YouTube, Cookies and Comments

Anyone who has commented on a YouTube video recently will be aware that the commenting system has changed. It has been integrated into Google+, not a problem for those of us already on G+ but a nuisance for everyone else. It should be an easy change if you already have a G+ account but some people have had problems.

Most problems seem to involve cookies. Cookies are small files web sites leave on your computer. They can be useful as a way of remembering your preferences and the like but they can also be misused. One of the ways to avoid potential problems is to control the way cookies are set. Chrome has an option to disable 3rd party cookies, that is only the site you are logged into can set a cookie. This may seem straight forward but many sites use 3rd party sites to add functionality, usually quite legitimately like WordPress and Gravatar. Unfortunately the link between YouTube and Google+ is broken by setting this option.

If you use Chrome and find you can no longer comment on YouTube but have already set up a Google+ account check your settings. Go to Settings – Advanced – Privacy – Content Settings, under Cookies check the last option (Block third party cookies and site data) isn’t checked.

Google Chrome in Korora

Korora comes with many repos already set up so you can just install many software packages from the Package Manager or command line. One of the repos that is set up is Google Chrome. A simple

dnf install google-chrome

will install the stable version of Google Chrome.

However if you want the beta or unstable version, I prefer the beta version, then you need to edit the repo file. Actually other versions like the beta will install with the specific command

dnf install google-chrome-beta

but they won’t be updated in future. Using your preferred text editor open /etc/yum.repos.d/google-chrome.repo. The last line is an exclude statement. You will need to delete or comment out this line. Alternatively you could edit it by removing the version you wish to install / update from that line.

Now you can use the beta or unstable version of Google Chrome in Korora.

Amarok Art

I have been using Conky to display the current track information from Amarok. This uses qdbus, the command qdbus org.kde.amarok /Player GetMetadata gives a great deal of information on the track including lyrics, artist, title etc. and the cover art. Search for amarok conky script and you will find lots of examples using this method. It was the cover art that gave me problems recently.

I haven’t used Amarok for a while as I tend to switch between Clementine and Amarok. When I started Amarok conky would show the track details but for many tracks it wouldn’t display the cover art even though it was displayed in Amarok. I searched for a while until I found the problem.

Looking at the output of the qdbus command I saw that sometimes the ‘arturl’ was a file in the music directory. This is where I have put covers that I downloaded manually or that came with the album. I would then use Amarok’s set custom cover screen so Amarok would display them. These lines in the qdbus output show illegal characters like ‘%’ that weren’t part of the filename. When it was a cover that Amarok had downloaded automatically it would be listed as a file in ~/.kde/share/.apps/amarok/. These files worked in Conky.

The answer was simple but time consuming. I used Amarok’s fetch cover option which would then display the custom cover I had previously set. I select it and then it works in Conky. There may be a better way but I haven’t found it yet. Hopefully I will only need to do it for one track from each album.

Old Reader Follows Google Reader

UPDATE: Old Reader have announced that they will stay open to the public now they have new resources and a larger team – see here for details.

Old Reader set out to be a Google Reader replacement but now they have followed it into history. Old Reader was my prefered replacement for Google Reader. In fact I found it better than Google Reader because it was more like Google Reader used to be, hence the name. Obviously many others thought like me and we overloaded it to the extent it couldn’t cope. Today they announced it is going to shut, at least for most users. Read the full announcement here.

I did use Liferea locally for a while but found I liked Old Reader more but looks like I might go back to a local solution.