Hosts and Wine

hosts, wine, foobar

Two tips worthy of blogging today. One" out with adblock, in with a modified hostsfile. Like most of my knowledge in computing, this tip starts with a post on Hackernews, which shows that AdBlock increases memory usage and load times quite a bit. A kind soul posted a link to hosts-file based adblock method. I’ll give it a go the coming days, see how it works. So far: seems to work!

Second tip: using Foobar on Linux, including global hotkeys. First, create/copy a shortcut file so that Gnome3/Unity can find/launch foobar easily. Secondly, create some custom global shortcuts and use Foobars commandline options, such as:

wine [foobar2000 path]/foobar2000.exe /pause
wine [foobar2000 path]/foobar2000.exe /next
wine [foobar2000 path]/foobar2000.exe /prev

Obviously this is separate from the Foobar control panel, and depends on some pre-defined Foobar commands. I have yet to discover how to rate my songs using global hotkeys, probably using the Run Command plugin and some configging.