dimitar.me

Ubuntu – Choose what volume to control with your keyboard sound controls

Like any other laptop my Acer has a designated keyboard sound control. I can turn the volume up, down or mute it all together. This was working fine until one day I decided to mess with a couple of microphones (the built in and an external one). All of a sudden I noticed that my volume knob no longer controlled the speaker volume but the microphone (input) sound instead.

I automatically decided that I had somehow messed up the kernel keycodes or the GNOME key mapping. After spending sometime looking into this I found out that the issue was much simpler than this.

I must have looked at least a half dozen times at the sound dialog (Preferences->Sound) but on the n-th time I realized what the issue was.

If you look at the bottom of it you will see a section called “Default Mixer Tracks”, then there is a drop down to choose the device and a text box with a bunch of different options:

Sound Preferences

Notice the quick explanation at the very bottom: “Select the device and tracks to control with the keyboard…”. They have to put this in red font for ignorant people like me! I only noticed it after I had found out the problem.

I had changed the device in this section to “Capture: HDA Intel” when I was playing with the microphones. All I had to do is put it back to “HDA Intel (Alsa mixer)” and then picked the master track. Then I was back in business…

It is good to know that I can easily change what volume my keyboard controls are in charge of without having to mess with the GNOME key tables.

If you have a problem where the computer does not even respond to a keyboard event, look at this entry in the Ubuntu wiki. It has a good explanation of how to diagnose and fix the issue.

Find out who links to your website

You can use the power of the search engines to find out who has links pointing to your site or to any domain for that matter.

In Google the syntax is allinanchor:domain.name. For example you would put this in the search box:

allinanchor:dimitar.me

to find out all the external links to this site.

In Yahoo and Altavista the syntax is linkdomain:domain.name. For example:

linkdomain:dimitar.me

Besides being useful to find out the popularity of your site, this technique could also be used to find out more information about anyone or anything.

It will allow you to find out who has links to the person in question on their blogs and social networking sites… Also it will show you things like the profiles they had created in different forums for instance (if they had put a link to their site in the profile description of course). There are a lot of possibilities here… Give it a try for yourselves.

Depeche Mode Live in Tampa

I finally materialized a teenage dream and went to see Depeche Mode live last Friday. It was everything I expected even more. They sounded incredible and Dave Gahan’s voice was as good as ever. It could have been the acoustics at the amphitheater but the live performance of the songs was better than the studio versions. Martin Gore also sang 2-3 of his songs and did a great job of it.

Depeche Mode -Ford Amphitheater in Tampa, September 4th 2009

At the concert I felt like I had to go see them again the next day in Fort Lauderdale. May be I should have…

I took a few videos. The quality is not that bad considering I took them with my iPhone.

Their “Tour of the Universe” continues to Mexico and then back in Europe. This could be the last chance to go see them live.