Gadget design, robotics, hacks, DIY technology and more.

I recently moved my blog from Blogger to an independently hosted WordPress installation and I needed to dynamically redirect the visitors going into the old pages so that the could see the new ones.

There are many tutorials on how to do this on the net but they usually involve fairly complex procedures and require modifying the Blogger HTML code and installing some plug-ins in WordPress. But, what I really wanted was a simple way of redirecting each blog post into its new version.

My solution:

I decided to write a little java script code that will do the job since it is a fairly simple task. All that is required to translate one of my permalinks is to strip the “.blogspot” part, and the “.html” part (see the example below).

Example:

Old address:  http://carlitoscontraptions.blogspot.com/2009/03/smoking-cyclops.html

New address: http://carlitoscontraptions.com/2009/03/smoking-cyclops/

The script:

<script type=”text/javascript”>

function redirect()
{
oldURL = document.URL;
oldURL = oldURL.replace(/.blogspot/, “”);
oldURL = oldURL.replace(/.html/, “/”);
window.location.href=oldURL;
}

window.setTimeout(‘redirect()’,5000);
</script>

This script consist of two parts: (1) a function that strips the unneeded parts from the current page URL, and (2) a time delay that executes this code after 5 s.

The only thing left to do is to insert this code into an HTML/Java script box in the Blogger layout editor and that’s it. No messy template edition required.

The Arduino software is good and works very well under Linux. Nevertheless, it doesn’t create a menu item when installed and it can be tricky to create one for those who are not very used to Linux (like me).

In order to add a KDE menu launcher for the Arduino software, open the KDE Menu Editor, create a new item and put

cd /opt/arduino-0007/; ./arduino

in the Command field. Also, make sure that Run in terminal is checked and replace /opt/arduino-0007/ by your own installation path.

I’m sure there are thousands of other ways of doing this (including many than only require a few commands in the terminal) but at least this ways is pretty simple and and can be done without knowing that much about Linux.

Amarok
Forget about iTunes, and even Winamp. Amarok is the best music library organizer there is. I was a big fan of Winamp before now Amarok is my player of choice.

With Amarok, you can download album covers, lyrics, see songs related to the one you’re playing, have artist info from Wikipedia, submit player tracks to last.fm, keeps lots of stats about your songs, manage your iPod (and other portable players), subscribe to podcasts, burn CDs (through k3b), and many many other features.

Inkscape
Inkscape is a free vector drawing program. It is full of features, allows to create professional quality vector drawing and is really light. Really, amazing software.

OpenOffice.org
OO.o is the office suite you always wanted. Imagine an office suite where all the features work as they should. Where you can apply styles to your text and be safe to think the program wont mess it up by applying the formatting it thinks is right. Where you can do “advanced” page numbering (e.g. numbering only some pages while leaving other pages unnumbered for instance) without having to spend lots of time getting it right (if you ever manage to get it right). OO.o is all that and more (that I have not discovered yet).

For those wondering about M$ Office compatibility, I can say that Word compatibility is not that good, Powerpoint compatibility seems flawless, and I have not tried the rest.

Beagle
Beagle allows to index and search files on the computer. IMHO it is much better than Google desktop search. It searches inside almost every file type and even in rss feeds very fast.

Automatix
Although installing software on Ubuntu is quite easy (you simply select it in the package manager) some things may be slightly more tricky to install (such as nVidia drivers). Automatix allows you to install all the most popular programs with very few clicks.

VMware
Although you might be thinking that compared to all this, other mainstream OS seem useless and costly, they are sometimes necessary. For instance I need to use Photoshop, OrCad or SolidWorks (they have not released a Linux version for these programs yet) and sometimes (unfortunately) M$ word (if I have to write a text for someone who only uses M$ software).

There are many solutions for this situations: (1) using wine (which allows to natively run win apps on Linux, but compatibility is still poor), (2) dual booting (which is not very good since you have to restart each time you need to change OS), (3) using VMware (the best solution IMHO).

With VMware you can run any OS on top of Linux. The mainstream OS runs as fast (or just slightly slower) than its normal speed on top of Ubuntu on my system. VMware even allows to connect peripherals to the virtual machine so you can print or your an iPod for instance.
Note that many of these programs are cross platform so they work on other OS as well.