KDE: Creating a RocketDock style quick launch bar

Since a few days I've been looking for a KDE replacement of RocketDock, which is basically a quicklaunch bar at the top of the screen.
Today I came up with a nice solution, which isnt a perfect replacement, but enough for what I wanted:

A Spammer who won a prize and two new CD's

As always, it's been a long time since my last post. I didn't pass the test in higher mathmatics, so I have to learn a lot, plus the usual stuff I have to do for working.
I promise to continue the Ireland series and also will report you the new and noteworthy things from the FOSDEM 2011 in Brussels, where I've been with Nik.

This morning I woke up. Pling! New mail on my cell phone. It was a PM notification mail from Last.fm. You might know I'm one of the moderators there. It was something like

Maybe this is your golden chance! Just one click to win a prize! Give it a try
- it is free but if you have some luck... :)

Dear Spammer!
Thanks for being so stupid, that really made my day :D I mean, which intelligent human being either codes a bot who sends spam to mods or, if sending the message manually, checks that I'm not a bot.
Please, next time use a big red "PLEASE BAN ME" sign as avatar and the same text as profile name.
Thanks :D

Other news....I bought two new CD's, namely

• R.E.M. - Around the Sun with Leaving New York on it(13 Tracks, 8 Euro)
• The Doors - The Very Best Of The Doors with e.g. Riders On The Storm and Light My Fire on it(20 Tracks, 20 Euro)

I really love them both although one Euro per track is really an exception I made, because I love "Riders On The Storm" :)

And yes, I still buy CDs! I love it to put them into my CD player and read the inlet while the music is playing and most times the inlet contains lyrics, too, so you can sing the track which is playing currently. Plus you never can get a better audio quality than from CD.

Ireland day 3: The wonderful barn

The third day I didn't do anything special, I was just soo happy to see Isy again <3
Yesterday's bus trip to Leixlip was nearly painless except the bus had to wait for a traffic accident to be cleaned up. Isy and me had a lot of things to talk about and time passed by too fast! Nina, Zoe and the rest of the family were so friendly and lovely as all the other poeple in Ireland, which is maybe a bit unusal for german poeple, but I was happy :D

When she sent me her letter weeks before, I googled her address and saw a strange building called "The Wonderful Barn" just a footstep away.
So now I liked to see it and went there with her and little Tadgh. He looked really sweet in his buggy and was very happy about the walk for fresh air and a shiny blue sky.
So here it is, the Wonderful Barn:

Ireland day 2: Dublin Bay

So here is a new episode about my trip to Ireland last autumn (how time can fly by...).
Dublin isn't that far away from the Irish Sea, it's got a large area of docks and that stuff. You could see the cranes and some red-white chimneys in the far distance and it was clear to me that I wanted to go there.
On my trip, which partly was a long walk down the liffey, I took of course some nice photos which I want to show you. If you like the photos, take a look at my Picasa web album at https://picasaweb.google.com/t.burny/IrelandDay2DublinBay#. All picutures have a Creative Commons cc-by-nc-sa 3.0 license :) If you want to have them in full 12 megapixels, just contact me.

Breakfast started with a really funny and interesting article in a news paper lying around at the hostel:

KDE 4.6 is out and I love it!

Today I discovered KDE has released version 4.6 of their desktop Suite.
It is really awesome and much faster, although I still have to explore the details a bit further (never used e.g. "Activities"). I was surprised by the really cool login screen, then by the faceted search feature of dolphin, etc....

Desktop and Dolphin

I came to that point when I booted kubuntu on my desktop pc to upgrade it to Kubuntu 10.10 Maverick. When I clicked on the wifi icon, something totally different than on my laptop showed up. Have to admit I have been using Windows 7 on it for a while, but I was astonished how fast Kubuntu (still with old KDE) was. I thought that I might have missed something during the various dist-upgrades on my laptop and stumbled upon the great news. I first updated on my laptop(just add ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports to your software sources via KPackageKit), which didn't make any effect on that network-manager tray icon, the old one was still there.

T42p: Making AccessIbm Button launch an application

Under Kubuntu, the "Access IBM" button has no function. I just decided to change that, luckily it's like a key on the normal keyboard so we can assign an action to it.
In my example this will be konsole, the KDE terminal. You can't ever get enough of them ^^
Follow these simple steps:

• Open KDE system settings dialog
• Click 'keyboard shortcuts and gesture control'
• Now "My Shortcuts" on the left should be highlighted. At the bottom center of the dialog, click "Edit", then "New->Global Shortcut->Command/Address"
• Give the Action a name, e.g. "AccessIbm Button"
• Go to the "trigger" tab, click on the button and press the "Access IBM" key. If the caption changed, you can succeed, else retry
• Go to the action tab and type /usr/bin/konsole into the text field
• Click "Apply"

Now you're done! Press the "Access IBM" key to test it and have fun ;)
From what I've seen you also can assign dbus signals, keystrokes(keyboard macro functions!) , etc. just play around with it a bit.

Ireland day 1: Dublin (part 3) - Dublin at Night

In this post, I will mostly let pictures talk and maybe say only a few words on single ones. Most of them are bridges, which are illuminated by green light from below.Looks really beautiful, doesn't it?

Custom House at Night

Millenium Bridge