Flashing taskbar with PuTTY + irssi + screen

As quite many people do, I use to IRC using screen + irssi on my server, which I connect to using PuTTY. A little while ago I went out to find a way to make PuTTY’s taskbar flash when I was hilighted. It wasn’t trivial to find the information on how to do it (it took me some time), so I though I could share it:

In irssi:
/set bell_beeps on
/set beep_msg_level MSGS NOTICES DCC DCCMSGS HILIGHT

And in putty:
Go to Terminal -> Bell in the settings, and set “Taskbar/caption indication on bell” to Flashing or Steady (whichever you prefer).

That should be it, and don’t forget to save the session settings in PuTTY so you don’t have to change them every time you connect ;) .

Rhythmbox 0.11.0 with new style Last.fm support for Gentoo

This is something I’ve wanted for quite some time: the new style Last.fm plugin takes Last.fm integration to Rhythmbox. Download here. You can install it by following these steps:
1. Add PORTDIR_OVERLAY=”/usr/local/portage/” to your make.conf
2. Run ‘mkdir -p /usr/local/portage’
3. Download the ebuild package from the link above and unpack it: tar xvjf new-style-lastfm-ebuild.tar.bz2 -C /usr/local/portage/
4. Emerging rhythmbox as you normally would.

And that should be it. Also, as the author of the patch writes, remember to only have one of the Last.fm plugins enabled at any time.