Remote Desktop via VNC in Ubuntu 11.10

Mark outlined a few remote desktop methods here.  The method that has worked for me is to use x11vnc with a simple script to start it when I want to connect:

$ cat ~/bin/start-vnc.sh
#!/bin/sh
x11vnc -nopw -once -display :0 > ~/.vnc.log 2>&1 &

Then the sequence of events is to start a session is:

1. Connect to my pc via ssh (and tunnel the vnc port 5900)
2. Run start-vnc.sh
3. Connect with vnc client (I use UltraVnc - it seems to work well)

The -once flag tells x11vnc to exit after you've disconnected.

If you need to connect before anyone is logged into the system, you'll need to use the -auth option to provide the correct authentication for the login screen.   In Ubuntu 11.10 this seems to work:

sudo x11vnc -nopw -once -display :0 -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:0

Show a change log after a pull in Mercurial

When working in a team on the same mercurial repository, I often want to know what has changed singe my last pull. Turns out its easy to add a hook that will do just that.  To print the change log after every pulladd the following to the [hooks] section of your ~/.hgrc file:

[hooks]
changegroup.cnglog=hg log -M --stat -r $HG_NODE:tip

But of course, bright colours are fun, so we'll use hg styles to colour-code the log. Steve Losh has a good blog article about using styles to dress up the CLI. After downloading the styles to say /home/bryan/hg/, update the trigger to use the style:

[hooks]
changegroup.cnglog=hg log -M --stat -r $HG_NODE:tip --style /home/bryan/hg/map-cmdline.slog

Gmail's Priority Inbox: Showing all unarchived mail for a label

If you use Gmail's priority inbox, you may have noticed you can add a section that will show all email for a given label, but there is no option to only show mail in the inbox for that label. Luckily there's a simple hack to do just that. Check out this stackexchange thread or follow the steps below.

1. Go to the priority inbox settings tab.
2. Click the options next to the section you want to show your work mail.
3. Click "More Options..."
4. Inspect the element for the "Work" Label
5. You will notice on the surrounding div there is an attribute cfg="^all,Work", change the value to "^i,Work"
6. Select the label on the page as you normally would