Listening radio on the internet

One can listen to the radio using a computer, if one has an internet connection, and a player, that supports streams. As almost all nowadays players (winamp, rhythmbox, amarok, iTunes, foobar2000, xmplay are just some of them) support streams, the harder task seems to find a radio station that suits one's taste. Here I list the ones that I like; that's just my taste, and there's no need to be liked by anyone else. Also, if the radio stations listed here are not at one's taste, one may want to visit the website mike's radio world and choose a radio station from a great list of radio stations there. Also, at the address of Shoutcast.com is a list of over 800 radio stations for listening on the internet.

* Not wanting to have my opinion as obsolete, the soft smooth jazz section of Last.fm is great. Here are also some other radio stations that I like:

* Frequencejazz is a french radio, that plays nice jazz things that I like. For to listen to it, just drag and drop the following link into your player: Link to frequencejazz
* I come from Bulgaria, and I like a radio station there, the Retro radio. It plays music I like. For to listen to it, drag and drop the following link into your media player: Link to retro radio (one has to be patient, since the link doesn't work sometimes; but to me the music there is worth the patience)
* There's also a german radio station that I listen to from time to time; the so called 106.8 Rock'n Pop. It's a good one. To listen to it, drag and drop the following link into your media player: Link to 106.8 Rock'n pop

Linux - How about SMplayer?

SMplayer (http://smplayer.sourceforge.net/), currently newest version 0.5, is, to me, the new multimedia leader in the linux world. Well, as I use it instead of my beloved BSplayer on my Windows machine, I guess it is also a great video player for Windows as well.
SMplayer uses the mplayer engine (http://www.mplayerhq.hu ), which by many is thought to be the best video player for linux. But for a long time there has been no simple, intuitive and complete frontend for this player. Until now.
The unique thing, one that I like mplayer (and hence SMplayer) about is, that it would allow me to watch a movie onlne with my extra-slow internet connection. I'm not very much sure if this is because of the cache it creates, or the usage of RAM memory it has, but for sure I'm happy about this.
Now, about the features of SMplayer. Probably the feature that distinguishes SMplayer the most is its ability to remember the settings for a movie - so the next time one starts it, the movie is played from where it had been stopped. This, of course, is a setting by default, which easily may be stopped from the settings box of SMplayer.
Another features may be found at the SMplayer website, at the features section. But they are many, and most of them were just (on my opinion) what one would want from a media player. The best one, of course, is that SMplayer is published under the GPL licence.
There is a translation in Bulgarian, which, of course, makes me very happy. As for the linux media players, the preferences dialog can be compared with the one of VLC. The ones who have used VLC may know how complicated things there may become; however, SMplayer allows an intuitive way for configuration. When using it with windows, there may be a need to tell SMplayer which font to use for the subtitles (for instance, C:/WINDOWS/Fonts/times.ttf). Some other basic configuration may be needed; however, after this, SMplayer is trully powerful; for me it is the best solution for video at linux at present time. And the best, it is under heavy development, so new features are probably being added even as I write this.

Linux - Conky tweaks

Sources: http://ubuntuforums.org, http://ubuntugeek.com


When making conky start on startup, it sometimes covers the panel, which doesn't look good. For this reason, here's a script, that would delay the startup of conky for some time.
This is supposed to be the file .conkylaunch:

#!/bin/bash
sleep 25 &&
conky &
exit

Then must be made: chmod + x .conkylaunch

Conky sometimes flickers after first installing. This may be fixed by

gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

finding the section "Module" and adding "Load dbe". Conky should flicker no more.

Linux - another .conkyrc file

Yet another .conkyrc, this one is one-line down. Source: http://ubuntuforums.org

background yes
double_buffer yes
use_spacer yes
use_xft yes
xftfont Bitstream Vera Sans:size=9
xftalpha 0.8
update_interval 30.0
own_window yes
own_window_type override
own_window_transparent yes
own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager
default_color grey
own_window_colour brown
double_buffer yes
draw_shades no
draw_borders no
draw_outline yes
stippled_borders no
border_margin 0
border_width 1
alignment bottom_left
minimum_size 1262
gap_x 9
gap_y 9
uppercase yes

TEXT
${color darkgrey}Uptime:${color white}$uptime ${color}|${color} ${color darkgrey}Battery time:${color white}${battery_time} ${color}|${color} ${color darkgrey}Temp.(C):${color white}${acpitemp} ${color}|${color} ${color darkgrey}Load:${color white}${loadavg} ${color}|${color} ${color darkgrey}Space used:${color white}${fs_used /}/${color white}${fs_size /} ${color}|${color} ${color darkgrey}eth0: ${color white}${downspeed eth0} kbps${color darkgrey} down (${color white}${totaldown eth0}b${color darkgrey} total), ${color white}${upspeed eth0} kbps${color darkgrey} up (${color white}${totalup eth0}b${color darkgrey} total) on ${color white}${addr eth0}
${color}

Linux - useful tweaks and commands

Here are some useful commands and tips for Ubuntu linux; the greatest part of them have as a source http://ubuntuforums.org.
1. How to change Rhythmbox icons I personally prefer using audacious, but in the rare cases, when I use Rhythmbox, I prefer that it has nice looking icons. An iconset may be found here.
Then, go to ~/.icons (may be needed to press Ctrl + H to show hidden files), create folder "gnome", put the icons from gnome.tar.bz2 in there - and the way rhythmbox looks like is changed.
2. How to access filesystem as root at the window manager Type

sudo nautilus

and you can easily rename/copy/paste/change permissions of folders in your filesystem. WARNING! If you don't know what you're doing, this may cause a fault to your system. Be careful, when using the root.
3. How to make global hotkeys for audacious Press Alt+F2, type gconf-editor, go to "apps->metacity->keybinding_commands", use command_1 till command_5, typing in audacious -s, audacious -t, etc. (open a terminal and type audacious --help for the list of commands for audacious), then go to apps->metacity->global_keybindings, and assign a global hotkey for the commands 1-5, i.e. run_command_1 =< Mod4>z (This uses the windows button of your keyboard; instead of Mod4 can be used any other, for instance Ctrl or Alt). Similar should be the setting of global hotkeys for other players (for instance, Exaile).
4. How to mount an iso: To mount the ISO image file.iso to the mount point /mnt/test use this command:

mount -o loop -t iso9660 file.iso /mnt/test