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First I’d like to say how happy I am that *every* key/mouse button works except the Flip 3D/Zoom keyboard buttons – which I’m going to be working on soon. Everything works out of the box, even horizontal scrolling with mouse wheel tilt left/right. I’m pretty impressed!

With all the keys working and utilities available for the MX5500, getting mail notifications via keyboard is really easy to do. What keyboard notifications am I talking about? In Windows, the keyboard will give a little beep when a new email is received. Also, a mail icon will pop up in the LCD on the keyboard.

First we need a mail notification application that can run custom commands on new email received and email checked (we need something to get rid of the mail icon once the mail notification has been acknowledged.) Here’s a good one: Mail Notification. Note: if you have problems with getting SSL to work, you’ll need to add a source to the repository to get an updated version (see https://launchpad.net/~mail-notification-ssl/+archive/ppa).

Once we get Mail Notification installed, we’re going to need a utility to control the keyboard functions (such as the beep and LCD icons.) This utility is called mx5000-tool. We’re not going to go into instructions on installing this, as they are readily available via a quick Google search. Here is a good link to follow to get this utility installed: http://www.gentoo-wiki.info/Logitech_Cordless_Desktop_MX_5000#Installing_mx5000-tools.

Next we’re going to make two scripts, one for new mail and one for read mail. I like to keep things organized in my home directory, you can place these scripts anywhere you want.
~/.scripts/mx5500/mail_new.sh:

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#!/bin/sh
 
#send a beep to the keyboard
mx5000-tool --device /dev/hiddev0 -b
 
#set the mail icon on the keyboard to 1 - on
mx5000-tool --device /dev/hiddev0 -i 1000

~/.scripts/mx5500/mail_read.sh:

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#!/bin/bash
 
#set the mail icon on the keyboard to 0 - off
mx5000-tool --device /dev/hiddev0 -i 0000

Remember you need to make these 2 files executable: chmod +x ~/.scripts/mx5500/*

Now to pass these scripts as custom commands for the mail notification app.

Run gconf-editor by either running that in a terminal or hit ALT+F2, type ‘gconf-editor’ an hit ENTER. Browse to apps -> mail-notification -> commands. Here we see ‘mail-changed’, ‘mail-read’ and ‘new-mail’.

Click on ‘new-mail’ and change the ‘command’ value to “~/.scripts/mx5500/mail_new.sh” (without quotes.)

Click on ‘mail-read’. Now when I was entering the custom command for this function, the ‘command’ value was set as an integer. Go ahead and double click it and change it to a string. Now, change the ‘command’ value to “~/.scripts/mx5500/mail_read.sh” (again, without quotes.)

That’s it! You can now sit back and enjoy the keyboard beep boop.

So I run DD-WRT on my Linksys WRT-350N router. I know the router comes with a media server, allowing music and videos to be played through a wireless connection. My goal is to get this working using DD-WRT, but I’m having trouble figuring out how to do this.

My first step was to upgrade my version of DD-WRT to v24-FINAL. Doing this gave me the option to enable USB via the web control panel. The upgrade went flawlessly. I enabled USB and my external hard drive is connected.

This is where I am right now. I’m doing a bit of reading into where to go from here, but it looks like I’m going to have to install some Optware packages. My main concern now is how much space I have on the router to be able install the packages I will need.

Bill is a good guy, Bill is a simple guy.  He works, drinks Budweiser, and drives a Camaro.  Bill’s driveway attracts friendly rabbits, wounded squirrels, and Peeps.  Recently, someone “friend” of his made a fraudulent Facebook profile of Bill, thinking it would be funny.  Now, this so called “friend” is receiving personal messages from friends and family.

A picture of Bill Readinger.

Help Bill out, join the cause!

beginning to implement new blog, i’ll be working on the site as well as templates over the following days