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Until now, the experience you get when using Gnome in a docking station is pretty dismal. Our infrastructure didn't really implement any policies to make docking stations work properly.
Jon McCann clarified my mind about what it is that we need to do to support docking stations properly, at least in terms of plugging monitors and when the laptop should suspend or not. The current state of affairs is pretty bad — you dock your laptop, plug an external monitor, close the laptop's lid... and the image keeps showing on both displays, even though the lid is closed. Things like that.
I've been working on the docking-stations branch in gnome-settings-daemon to fix this. Things are much better now:
- A laptop will stay running (i.e. not suspended) as long as there are monitors plugged into it, even if the lid is closed. This takes care of the "I want to close the laptop and use an external monitor" problem.
- The laptop will suspend when no monitors are plugged in if you close the lid.
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A DBus interface to show files in the file manager
One of the tasks for Akshay Gupta, my student for this year's Summer of Code, was to implement a DBus interface in Nautilus so that applications can ask that the file manager show a file within its containing folder. This is makes it possible to implement the "circulation for your files" pattern.
On the xdg-list, we've discussed a simple interface that file managers ought to implement:
<interface name='org.freedesktop.FileManager1'> <method name='ShowFolders'> <arg type='as' name='URIs' direction='in'/> <arg type='s' name='StartupId' direction='in'/> </method> <method name='ShowItems'> <arg type='as' name='URIs' direction='in'/> <arg type='s' name='StartupId' direction='in'/> </method> <method name='ShowItemProperties'> <arg type='as' name='URIs' direction='in'/> <arg type='s' name='StartupId' direction='in'/> </method> </interface>I guess I should write a super-short spec to detail that.
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A bedside table for our bedroom
The other day I finished making this simple bedside table for our bedroom. The legs and stretchers are aromatic cedar, and the surfaces are mahogany. The stretchers and legs are mortised-and-tenoned, and pegged with oak (I think) dowels. The top is square, and the proportions of the table and the position of the shelf match the golden ratio.
But that's fancy talk. The layman's version is: this is a solid wood bedside table, with good construction, that will last for decades. Materials cost, oh, I don't know, no more than 300 pesos (that is, what, 20 USD or so).
This is unlike the garbage you buy in stores, which is made of
formaldehyde-laden termite diarrheaparticle board veneered with essentially plastic, and fastened together with staples and other horrors — by underpaid Asian slaves. We just saw one-of-a-pair of bedside tables at Sears, built like that, for 5000 pesos. With the humidity here, that abomination won't last for 10 years.
