Andrea Olivato’s Blog

Yes, since I was able to run Dropbox on Fluxbox I’m quite exhausting it, trying to sync most of my work settings with my home computer.

As I prefer using Epiphany to FirefoxFirefox, I needed to find a way to easily sync my bookmarks but unfortunately the symbolic link made from epiphany folder to the DropboxDropbox one didn’t work as expected, and I didn’t want to use Epilicious ( -> Magnolia) to store all my bookmarks.

So I tried with Rsync but the result was not so good, as it’s not natively bidirectional. Unison, instead, worked exactly as I wanted to!

mkdir ~/Dropbox/epiphany
unison ~/.gnome2/epiphany/ ~/Dropbox/epiphany/ -path ephy-bookmarks.xml -terse -auto -silent -ui text

Unison will sync the two files, merging them or giving output about conflicts (if you modified the file on both computers and it’s not able to merge them, like svn does). Also note that while usually unison works with directories I imposed to sync just the ephy-bookmarks.xml file, using the -path option.

As the file is not that big and it’s not modified so often I put the command on the crontab every 2 minutes. You should choose a period that fits your pc load/activity…

crontab -e
*/2 * * * * unison ~/.gnome2/epiphany/ ~/Dropbox/epiphany/ -path ephy-bookmarks.xml -terse -auto -silent -ui text

I think this can be useful to sync even other services/preferences…

Have you ever dreamed about an andvanced IA (I’m ironic) who could understand what browser you opened and open all the links you click on your DE in THAT browser and not in the default one?

Well this is asdGB (Automatically set default Gnome browser), a simple bash script which runs in background, checks for opened browsers and sets the default handler for http / https links on the one you prefer. Obviously if you got only one browser opened it will set that one as default. This means memory and resource saving. This means no more too many windows opened.

asdGB is released under GPL v3 licence and it’s as simple as ./asdGB.sh!

Official Page and Download:

http://blog.andreaolivato.net/software/asdgb-automatically-set-default-gnome-browser

A quick pearl to spread an old news about Epiphany to other browser’s users:

with Epiphany, when you open a new tab from a link (middle click or right click + open in a new tab) the browser keeps the history of the parent tab!!!

Yes, for those who know that’s probably not a big deal, however I like this feature so much I needed to spread!

Use Epiphany! You can go back in a just opened tab!