Taking back the old scrollbars in Ubuntu

Today I couldn’t take it any more and I had to do it …

I’m a Thinkpad Lenovo X61s owner with which I don’t use nor miss a mouse thanks to the awesome TrackPoint included. Because of that, the new Ubuntu’s scrollbars are, from the user interactivity point of view, just not usable.

Leading quickly to the “ham” 🙂 , disabling them is just a matter of writing in a console:

$ sudo echo "export LIBOVERLAY_SCROLLBAR=0" > /etc/X11/Xsession.d/80overlayscrollbars

and reboot.

I’m not saying that the new scrollbars aren’t an enhancement. They allow a better usage of the display but, from the functional point of view, they only work as positioning indicator. They will tell you the progress in the scrollable window but, necessarily, you will need a wheel in your mouse or a way to emulate it. If you often have to grab the scrollbar, from a functional point of view, they are just a failure.

Hence, you will miss in Ubuntu a way to tune on or off its usage without having to use these kind of “hacks“.

Of course, another alternative would have been “to emulate” the mouse wheel through the middle button. I my case, this is not an option since last time I walked this path I decided to have a better “select and paste” experience with this button rather than use it as modifier for the vertical/horizontal scrolling.

Anyway, if you want to use the middle button this way, you had to do some changes to the “XOrg” config file before. Now, you just have to install the “gpointing-device-settings” package:

$ sudo aptitude install gpointing-device-settings

and select the proper options after launching its UI from “System -> Preferences -> Pointing devices“.

This and many other tricks can be found at ThinkWiki.

Who knows, maybe, in some time, I will change my mind and retake this functionality (and the new Ubuntu scrollbars) …

Spam in your mobile

Web maligna www.visacarta.com

Esta no es la típica entrada alertando de cualquier chorrada en cadena, tal y como aconsejaba no propagar en “Netiquette en tu mail“. Esta es una entrada por un aviso real.

Tampoco es la primera vez que me llega un mensaje de este tipo, pero si es la primera vez que me decido a escribir sobre ello.

Hace un par de días me llegó un SMS a mi móvil español (Vodafone).

El remitente aparecía como “Importante”. No sé como lo hicieron, pero ocultaron el número y aparecía como si ese fuera mi contacto en la libreta de direcciones.

El texto del mensaje era:

Estimado cliente, su tarjeta visa ha sido bloqueada por su seguridad. Para desbloquear su tarjeta visite porfavor www.visacarta.com y complete los pasos.”

Es bastante obvio que era spam. De hecho, si visitas esa web, FireFox ya te avisa de que es una web maligna.

En resumen, si os llega un SMS de este tipo, ya sabéis que tenéis que borrarlo directamente y no hacerle caso.