Fixing Thumbnails in Nautilus

If you are like me and many other internet users, you’ve probably downloaded movies with one P2P program or another.

If you did that downloading while using Nautilus and Gnome, you might have noticed that Nautilus fails to produce Thumbnails for downloaded movies, presenting the film-roll Icon instead.

What happens here, is that Nautilus attempts to generate thumbnails for files as soon as you enter the directory that contains them, when it comes to files that are only halfway-downloaded it fails for obvious reasons.

The problem is that when Nautilus fails to generate a thumbnail, that failure is noted down somewhere, and therefore Nautilus does not attempt to regenerate the thumbnail once the file is fully downloaded.

Viewing Nautilus script parameter values

I’ve been working on some Nautilus scripts recently, and I’ve found that it would be easier if I could inspect the values that Nautilus passes to the scripts, so I wrote a little script to achieve just that, I hope you’ll find it useful if you ever set out to write a Nautilus script.

Code Gaess: Lelouch of the Rebellion

Ok, so what do we have here:

• Mechas wrecking havoc in the city: Check.
• Mysterious girl to make her appearance in key event: Check.
• Motivated but self-doubtful teenage male characters to pilot the Mechas: Check.
• Main character mysteriously better at piloting Mechas then anyone else: Check.
• Long time friends find themselves on opposite sides of the conflict: Check.
• Super-Mecha to end all Mechas presented to the world: Check.
• Bad guy with vague morals and sexual orientation: Check

Awesome EscapePod today

I just finished listening to the special Christmas story EscapePod released yesterday, and while I’m Jewish and live in Israel where this time of a year isn’t a time of holidays at all for most people, I find myself deeply appreciating this story.

This story brought tears to my eyes.

I won’t go into details about the story itself, because I want everyone to just go and listen to it, but I’ll just say it made me happy for the fact that humanity is still too young to have to come to terms with the harsh, dark and cold reality presented in this story.

Last but not least, I also enjoyed the very amusing closing song.

Deleting files as root in Nautilus

I’ve just seen the title of this post in my blog stats as search-term hit to my blog, and while they guy searching didn’t find his answer here (He got directed to my Nautilus Garbage Bin post), I decided to make sure the next one searching for that will find a decent answer.

I must admit that I firmly believe that root’s work should be done from the command-line, however, if a guy insists on doing it this way, well so be it, this is, after all, Linux, the OS of the free…

So basically I can see 2 ways of going about deleting files as root with Nautilus: