Tuesday, December 25, 2012

How to fix a double clicking Logitech MX1000 wireless laser mouse

I've got an almost 7 years old Logitech MX1000 wireless laser mouse. After a few years from the purchase I started experiencing a rather annoying issue: every now and then a single click was followed by a quick misfired second double click. So it became hard to accomplish simple tasks like moving or resizing a window with this mouse. Now I have decided that I had enough and I started looking for a solution. Googling around it turns out that this is a very common problem among Logitech mouse users, e.g. [1, 2]. As you can read from those posts, you have basically two roads: either your mouse is still covered by the warranty period and therefore you can ask for a replacement, or you fix it by yourself (of course you can always choose to throw your Logitech mouse away and go for a replacement, but I won't discuss this option here :P)

Saturday, July 21, 2012

gtumbler - A New Graphical PDF Manager for Ubuntu

I am delighted to announce the first stable release of gtumbler (formerly gistiller), a new graphical PDF manager completely written in Python. It is distributed under the terms of the GNU GPL v3 license (the pyPDF python modules shipped with the app are distributed under a modified version of the BSD license). If you want to give it a try you can get it directly from my PPA "The Nest of Heliopolis" hosted by Launchpad. If you are using Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin, you can add my PPA to your APT sources list by simply typing

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:phoenix1987/ppa
sudo apt-get update

Then you can install gtumbler with the command

sudo apt-get install gtumbler

or directly from the Software Center.

The major features of gtumbler are:

  • convert PostScript documents to PDF format;
  • merge multiple PostScript/PDF documents into a single one
  • extract pages from document;
  • modify the bounding box of each page in a document (e.g. to crop white margins)
  • pattern renaming of a list of documents You can also modify each document by invoking a PDF editor directly from gtumbler. By default gtumbler uses Xournal.

    Here is a screenshot of the application in action