A Must Have iPhone App – Streaks

Posted by Bhavik in Other on May 11, 2009

I finally got myself an iPhone recently, thanks to my cousin randomly buying me one outta nowhere! The things amazing, theres nothing it can’t do. The first day I went on an app shopping spree. I think I had around 7 pages of apps within 6 hours of having the phone :) So anyway, I wanted to share my favorite app with you guys.

Some background info…
I could never stay motivated to workout. I’d always start and go strong for 2 weeks and then stop for months. So I found this iPhone app called Streaks. It tracks how often you do something. You can setup a calendar for each thing you want to track. The thing I wanted to tackle was pushups. Each day I did them i’d mark an X in my Streaks app. Today I’m up to 29 days in a row! That’s pretty much unheard of for me, so the app works wonders. You can even track things every other day, every week, and every month.
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Replace Gnome-Panel with Tint2

Posted by Bhavik in Linux on April 7, 2009

Hey guys, Today we’re going to get rid of gnome-panel and replace it with something much better looking…

Tint2 is a a fully customizable taskbar that can add some more eyecandy to your linux desktop. It features custom color and transparency on fonts, icons, borders and background. It also has a clock you can setup.

To get it, download it from this link. Save it to your desktop and open up a terminal. Type in the following commands to extract and install tint2 (your folders may be different if you downloaded a different version)

cd Desktop/
tar -xvf tint2-0.7-beta1.tar.gz
cd tint2-0.7-beta1.tar.gz/
cd src/
make
sudo make install

After the install, I tried to run it in my terminal and got this error…

tint2: error while loading shared libraries: libImlib2.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

This can be fixed by installing the libimlib2 library. You can look for it in synaptic or type

sudo apt-get install libimlib2

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Have Conky Check Your Email!

Posted by Bhavik in Linux on March 5, 2009

So I think it’s pretty clear that I don’t like doing things in my browser that a script can do for me. Woot.com, Stock Quotes and NHL Scores have all been taken care of. Now if only conky could tell me if I have new mail. This would save me from logging in and checking manually…

Thanks to python’s easy to use IMAP library this is a piece of cake. The script should work with any IMAP mail server. I have tested it with my Gmail and Drexel University accounts. Your mail server info should be publicly available. Google has theirs under the gmail settings >> imap/pop3 tab (You may have to enable imap under this tab). Best bet is to search google.

The script shows you the total number of messages in your inbox and the number that are unread.

To get it working edit your .conkyrc file. Add the following line under the TEXT section. Change the path to where your script is

${execi 60 python /path/to/script/imap.py}

This’ll make obsessive email checking much easier…no need to login manually :)

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Woot.com Item of the Day on your Desktop

Posted by Bhavik in Linux on February 27, 2009

The first thing I check in my browser everyday is what’s for sale on woot.com. Its a site that features one deal per day and charges 5 bucks for shipping no matter what the product is.

This morning I decided to write a script to stick the deal in my conky. Having it sit on my desktop means one less thing to manually check in my browser :)

If you don’t know what conky is here’s my conky tutorial
I used the same method as I do in the rest of my scripts…set flags around our data, extract the info between the flags and shoot it out to conky.
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Stock Quotes on your Desktop with Conky

Posted by Bhavik in Linux on February 27, 2009

I wrote another script today to save me from needing to open up a browser.
The old process for stock quotes was, go to yahoo, type in each stock, get the price.
The new process involves only directing my attention to the bottom right corner of my desktop. All stocks of interest are lined up inside my conky. They auto refresh every 2 minutes for me. I can see the current value, what it opened at, and the change.

If you don’t know what conky is click here for my conky tutorial.

To get it working, download the script and add the following line to your .conkyrc
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