Linux Hack3r

Simply put, Amarok is the greatest piece of software ever. The only improvement for it I could think of would be for it to actually cook your breakfast, lunch, and dinner! Now, remember that one feature of Amarok titled Cover Manager? Although using this method is extremely fast, easy, and convenient, there was one problem with it I found. As I am constantly installing different distro’s, especially new one’s that come out, I find myself having to constantly update the cover art for all my albums. One solution would be to embed the images into the mp3’s, however I hate doing this because I feel that this may cause corruption in the mp3’s if the images are too big. Today I was fooling around with Suse 10.3, and I realized that if you place a jpg in the folder containing the album, Amarok will recognize it as the cover. So as long as you have Amarok managing your library of music, simply download the album jpg’s from wherever you’d like, and place them in the specific folders. After placing jpg’s in the folders, simply call Amarok to update your collection. Now as long as you keep your music directory intact, next time you decide to try a new distro, your album artwork will already be there!

    Most Linux users will probably admit to having a “Lock Screen” button. Why? Because it is very useful to be able to slide your pointer to the top right of your screen and click a button before stepping out of the room for a few moments. Although both KDE and Gnome have an “applet” for locking the screen, creating a custom one will be more efficient. Even when you lock the screen, the monitor still stays on, and probably will for at least a few hours. By creating your own button, you can turn off your monitor and lock the screen at the exact same time! Right click one of your panels, click on Add Application to Panel–>Add Non-KDE Application. Add whatever Button title, Icon, and Description, but for the Executable, place this:

sleep 1 && xset dpms force off && kdesktop_lock -forcelock