Create a playlist file as normal. A playlist is just a text document with one file on each line. There's no need to escape odd characters like spaces, apostrophes, and ampersands. You can include comments by starting the line with #. Here is a sample playlist, which I've put in a file named instrumental:

# Instrumental songs
/music/NickelCreek/Why Should the Fire Die/Scotch & Chocolate.mp3
/music/John Williams/Figrin D'an and the Modal Notes/Cantina Band #1.mp3

You can play this playlist by typing mplayer -playlist instrumental or, if you want it to be shuffled, mplayer -shuffle -playlist instrumental. But why not make it executable so that I can just type instrumental? And why not default to shuffle for certain playlists if that's what I want?

By using shebang notation, we can tell the OS how to "execute" our playlist. Instead of picking a script interpreter like /usr/bin/python, we'll use /usr/bin/mplayer, along with a flag to tell it that the file is a playlist. (If mplayer is located elsewhere on your system, running which mplayer should find it.) Here is our modified playlist:

#!/usr/bin/mplayer -playlist
# Instrumental songs
/music/NickelCreek/Why Should the Fire Die/Scotch & Chocolate.mp3
/music/John Williams/Figrin D'an and the Modal Notes/Cantina Band #1.mp3

Since the line we added starts with #, it is treated as a comment when mplayer reads the playlist. If you chmod +x instrumental and move it to a directory in your PATH, you should be able to type instrumental to play the playlist.

Note that you can always type mplayer -shuffle -playlist instrumental or any other command if you wish to play the playlist with a different set of command‐line flags.

#!/usr/bin/mplayer -shuffle -playlist
# Instrumental songs
/music/NickelCreek/Why Should the Fire Die/Scotch & Chocolate.mp3
/music/John Williams/Figrin D'an and the Modal Notes/Cantina Band #1.mp3

Unknown option on the command line: -shuffle -playlist

#!/usr/bin/perl -esystem('/usr/bin/mplayer', '-shuffle', '-playlist', @ARGV)
# Instrumental songs
/music/NickelCreek/Why Should the Fire Die/Scotch & Chocolate.mp3
/music/John Williams/Figrin D'an and the Modal Notes/Cantina Band #1.mp3

I've uses these patches with XFCE 4.4.0, 4.4.1, 4.4.2, and 4.4.3.

The lack of blinking of taskbar buttons was one of the things I liked about XFCE over Gnome and Windows. Then they added it. This patch removes it. Patches libxfcegui4.

• Stop task list blinking

Window title bars should not blink, either. Patches xfwm4.

• xfwm4 4.4.0, 4.4.1, or 4.4.2
• xfwm4 4.4.3

Another thing I liked about XFCE was that if you had only a couple windows open, their taskbar buttons still were wide enough to cover the width of the screen. Why cut off information for no reason? Then they changed that, too. This patch restores the old behavior. Patches libxfcegui4.

• Make task list buttons expand to fill available space

I created these patches somewhere around Gaim 2.0, and they still work as of Pidgin 2.4.1.

I can sort of understand why the Pidgin developers decided that colors, italics, etc. should persist from message to message: It means there doesn't need to be a separate UI for configuring the defaults. But I'd much prefer that there be a "use this as default formatting" button for the people who want it and that the formatting reset to that default every time a message is sent. This patch doesn't bother with the button (though "Reset formatting" is now available in Pidgin itself), but it does automatically reset your formatting each time you send a message.

• Clear formatting after sending a message

CTRL+L clears a conversation history from the window. I never want this, but I occasionally press it when I mistakenly believe that Firefox has focus.

• Unmap CTRL+L

If you're using Gentoo and don't mind dealing with Portage overlays, you can download a Gentoo ebuild and throw it in your overlay, probably under net-print. Pitt users will want to set the pitt USE flag so that the ebuild will install a Pitt printer–setup script you can run to add all the campus printers easily. The ebuild will pull in CUPS and Expect if necessary. Just emerge sshlpd and follow the post‐install instructions for information about how to add the printers.

• sshlpd-1.ebuild

I was surprised to hear from someone outside of the university who found a use for sshlpd. The code is designed to be fairly general, so if you need LPD over SSH, you may find the script useful. There are, however, a couple of changes that need to be made.

• The location of lpr on the remote computer is hard‐coded. You must edit $REMOTE_LPR in the sshlpd script to point to the sshlpd executable. I should find a better way of doing this, but nothing immediately came to mind, so you'll need to edit the Perl script for now.
• The company I heard from uses SSH key‐based authentication, which allows SSH connections to be securely created without requiring the user to enter a password at each connection. (Ideally the Pitt version would function this way, but it appears that the university has turned off key‐based authentication on the server.) In any case, key‐based authentication makes Expect, /etc/sshpassword, and a little bit of Perl code unnecessary. If you have key‐based authentication set up and want to use sshlpd, then you will want to install Stephen DeGabriele's patch to remove Expect password‐handling.