Ubuntu is fun

[Stan_Lite]

I normally use my K800i as a back up alarm for getting up in the morning but yesterday, there was no sound from it and the only solution I could find was to give it a tap. This worked ok but I decided it wasn't a reliable enough solution so I decided to see if I could use my laptop as an alarm clock.
I have the small laptop with me which only has Ubuntu on it to force me to use it and learn so I set about finding a way to set it up as an alarm clock.

First job was to find an alarm application – the one I decided upon was kalarm which is a KDE app but works fine in Gnome. It will alert with text or picture or you can set it to run a command at the appointed time. All very well and good.

I wanted to wake myself up with some music so I needed to be able to set kalarm to run a command to play a music file to wake me up.

I found an excellent little application called plait which, once installed, can play music files through your chosen audio player (Amarok in my case) from a simple command.
I set kalarm to run the command

plait alternative ulster

at 05:00 and crossed my fingers.

I awoke this morning at 05:00 to the strains of Alternative Ulster by Stiff Little Fingers – everything worked a treat. Using the multiple workspace facility, I can leave it open permanently in it's own workspace and set it to run every day at the same time. With the help of Ubuntu's ability to save changes in each session, I can leave it and it will remain there no matter how many times I switch the machine off and on.

I really like plait; if I'm doing something on the pooter and I fancy a quick choon whilst I work, I don't have to open Amarok, scroll through playlists or collections and then play them or open 4 folders to get to the track/s I want. All I need to do is open a terminal window and type a simple command:

plait alternative

will play alternative Ulster,

plait inflammable

will play the album Inflammable material or

plait stiff

will play all songs in my collection by Stiff Little Fingers (it will also play any songs/albums/artists which contain the word 'stiff'). If all you want is Stiff little fingers, you just narrow the search by adding keywords such as 'fingers' but as I have nothing else that matches stiff, that does fine.

I really like Ubuntu, it's a lot of fun finding things out and implementing them. It'll do pretty much anything you want it to do, if you find the right apps.
I'm still at the stage where I'm pretty much following instructions but I'm slowly learning a little bit at a time. I'm a bit too old and have too little time to master it in a significant way but I'm enjoying having the freedom to configure and organise my OS the way I want it.

I look forward to doing more interesting stuff with this. Anyone else done cool stuff with it that might be interesting?