I’ve been using CoPilot 7 for a couple of days. It’s a great application for GPS navigation on Windows Mobile devices.

One big drawback for me is that it doesn’t have the ability to silence the voice without also turning down the master system volume. If I do this, then I can’t hear any other application that needs to make a noise.

So I created my own silent voice. It consists of nothing but blank sound files for every bit of speech. This way, I can select the Silent voice in CoPilot, while leaving the system volume at its normal setting.

Just unzip the files, and copy the ‘Silent’ folder into the same directory as the other voices for your language. Then in CoPilot, you should see ‘Silent’ as one of the voice options.

silent.zip

I find the Ubuntu automated check-for-updates a bit limiting. I want it to check for updates daily, but as it uses a daily crontab to manage this, the PC has to be switched on at the time the cron job is expecting to run. If my usage pattern changes, I can end up going several days without an update check because the PC happens never to be on at the right time.

I could change it to do the check every ten minutes, but that hammers the Canonical servers unnecessarily. What I really want to do is check for updates once per day whenever the PC happens to be switched on.

So I wrote this little script that I put in /usr/bin/apt-update . It simply checks to see whether it has been run already today (by comparing the current date against the modification date of a touch file). If it has been run today, then it doesn’t perform the check. Otherwise, it performs the check, and touches the touch file to prevent further runs.

#!/bin/bash
touchfile=/root/.aptlastcheck
now=`date +%Y-%m-%d`
[[ -e $touchfile ]] && last=`date -r $touchfile +%Y-%m-%d` || last=0
[[ $now != $last ]] && apt-get update
touch -d $now $touchfile

I then added a root crontab:

1,11,21,31,41,51 * * * * apt-update

This runs the apt-update script every ten minutes, whenever the PC is on. So I get speedy updates without being nasty to the Canonical servers.