How to disable the HUD’s use of the Alt key?

Annoyance
Pressing the Alt key brings up the HUD. How to get rid of it?

Solution
http://askubuntu.com/questions/122209/how-do-i-modify-or-disable-the-huds-use-of-the-alt-key

Launch System Settings, then Keyboard -> Shortcuts -> Launchers. On Key to show the HUD, press Backspace to disable it.

Remove arrows from desktop icons (Windows 7)

To get rid of the arrows on the desktop icons in Windows 7, use the Ultimate Windows Tweaker.

Tweak your Ubuntu

“Ubuntu Tweak is an application to config Ubuntu easier for everyone. It provides many useful desktop and system options that the default desktop environment doesn’t provide.“

UT is provided in .deb format, so its installation is trivial. You can start it with “ubuntu-tweak“.

I find the following options particularly useful:

• Under Tweaks -> Miscellaneous, you can put back the icons to menus and buttons.
• Under Tweaks -> Compiz Settings, you can assign window operations to workspace edges.

Produce one single HTML page with latex2html

Problem

With latex2html you can convert a LaTeX document to a bunch of HTML files. However, by default latex2html generates one HTML for each subparagraph. How to produce less files, one per chapter for instance? Or how to produce one single HTML?

Solution

The behaviour of latex2html can be controlled with the file “.latex2html-init“. Type “locate .latex2html-init” to find a template that you can customize. On my machine I found a file called “dot.latex2html-init” that I had to rename:

$ locate .latex2html-init
/usr/share/latex2html/dot.latex2html-init
$ cp /usr/share/latex2html/dot.latex2html-init .
$ mv dot.latex2html-init .latex2html-init

Copy this file next to your latex source and execute “latex2html source.tex”.

Customization:
If you want less HTML files, this is the variable you need:

$MAX_SPLIT_DEPTH = 8;   # Stop making separate files at this depth

Set its value to 1 to have one file, 2 to have a page by “Part”, 3 by “Chapter”, etc.

Issues

With latex2html I had some small problems and I didn’t find a solution for all of them. For instance, the generated pages look good via the file: protocol but if I put them on-line, they look different. It’s as if CSS were not loaded properly. A typical example is the navigational header that gets broken.

Another thing: latex2html puts a link on “crossref.png” with the file: protocol. If you put the pages on-line, they are not loaded. So I had to replace the instances of “file:/usr/share/latex2html/icons/crossref.png” to “icons/crossref.png” to point to my local copy.

Summary: you can customize the behaviour of latex2html but be prepared that you’ll have to tweak a bit the end result manually.

Ref.: http://www.cnrm.meteo.fr/gmapdoc/meshtml/doc-info/latex2html/DOClatex2html/node3.html.

Hide the sidebar on wordpress.com

Problem

You want to hide the sidebar(s) on your wordpress.com blog.

Solution

Refer to the post Widgets on static pages or single posts by Panos, everything is detailed there.

Lessons learned for me: My current theme (iNove) is a good choice as it supports the possibility to deactivate the sidebar (under Appearance -> Theme Options; this option applies to the blog in general – all dynamic and static pages). Extra for me: the pages without the sidebar become large, I prefer that. There are some themes listed under the link above that have no sidebars but the text is very narrow.

I also posted this question to the forum.

phpMyAdmin: No activity within 1440 seconds; please log in again

Problem

phpMyAdmin’s “No activity within 1440 seconds; please log in again” message is slowly but definitely driving you crazy. How to remain sane?

Solution

Increase the time limit. Open the file /etc/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php and add the following line to its end:

$cfg['LoginCookieValidity'] = 60 * 60 * 8;  // in seconds (8 hours)

Here I set 8 hours, but you can change that.

When you log in again in phpMyAdmin, this new value will be taken into account.