen and kteatime on my laptop.

It’s not entirely clear, how to bind in KDE an external program without KDE support on a keyboard shortcut, the “System Settings -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Keyboard Shortcuts” has no such option.