Ghetto iPod Blaster

Ghetto iPod Blaster

I’ve been using these for about a year now as speakers for my iPod Mini. I was painting a mural for a few months and recently I’ve been painting the interior walls of a house I’ll be renting. These old PC speakers beat the holy hell out of dragging CDs around or buying one of those overpriced iPod jukeboxes. I wouldn’t want to leave one of those in my car trunk through the winter or get paint on them. I don’t know about the quality of the sound (they are a bit ‘tinny’), but they sure do work in a pinch. It’s so simple of a concept that I won’t go into details. The picture says a thousand words. 😀

An ‘Eject iPod’ Button for Xubuntu (XFCE)

iPod Mini Silver

Using an iPod with Xubuntu is not as slick as using an iPod with Ubuntu. It will mount automatically just fine, but the right-click-unmount action doesn’t quite do the job. I had been using this routine for attaching/unattaching my iPod. Everything seemed to work fine, but I guess unmounting isn’t all that can be done. The ‘No Access’ flashing sign did not go away and change to the regular directory list on the iPod’s screen. The command to ‘Eject’ the iPod actually causes the screen of the iPod to go back to the list screen like it would after being unmounted in Ubuntu 6.06, OSX or Windows. This post is a brief description of how to make a button on the top panel of Xubuntu to avoid using the Terminal every time you want to thoroughly eject your iPod.

Xubuntu Program Launcher Setup Screen

  1. Right-click on the top panel (or whatever panel you’d like) and select ‘Add New Item’ and then select ‘Program Launcher’. You will get a screen like the one shown above.
  2. In the ‘Name’ box give the function a name like ‘Eject iPod’. Give a description if you like. In the ‘Command’ box type this:
    eject /dev/sda
  3. Make sure ‘Startup Notification’ and ‘Run in Terminal’ boxes are unchecked. Leave the generic icon for now. Hit ‘Close’.
  4. Now, simply hit that button when you are ready to disconnect your iPod and wait for the ‘No Access’ symbol to change to the iPod’s normal user interface before disconnecting.

If you really want to get fancy you can create your own icon for the mounted iPod and the new ‘Eject iPod’ button. (Actually, since I drew them I guess it’s my artwork, so I am making two iPod icons available for download. They are the Silver Mini shown above and a Black Nano. Help yourself. They were made with Inkscape and are SVG files.) This will make the purpose of the button unmistakable. To do this you must replace the file ‘multimedia-player.svg’ (you have to name your new icon that in order to work) in
/usr/share/icons/(name of icon theme)/scalable/devices/

Be sure to backup the original system icon before doing this. In order to move your custom icon to that folder you will need root privileges via the ‘sudo’ command and that means using the Terminal. First, save your custom icon onto the desktop as a plain .svg file with the name ‘multimedia-player.svg’.

Open the Terminal application and type the following:

sudo mv /home/(your user name)/Desktop/multimedia-player.svg(enter a space here)/usr/share/icons/(name of icon theme)/scalable/devices/

hit enter

Again, you will need to enter your password. ‘Sudo’ gives you short-term root priveledges, ‘mv’ stands for ‘move’ and the first directory is your new file, the second directory is the destination. Now right-click on the iPod Eject button, select ‘Properties’ and add “/usr/share/icons/(name of icon theme)/scalable/devices/multimedia-player.svg” to the icon input field to update it with your new icon.