Another conky config showing date, time, stats, calendar, gmail and weather

Update: Conky weather no longer works, so i have used yahoo weather to get the same effect in my new config. Look here for details.

These are a couple of conkys showing you the date, time, stats, calendar, gmail and weather forecast.

You will need a lot of fonts and few scripts to run this successfully. 

Fonts used: 

1. Radio Space
2. hooge font
3. Poky font
4. Weather font
5. OPenLogos font
6. PizzaDude Bullets font
7. VariShapes Solid font
8. StyleBats font
9. DejaVu Sans
10. Liberation Serif

Google for them and download free from the sites.

Scripts used:

1. conkyForecast.py
2. conky3Days.templet
3. gmail.pl

Download the scripts from here.

Logo used:

.conkyrc for the first conky in the above pics is here.

And the .conkyrc for the second pic is here.

Download and save the fonts, scripts and logo.

You will need to edit the scripts and change the paths, to make it work.

If you need more info...... for 

Google calendar (gcalcli) go to http://www.webupd8.org/2010/08/display-google-calendar-on-your-desktop.html

Conky weather go to http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=869328

Have fun......

Ubuntu dark charcoal theme for chrome

Hi install Ubuntu darkly charcoal theme for chrome web browser. You can install it from the chrome web store for free. Go to https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jjekofhljmbijhelagbihakhbnognjfj to install. I liked the theme a lot, it looks great with a dark Ubuntu theme, take a look at the screenshot below.

Natty Narwhal boots only with acpi=off kernel option

The Natty Narwhal alpha 64 bit edition with latest updates, on my Vaio CS can boot only with the kernel option acpi=off. Other kernel option like, pci=noacpi, acpi=force are not working as of now.

AV Mode multimedia key works with natty narwhal on Vaio CS

Hi with the latest upgrades available for natty narwhal, i found to my surprise that the AV Mode multimedia key now works and brings up the rhythmbox music player on press. This is the first time in 2 yrs, since installing ubuntu on this machine, that i have any of the multimedia keys working.

Mind you this is the only key which works at the moment, volume change keys, forward and backward keys and capture button for webcam do not work.
I believe this is the first step in the right direction.

Although the rhythmbox starts with the AV Button, it leaves the machines unresponsive for a minute or so. But the machine recovers on its own....Natty is still alpha1,so hopefully as it matures, will fix the issue of media keys on Vaios....

Natty Narwhal running unity on my Vaio CS

Natty Narwhal alpha1, ubuntu 11.04 was out last week. I took the plunge and installed it as a dual boot alon side with my maverick. I am posting screenshots of my natty narwhal i,e ubuntu 11.04 desktop running unity interface under compiz. Will add a video shortly. Thank you.

Back pain and posture.

Nobody is immune to Back pain. It is the most common musculoskeletal condition, like tooth decay and the common cold, this is an affliction that affects a substantial proportion of population, at some point in their lives. This condition does not discriminate by gender, age, race or culture.

There are a number of surveys in many countries that reveal a point-prevalence of 17–30%, a 1-month prevalence of 19–43% and a life-time prevalence of 60–80%.

It has been said that backahe is the price the human race is paying for adopting a erect posture.
There are a number of factors which contribute towards developing backache like: Work environment and ergonomics, posture, psychosocial factors and spine/extraspinal pathologies. Sometimes these factors overlap towards causing this condition.

Common conditions that cause the back ache are: Disc pathologies, Injuries, degenerative changes in the spine, infections etc.

If your have chronic backpain, pain radiating along the thighs or legs, recurrent backpains, tingling or altered sensation in the limbs; please see the orthopaedician as it needs to be investigated.

In this article i will concentrate on backpain related to work and posture.

 Back pain is often a consequence of poor posture and stress on spine. This causes overtaxing of various tissues of the spine.

Stooping either in sitting or standing posture increases the strain on the spine leading to damage to intervetebral disks.








                                                                              

Knee pain in young IT Professionals

One of the common complaints, I encounter in my clinic is the knee joint pain in young individuals. Mind you most of my patients are IT Professionals, who sit in front of the computer and work, on an average of up to 10hrs a day.

Knee pain in young individuals is a common condition, esp in individuals involved in sports, prolonged sitting or standing jobs, industrial jobs and even office jobs.

Most of these patients have

• anterior knee pain, which is a dull aching pain: 
• aggravated by activities like prolonged standing or sitting, going up and down the stairs, jogging or doing sports. 
• Some of them can get grating sensation on moving the knee. 
• There is no swelling or redness of the joint
• and there is no history of any previous knee injury.

So if you are having these symptoms, you could be suffering from one of these conditions:

Blog renamed

This blog has moved from www.dksdk.blogspot.com. I have renamed my blog to www.techiesurgeon.blogspot.com. Thank you.

Conky config for my conky showing date, time, stats, calendar, mail and weather

Update: Conky weather no longer works, so i have used yahoo weather to get the same effect in my new config. Look here for details.

Since some of you are asking for the conky config for the conky i posted in my previous post, here you go. This is a single instance of conky on my ubuntu maverick, displaying stats, date, time, calendar, gmail and weather.

You will need a lot of fonts and few scripts to run this successfully. 

Fonts used: 

1. Radio Space

My Ubuntu Desktop with single instance of conky displaying clock, calendar, stats, gmail and weather

Hi this is my Ubuntu Desktop showing conky. I have setup my conky to utilize the full real estate on the desktop. It is a single instance of conky showing : Date and time, stats, Google calendar, weather and Gmail. Pl ask if you want the conkyrc, will upload. Thanx..

Finally suspend works on Sony Vaio CS running Ubuntu 10.04

Yes finally got suspend to work on my Sony Vaio CS, running Ubuntu 10.04 64 bit edition.

• sudo gedit /etc/default/grub. Look for the line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" and change it to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash atkbd.reset". Save it.
• sudo update-grub.
• Reboot.
• Now when you want to suspend, if you have a SD Card mounted, unmount it first.
• Suspend should work now. cheers.

Good office ergonomics to avoid RSI

Of-late in my office practice, i am getting to see more and more IT Professionals with RSI i,e repetitive strain injury. Some times Type1 RSI, but most of the times Type2 RSI. Since these individuals are working for 8 to 10 hrs per day at their workstations, it is safe to assume that the musculoskeletal pains  they are getting is related to the work environment, provided we have ruled out other specific causes. So what is RSI?

Repetitive strain injury or RSI is a range of painful or uncomfortable conditions of the muscles, tendons, nerves and other soft tissues, usually caused by repetitive use of a certain part of the body, often somewhere in the upper limbs. 

Since our patients are computer professional, it is important for them to practice good computer ergonomics to prevent RSI and also to reverse it in early stages.

What is good computer ergonomics?

A properly set-up office workstation helps workers maintain a neutral body

posture. This is a comfortable working posture, in which the joints are

naturally aligned, reducing stress and strain on the muscles, tendons, and

skeletal system, and minimising the risk of developing RSI. An adequate

workstation also helps to prevent fatigue, eye strain, headaches and stress

by controlling environmental conditions.

A neutral body posture has the following characteristics:

Inbuilt Microphone working on Vaio CS with Ubuntu

In my previous post i have said that internal mic was not working on my Sony Vaio CS with Ubuntu. Look here. Now we have a solution.

Open the file /proc/asound/card0/codec#0. If you find Codec : Realtek ALC262 (first line), go to the next step.
Edit alsabase.conf, for that type :

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf  in a terminal.

at the end of the file add the following line

options snd-hda-intel model=toshiba-s06


Reboot and the internal mic should work.
credit to magic-neophyte, look here.

Day trip to shravanabelagola, belur and halebidu from Bangalore

Splendid Rock temples of belur and halebidu are around 230kms from Bengaluru. Karnataka is famous for explicit rock cut/carved temples from ancient era. Built by hoysala kings, in soft stone in 11^th century, Belur & Halebidu rock temples have very elobarate carvings of mythological and social events. Shravanabelagola has worlds tallest monolithic statue of bahubali, a jain saint.

07.00: We planned a day trip to these three sites from Bangalore, since they are about 5 hrs drive from bangalore it was essential that we left early. We were four adults and two kids. Though we planned to start at at 6am, we managed to leave at 7.

08.00: It took almost an hour going through the ring roads of Bangalore to reach Nelamangla and the diversion towards hassan. Hassan road is nice though still under construction, so you expect lot of diversions.

12.00: We reached Shravanbelagola which is about 150 kms from Bangalore at 12 noon. Vindyagiri, on top of which there is bahubali also called gomateshwara's statue, has a steep ascent to the top. It requires some effort to get to the top especially for the old with arthritic knees. But the view from the top and the statue of bahubali, is worth all your efforts.

Essential apps for ubuntu lucid lynx

This is my list of 15 most useful apps for the ubuntu lucid lynx and ubuntu in general.

1. Google Chrome : Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer and easier.
   
   
   I feel that chrome is a wee bit faster than firefox especially the start time.
2. Google Earth : Google Earth lets you fly anywhere on Earth to view satellite imagery, maps, terrain,3D buildings, from galaxies in outer space to the canyons of the ocean. You can explore rich geographical content, save your toured places, and share with others.
   
   
3. GIMP : GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc. GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted. GIMP is written and developed under X11 on UNIX platforms. But basically the same code also runs on MS Windows and Mac OS X.
   
   

Solution to noisy fan issue on Sony Vaio CS

A few months back i wrote on this blog, how to rectify the noisy fan issue of Vaio CS17G. Look here.
Even though the noise reduced considerably, i still got a faint noise intermittently.

I decided to partition my hard disk and install ubuntu. Installed ubuntu 10.4 or lucid lynx and am running it since its beta release. Its been more than a month now and i am very much impressed with this new release. So much so that most of the times i am running ubuntu and i hardly ever needed to revert back to my vista partition. I might have done so only two times in a month.

I have noticed a peculiar thing that whenever i am running ubuntu i never get this noisy fan on this laptop. But if i revert back to vista, within 30 mins this intermittent fan noise starts.
Why this happens?
Because ubuntu runs at a lower temperature than vista on this machine, about 3 to 4 degrees less of CPU temp. It keeps below 50 degrees most of the times. But it is  >50 degrees most of the times, if i am running vista.
This could be the reason.
So if you want a permanent solution to the fan noise on Vaio CS it might help, if you switch to Ubuntu.

Bluetooth & suspend problems solved Macbook

It is a well known problem that on apple macbooks, whenever your battery lifetime is nearing the end or the battery is not functioning well, you will face these two problems.

• The bluetooth icon on the panel fades and it says bluetooth not available.

• And when this happens suspend will not work and when you close the lid, you can still hear the fan running noise intermittently.

These issues are some how related that if you have a battery related problem your bluetooth disappears and when this happens suspend will not work.

Apple says to reset the SMC, see here.
But this may not work for most as this may be a hardware problem.

I faced the same problem and after heavy googling was all set to take apart my macbook to set right the problem.

But since i replaced the battery the problem rectified on its own.
Initially after the replacement the problem persisted. But gradually i started getting the bluetooth available intermittently and whenever bluetooth is available suspend worked fine.
Later i was getting the bluetooth not available problems intermittently.
After nearly two months of new battery it seems now that the problem has disappeared completely. Now bluetooth is always available and suspend works fine.
So the fix is : Replace your battery if nothing else works.

Ubuntu lucid lynx 10.4 on Vaio CS17G

Its nearly a week since the release of ubuntu lucid lynx or ubuntu 10.4. I upgraded when it was still beta and now i have fully updated lynx. On my vaio cs17g, i was hoping it will fix few specific glitches with this laptop. see my previous blog for this.
So does anything change? Not really
Although there are a lot of improvements over ubuntu 9.10 like,

• Faster boot time: some guys claim to have a boot time of less than 10 secs, i get around 15 secs till Login screen.
• Improved appearances: in the sense, better default themes, i like dust sand, ambience
• Introduction of "me menu" which i feel is a very nice idea.

In terms of addressing my specific problems pertaining to this laptop, no much change.

• suspend does not work: it suspends well but no keyboard on wake up
• Inbuilt microphone does not work
• Media keys do not work

I managed to get the brightness key working after tweaking and getting them to work with nvclock.

Apart from these glitches i feel it is a great improvement over the previous release.

Ubuntu 9.10 on Sony Vaio VGN-CS17G

Hi, a little more than a month left now for the release of Ubuntu Lucid lynx i,e 10.04. I have been using ubuntu for the last 5 years,earlier on my previous sony vaio PGN-K115Z and now on my new vaio CS17G for the past 6 months. I have tried hard to get the most of my lappy in ubuntu. It is the time to list what has worked and what did'nt, since i want to move to ubuntu lucid beta ASAP.

What did'nt work:
1. Inbuilt microphone
2. Suspend works but no keyboard on waking up.
3. Media keys do not work.

What works:
1. Fn keys for volume control works including mute, up and down out of the box.
2. Fn brightness keys worked after tweaking, to get them work with nvclock
3. Inbuilt webcam works with cheese but not with camorama.
4. wifi works out of the box
5. Hibernate works out of the box.
6. Headphones work

Most of the other things worked.
For me, the one which caused much trouble was suspend. It is anoying to hibernate, as it takes more time to wake up than booting time. So you can actually shut down and boot everytime faster than hibernate

I have heard that the new kernel in lucid has rectified the problem of suspend. That is good news and that it is very fast in booting i,e under 10 secs boot.

I will report back when i install lucid beta on this machine.

Useful websites for Orthopaedic surgeons and Residents

Hi i have compiled a list of very useful websites for Orthopaedic residents and surgeons. The list has links to many sites with free medical information, some basic,some with recent advances. This has taken a lot of time and some heavy googling to compile, i hope you find this useful.

• 1. AO Foundation
• 2. Arthroscopy: The Journal of Arthroscopic and Related Surgery
• 3. Cardiovascular Medicine
• 4. Clinics in Sports Medicine

Save our Tigers

Hi there is a sharp drop in the tiger population in India. Only 1411 left now, with 86 deaths in 2009.
Our national animal, majestic and the biggest of the cats is in the brink of extinction.
There is a campaign going on called 'save our tigers'.
Pl voice your support for the same by visiting http://www.saveourtigers.com/.
Click on join the roar and pledge your support.
This is one of the many photographs of the most favorite animal of the world, by me.

Reduce Loud Rattling sony vaio CS fan noise

Update: 3 months since my post on reducing the fan noise. The noise seems to reappear. I took apart my vaio CS again to peep inside and try to figure out what exactly is the problem. I found that there is a lot of wobble when the fan rotates which makes the blades to brush the edges. So i came up with this.
Take a smooth surfaced plastic washer and stick it to the base of the center rod in the fans, like this in the photo. Look at the arrows to see how the washer is stuck to the base of the fan. After this put everything back as before. Now the fan noise is very minimal as the wobbling reduces to a great extent and the fan runs smoothly. For full article look below.

                                                                 

Hi it has been nearly 10 months since i started using vaio CS17G, it is an excellent laptop running vista without problems thus far. But since yesterday i started getting a strange loud fan noise all of a sudden.
I could follow the temp readings and the noise came on as soon as the temp was nearing 50C.
After googling for a while i learnt that this is a common problem with the sony laptops and was attributed to the faulty fans manufactured in china which were used by sony for their laptops.
I could go for repairs from sony under warranty, but for many people the problem returned after the repairs.
Since i had also partitioned the hard disk and installed ubuntu, i was not sure of warranty.
So i decided i will fix this on my own.
So these are the steps to reach the fan and fix the problem.

1. Disconnect power cable after shutdown and remove battery.

Lalbagh Flower show 2010

It is the time for the famous lalbagh flower show again. I was lucky to have visited it this year to witness the beautiful display of flowers. The flower formations inside the glass house were splendid especially the orchids, orchids with a wide range of colours. Here i present some of the photographs from the same.