I was discussing this with my friend Jason and he recommended playing with the font sizes. Sure enough, that did the trick! It seems that the reason everything is so big is that the default font sizes are 10pt. I shrank them down and MAN does it look nice now!

You can edit these values one ways; via gconf-editor or via gconftool-2 on the command line. I won’t post the gconf-editor direction since, if you know your way around it, you can extrapolate the parts you want to edit via the gconftool-2 commands. The following settings worked extremely well for me, but you can adjust the font faces and sizes as you see fit.

gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/metacity/general/titlebar_font "Sans Bold 8"
gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/interface/font_name "Sans 9"
gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/interface/monospace_font_name "Monospace 9"

This will adjust the title bar, all normal window text and all monospace text, respectively. Again, these numbers looked the best to me, but you can make them even smaller (or bigger) to fit your needs. I did these adjustments on my 1680×1050 display as well, and it looks amazing. Then again, I love small text!

Another way to free up screen space is to auto-hide the panel(s) you have. Now, I know this is cumbersome with the default settings because it’s slow to respond and expand, but you can tweak that stuff too. Here’s what I have set:

gconftool-2 --type boolean --set /apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel_screen0/auto_hide 1
gconftool-2 --type boolean --set /apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel_screen0/enable_animations 1
gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel_screen0/animation_speed fast
gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel_screen0/hide_delay 500
gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel_screen0/unhide_delay 100

Now, it opens much faster, animates much faster and goes away much faster. the hide_delay is fast enough that if I’m sloppy with the pointer, it still doesn’t disappear when I don’t want it to. Still annoying? play around with the hide and unhide delays until it works for you. Still too slow to pop in? Set enable_animations to 0 and it’ll come on the screen instantly.

As an added piece of advice, if your panel is over-crowded with junk, you can add another panel (or 2 or 3…) to separate out tasks. For example, I have a small, hidden, non-expanding panel I keep in the bottom left of the screen on which I have my timer-applet and my hamster-applet. Additionally, if you have something on your panel that you always want to see on your screen, add it to another panel that you don’t hide.

• Toss some laundry in the machine
• Start my lunch and work while it cooks
• Sign for packages when they are delivered

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. However, to make telecommuting possible, there are some technologies I simply MST have working. VPN is a big one, so I can get at the computers back in the office. SSH and FTP access is important to manage servers and files. And of course, I need to communicate with people; for that, we use AIM and Skype. Up until recently, it’s been enough for me to use my Nokia N800 to make my calls back to the office. It’s no good for chatting with video though, so I needed to set it up on my desktop with my camera and, preferably, my headset.

Simple enough task really; both my Logitech webcam and Plantronics headset work out of the box with Ubuntu (at least in 9.04) with nearly zero configuration required. I just plug them in, tweak Skype quickly and I’m up and running. However, with the addition of PulseAudio in the more recent version of Ubuntu, this became a little trickier.

You see, in the new version of Skype, the ONLY option I have for ANY audio, input or output, is simpley PulseAudio. No control for which device to use for different tasks. Enter padevchooser, short for PulseAudio Device Chooser.

It’s a pretty sweet application, and you should have no problem installing it since it’s in the repository (note: I’ve added the Medibunutu repo, and it’s possible it came from there). Once installed, you simply run it, from the command line, the run dialog, gnome-do or whatever method you choose, and you’ll get an icon in the notification area. Click on that, choose Volume Control, and you’re off and running. There are tabs for Playback, Recording, Output Devices, and Input Devices. Any current audio stream will show up in the list in the appropriate tab and you can move them around to different devices.

The easiest way to configure Skype is to place a test call. As soon as you start that call it will show up in the list. Move the “Skype: Output” stream to your headset in the Playback tab, do the same for “Skype: Input” in the Recording tab and you’re off and running. All Skype audio is now sent to your headset for easy chatting. I still haven’t figured out how to make it ring through the speakers and still use the headset for chatting, but this is good enough for now. Padevchooser made living with PulseAudio that much better!

Of course, their webpage kept kicking me off the album I was trying to buy and I had to keep pulling it back in from my history. And the album page lacked a way to purchase the WHOLE thing, I had to hunt that down from the band’s album list page. How any normal person (ie. my parents, or, GASP, my grandparents) is supposed to buy mp3s from Amazon is beyond me!

Despite all these problems, I finally had a “Buy MP3 Album” link and I was ready to go. I clicked on it and it verified that I would be purchasing the album. “Awesome, here we go,” I thought, thinking I would be taken to the checkout process and be given this magical file which would download the album through the download software I just installed. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Instead, I was greeted with a page saying that the order failed and that I had to do one of the following:

• Verify or update your 1-click billing address in the “Payment Settings” section of Your Account. (with a link)
• Retry with the existing credit card. (no idea what this means, I tried 3 times and got the same errors)
• Choose a different payment method from your account. (the one useful tip, with no indication of HOW i would do that!)
• Enter a new payment method. (Again, no link, no idea how!!!!)

They did have a link to their Help pages, which had all kinds of information on the Kindle 2, tracking my shipment, etc. No indication of how I buy mp3s without 1-click billing enabled or “[c]hoose a different payment method.” Needless to say, this crap is unusable! I’ve uninstalled their software, vowed to never buy mp3s from their site (not that I could if I wanted to, which I did) and I’ll no go out of my way to buy the physical discs from some other site, whether they’re available on Amazon or not.

This is exactly how NOT to sell mp3s. With processes like this, it’s no wonder at all why nobody can cut in to Apple’s market, no matter how over-priced and under-featured their players are and how terrible their iTunes software is!

One of the other easier CAPTCHAs I’ve used at work is a little dynamic images that asks you to do a little simple math. It’s an idea I saw on another site so I thought I would give it a try and it’s been extremely effective despite it’s ease of being broken. Surprisingly, it has completely stopped all SPAM coming through our contact form.

Another one I tried, much less effectively, is a colored word and a dropdown with a number of colors to choose from. It literally asks “What color is this text?” and offers a number of possibilities. This, however, was not effective for more than a week or so. The form still sees about one or two SPAM messages a day, which is especially strange because it’s a site that sees far less traffic. I think if I added more colors that weren’t even valid selections and changed the order it might be more effective, but I still need to find something better.

I’m thinking a system that would show three images and ask which one doesn’t belong could be usable, but it’s a little more difficult to implement; where do I get the images, how do I randomize the data, etc. I really like the HotOrNot CAPTCHA because the images always change and all of the images and data are crowdsourced, nothing for you to manage.

So, what can one do? Sadly, I don’t have an answer, but there is a lot of work being done on the topic. I think I need to just keep looking and mull this all over for a bit. We’ll see what I can find or come up with.