Go away Desktop icons... again!

I want my desktop to be clean. That means no icons. Recently I have been trying various window managers, and finally I settled down to i3 for the past few weeks. I love it.

Today, I just wanted to log into Unity just for change, and found things have changed since I last logged into it. That's strange since I never did this and nobody is using my PC. I was seeing desktop icons!

I wanted to get rid of those. So I used gsettings to find out 'who' was responsible for this. It turned out to be some program called nemo. The following command:

 ➜ ~ gsettings list-recursively | grep -i desktop | less  

turned up, among other things, this:

 org.nemo.preferences desktop-is-home-dir true  

So, to set things right, I had to do this:

 ➜ ~ gsettings set org.nemo.desktop show-desktop-icons false  

Now, things are right again.

Now that I think about this, I did play with Cinnamon recently, didn't quite like it, and then forgot all about it. Maybe, this was a result of that adventure... nemo being a part of Cinnamon...

(Oh, in case anyone was wondering, those command prompts are due to oh-my-zsh that I am using nowadays)

Getting audio volume go beyond 100% in Ubuntu Gnome

In some videos I find the audio volume to be too low, even after the I turn the volume up to 100%. However, from gnome's sound control, I can see that I can use the mouse to make the volume go beyond 100% so that the audio becomes louder.

So, I was looking for a command line that would do that for me, so that I can assign that to a keyboard shortcut so that every time I needed louder sound, I would not have to use my mouse to reach out for the gnome sound control.

I turned out that the pactl command (from pulseaudio-utils package in Ubuntu) can be used for this purpose.

To make the volume go up by 10%, the command would be:

 pactl set-sink-volume 0 +10%  

And to make the volume go down by the same amount, the command would be:

 pactl set-sink-volume 0 -- -10%  

(The '--' in the command above is necessary otherwise it is interpreted as a command line option and I get an error. The '--' basically stops the shell from option parsing from that point onward)

This command allows me go beyond 100%

Now I have assigned this command to a shortcut key in Gnome and my problem is solved :-)

BTW, if there are more audio devices, the index may need to be changed from 0 (I have only one, so the index is 0 in my case). More details are available in the 'pactl' and 'pacmd' manual pages.