I’ve been using my fitbit for some time now, and realized that the badges reminded me of something in Ubuntu — the Ubuntu Accomplishments!  The only problem was that the FitBit API needs to be authenticated over OAuth.  The answer to that became obvious when I happened to look at the System Settings in Ubuntu and found Online Accounts.  After spending a weekend reading up on Online Accounts and how they work, I started hacking.

The result of this hacking, is the new FitBit account plugin!  You can now authenticate to FitBit through Online Accounts, and use that plugin to check for your awarded badges, and will display them as Ubuntu Accomplishments.  Matt Fischer did a phenomenal job writing the accomplishments, as well as the scripts to check for the badges over the FitBit API.  After installing the fitbit accomplishments collection, you can see all of your badges in the Accomplishment Viewer, seen below.

Some of the badges you can earn in Fitbit Accomplishments Collection

To get these accomplishments, you need to authenticate FitBit first.  To do this , open the Online Accounts from System Settings.  You should see this:

Online Accounts UI

Click on “Add account “, and select FitBit.  This will bring up the FitBit authentication page, which will look like this:

Simply Authenticate with your FitBit email/password, and select “Authorize” . This will complete the process, and allow the Accomplishments system to get all of your fitbit badges!

To get the account plugin, and Fitbit Accomplishments simply run:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fitbit-accomplishment-maintainers/daily
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-accomplishments/releases
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install account-plugin-fitbit ubuntu-fitbit-accomplishments

P.S.  Be sure to join the Ubuntu Fitbit Group!

If you search @username, it will use the users gravatar as an image

To get some feedback for the user, I decided to run git clone in a newly opened gnome-terminal, as well as to ensure no hiccups happened along the way.

Github Lens Previews from chris wayne on Vimeo.

The lens is again available in the Scopes Packagers PPA. To upgrade simply run apt-get update && apt-get upgrade. To install, run:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:scopes-packagers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install unity-lens-github

Note that this update will only be available for 12.10 users, and you will need quantal-backports enabled to get the updated version of python-unity-singlet.

Where does the bug go?
Many of the bugs filed against ubuntu-nexus7 are valid bugs on other platforms as well. Due to this, we need to make sure that the bugs are logged to their respective upstreams. This will allow for the right people to find and fix the bugs, and for the fixes to make it into the Upstreams, meaning the fix will be available for everyone. It is sometimes obvious what the correct upstream package would be, although sometimes its not so simple. For example, if you are logging a bug against the on-screen keyboard, it should be logged against ‘onboard’. A kernel bug will be logged against ‘linux’, a Unity bug against ‘unity’ and so on. If there is a case in which you are unsure of the upstream, it’s okay to log the bug to the ubuntu-nexus7 project. We will do our best to find the upstream and make them aware.

If you do know the upstream, please log the bug using ubuntu-bug. This is as simple as running ubuntu-bug <package-name>. This will auotmatically grab all of the relevant logs and information, making it easier to log a good bug. One thing to make sure of is once the bug is logged in launchpad, make sure to make it ‘Also Affect’ the ubuntu-nexus7 project. To do this, open the bug in launchpad, and find the “(+) Also affects project” button and when prompted, input ‘ubuntu-nexus7′ as the project.

What should the bug contain?

A good bug will contain 6 essential pieces.

1.  A good title. A good title describes the exact problem succinctly and easily. An example of a good bug title is “When in portrait mode, mouse movement glitches rightward intermittently”. Notice the title goes into specifics about exactly what happens in the bug. This title is *much* more useful than a simple “Mouse doesn’t work right when screen rotated”.
2. A brief summary.  It is important to keep this brief.  With a good enough title, this can be just 1 or 2 sentences long.  If the bug is complicated, this can obviously be quite important.
3. Steps to reproduce.  Steps to reproduce make the job of a bug triager or developer *much* easier.  Instead of wasting time figuring out how to reproduce the bug, they can get right to trying to fix it.  Try to step through exactly what happened to cause the bug, something that will show the bug reliably (i.e., reproduces the bug 100% if possible).  These should be clear and concise.  A good example could be: 1) Run /usr/bin/xrotate in terminal 2) Click and hold titlebar of window 3) Try to drag the window down
4. Expected Results.  Describe here what you would expect to happen when you follow the steps to reproduce.  In the above example, an adequate expected result could be as simple as “Expected the window to drag down smoothly”
5. Actual results. Describe what happens instead of the expected results.  Again with the above example, this could be something along the lines of “While dragging the window down, the window seems to jump around randomly.”
6. Logs! This will usually be automatically taken care of if ubuntu-bug is used to log the bug.  If not using ubuntu-bug, it is very helpful to attach logs to the bug.  The most often needed logs are /var/log/syslog, dmesg, or /var/log/kern.log

To see it on the apps site, click here

Turns out, this icon is not ok:

Looks a bit like this

As always, testers are appreciated, any issues shoot me an email at cwayne@ubuntu.com.

To install:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:scopes-packagers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install unity-scope-thesaurus
setsid unity

Looks like this

As always, the scope can be found in the scopes packagers ppa (although this time, you’ll need the utilities lens as well).

To install:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:scopes-packagers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install unity-scope-dictionary
setsid unity

Now I’m not sure how many people this would be useful for, but if it’s something you’d be interested in, I built it in my ppa (not quite sure it’s ready for the scopes-packagers ppa).

To install:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cwayne18/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install unity-lens-unzipper
setsid unity

The GitHub Lens searches through repos as well as users. This will be useful if you want to search for say, “Google Voice” to see if anyone has any google voice api’s hanging around on GitHub. You could also search for your friends to see if they have a github account. Lastly, if you want to list all of the repos that a given user owns, simply search for their name with a ‘@’ in front of it. This will return all of their repos, and with a fun little bonus, will use their gravatar if they have one.

Check it out below:

github from chris wayne on Vimeo.

As usual, the code can be found on launchpad, at lp:~cwayne18/onehundredscopes/unity-lens-github

To install:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:scopes-packagers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install unity-lens-github
setsid unity

Now, instead of going through all that trouble, you can simply search for available or installed modules from the Unity Dash.  One thing that I was particularly concerned about was speed, especially with the slow pypi site, and ‘pip search simple’ taking 6 seconds on my machine.  To do this as quickly as possible, I pull the list of modules from a pypi mirror (http://g.pypi.python.org/simple/) and perform the searching myself.  To make it even quicker, the data is only pulled from the web on the first search ( the first search of each unity session), and then re-used.  Again due to speed, the results are limited to 100 results, as this is about searching more than browsing.  Clicking on a result will open it’s description page on PyPi.

Check out the lens in action!

pypi from chris wayne on Vimeo.

Unity-lens-pypi was written using Quickly and Singlet, on Ubuntu 12.04.  It is available in ppa:scopes-packagers/ppa.

I’m actually quite proud of this lens, as I find it more useful than pip search or using the site.  It’s certainly faster in most cases.

To install the lens:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:scopes-packagers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install unity-lens-pypi
setsid unity