Fight for the Internet 1!

Saturday, January 31, 2015

Clean Up Twitter's cluttered website


I don't like Twitter. But the service has its uses. So if you ever have to use the Twitter website and you don't want to view all the garbage they forcefully throw at you, such as Trending and Suggestions for things to follow, here is a really easy way to remove that worthless junk.

If you are running Adblock Plus (and you probably should be), you can simply add these custom filter rules to that add-on's preference configuration:
twitter.com##*.ProfileWTFAndTrends
twitter.com##*.wtf-module
twitter.com##div.trends-inner
And now suddenly Twitter is significantly less annoying.

Saturday, January 24, 2015

Baloo File Indexer / File Extraction

How to fix Baloo File Index --> Disable it!

Problem

Many desktop indexers as they are implemented in KDE unfortunately are problematic. They are slow and resource hogs, taking up gigabytes of drive just to store indexes of files you won't use. Worse yet, they habitually lag my machine. The problem really arises when I'm copying multiple gigabytes of files over USB (but usually less than 30 files total). The Baloo file extraction process starts up and lags frequently.

Unfortunately there is not neat graphical way to disable the Baloo indexer. 

Quoting one of the Baloo authors:
There is no explicit “Enable/Disable” button any more. We would like to promote the use of searching and feel that Baloo should never get in the users way. However, we are smart about it and IF you add your HOME directory to the list of “excluded folders”, Baloo will switch itself off since it no longer has anything to index.






enter image description hereSolution

Here is how to disable Baloo from operating. Edit the file $HOME/.kde/share/config/baloofilerc. It is enough to edit it and change the option:

Indexing-Enabled=true 

to (or add if there is not such option)
 
Indexing-Enabled=false

to disable baloo.

I know it is way too easy but it did work for me and also for the guy who posted this simple solution on this page.