Opera and SCIM...

How to use the SimpleChineseInputMethod with Opera on Linux:

Just add the following lines to your /usr/bin/opera file:

# Activate Chinese input
export LANGUAGE="de"
export LANG="de_DE.UTF-8"
export LC_CTYPE="zh_TW.UTF-8"

Actually you only need to set the LC_CTYPE variable... but anyway ;-)

Strange behavior with mplayer

I mainly use a 32" flat screen tv to watch my anime series... but sadly, the resolution of this nice piece of hardware is lower than the resolution of my every-day-use 19" monitor. 1366x768 compared to 1440x900.

After fiddeling around some time I found that cloning the main monitor's output with nvidia's Twinview option would leave me with a still quite reasonable performance on my desktop and still offer the possibility to 'view things' on my tv.

I set up a "TVtime" nautilus-actions with path

mplayer -fs -ass -xy 768

and parameter

%d/%f

Bad thing is that now *every* movie on the main screen is played with a 786 resolution... even if I don't use 'TVtime' or if I start my movies with -xy 1440. The window size is ok, but when I switch to fullscreen *zang*... probably a bug in LinuxMint/Ubuntu's MPlayer 1.0rc2 and/or compiz' fullscreen hint. (Just a hunch.) Anyhow, an unbearable situation.

To get past this I modified the menu entries for MPlayer a bit, using the X11 video output and -zoom option:

gmplayer -vo x11 -zoom %F

Performance is still very good, in spite of the use of software scaling (-zoom). And I never ended up with more than 65% CPU usage on an aged E6300 system with real 1080p encoded x264 material running a bunch of normal apps in the background.

Just a reminder to myself...