A working touchpad!

Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn
Linux kernel 3.17.0
Toshiba Tecra W50-A

After months of waiting I now have fully functional touchpad on my laptop.  Work bought me a very new, relatively expensive notebook, which of course means it's taken the linux kernel some time to catch up with my hardware.  The touchpad was identified as a generic PS/2 device, and while I had basic functionality, niceties like scrolling -- nevermind palm detection -- were out of the question.

I had hoped that the 3.16 kernel shipping with Ubuntu 14.10 would do the job, so I upgraded even though I would have preferred to stick with the 14.04 LTS version on this machine.  No luck.  But the upgrade went rather painlessly, which emboldened me to try installing the latest stable version.  These instructions worked without a glitch, and as soon as it rebooted I knew it had worked!  (The mouse pointer responded subtly differently.)  Now I have a new device to configure.

Shrinking PDFs

Ubuntu 14.04 Trust Tahr
pdftk
ghostscript

I quite often use pdftk for re-arranging pdf files, but the resulting pdfs can be quite large (not always pdftk's fault).  Fortunately, I found this trick using ghostscript can produce documents of a friendlier size.  I find that -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen can produce a document that is too low in quality, but -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook works rather well.

Photo Information

Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamander
Nikon D3200

Having recently acquired a DSLR to play with, I was frustrated by the lack of metadata displayed by the "properties function" of the file manager.  Specifically, in the "Image" tab I could see the exposure time and the ISO, but not the aperture size.  That information -- along with much, much more -- is there, as can be seen by uploading the photo to Flickr.  But courtesy of one of the posters at Superuser, I found this neat command line tool: exiv2.  An example of it's handiwork:

> exiv2 DSC_0001.JPG
File name       : DSC_0001.JPG
File size       : 6445139 Bytes
MIME type       : image/jpeg
Image size      : 6016 x 4000
Camera make     : NIKON CORPORATION
Camera model    : NIKON D3200
Image timestamp : 2014:06:07 17:48:57
Image number    :
Exposure time   : 1/100 s
Aperture        : F4.2
Exposure bias   : 0 EV
Flash           : No flash
Flash bias      :
Focal length    : 26.0 mm (35 mm equivalent: 39.0 mm)
Subject distance:
ISO speed       : 3200
Exposure mode   : Aperture priority
Metering mode   : Multi-segment
Macro mode      :
Image quality   : NORMAL
Exif Resolution : 6016 x 4000
White balance   : AUTO      
Thumbnail       : image/jpeg, 8762 Bytes
Copyright       :
Exif comment    :                                     

exiv2 is in the Universe repository. 

New gaming rig

Modest, as far as such things go, but here it is:
Core i5 4440 3.1 GHz
ASRock H87M MB
2x Adata 4GB Premier Pro DDR3
Gigabyte GV-N650OC-2GI GTX 650 2GB
Adata Premier Pro SP900 128GB SATA3 SSD
Seagate 500GB Barracuda SATA3 HDD
LG 20EN33TS-B 20" LED Monitor
Aywun 550W MEGA POWER Elite Series Power Supply
SilverStone RL01B ATX Mid Tower Case

I bought the 128GB SSD with a view to dual booting, but so far it's just Linux (Ubuntu 13.10).  Stream games are working well (Crusader Kings II, Kerbal Space Program and Half-Life).  I will see how much I can get to work under PlayOnLinux.  With a bit of luck, this box might stay Windows free.