HOWTO add blur effect and reflections to an Emerald theme

Hey, first you need to get your favourite emerald theme and add it to your theme manager. I took this one. Also make sure that your Compiz Decoration Blur Type in the Emerald Settings is set to Titlebar only.
The second thing you have to do, is to download this reflection file and go to your CompizConfig Settings Manager. There you first have to find the Reflection plugin. Then you can add the currently downloaded reflection file as Reflection Image.
The next you have to find is the Blur Window plugin, there you have to set the Blur Filter to Gaussian and Gaussian Radius to 10.
Don't forget to activate both plugins. That should be it, have fun!

Announce Battery State Script

Hey all!
I sometimes have the probleme that I don't notice that my battery is nearly empty. So I decided to write a little script that tells me from time to time how much power is left. It's a quick and dirty script written in python only tested with Ubuntu 9.04, so don't expect too much.
It uses the new notifying system (notify-osd) that came with ubuntu 9.04 to notify the actual battery state and plays a sound in the same time.

So here comes the script. Just make it executeable

chmod +x check_battery_state.py

, add it to your startup applications and don't forget to install python-pyxine otherwise the sound wont work

sudo apt-get install python-pyxine

Thats it, I hope it's usefull to someone out there.