Michael Ekstrand's questions

I have most of my music in FLAC on my large storage device, and would like to automatically re-encode it in Ogg Vorbis when copying it to my portable audio player (Sansa Fuze v2). I have set my Fuze to MTP mode and told Banshee to encode to Ogg Vorbis with quality 4 in the Device Properties dialog for the Fuze (I would use MSC mode, but don't have an encoding option in the device properties when I do that). However, when I copy music to the device, either by dragging it from the music library or by syncing a playlist, the full FLAC files are copied rather than transcoded and written as Oggs.

How can I get my Banshee setup re-encoding the audio?

If StackExchange supported bonus points, I'd give bonus points for a solution that only re-encoded music that was already losslessly encoded, but I don't think that's possible.

When I am viewing a PPA in Launchpad, the "Package Details" view shows me the most recent change from the changelog. Is there a way to view the entire changelog for a source package in a PPA without downloading the package?

The package browser allows changelog downloads for distribution packages. It would be quite helpful if I could do this for PPA packages as well.

Some Type 1 fonts, particularly URW Palladio L, look rather ugly when rendered on-screen in various programs. In particular, the letter height is inconsistent.

The header text is Nimbus Sans L, also a Type 1 font; sometimes, it looks acceptable, but sometimes its baseline isn't clean.

I have this problem in most programs. OpenOffice and AbiWord both display it with URW Palladio. I similarly have problems with Nimbus Sans embedded in PDFs displayed in Evince.

Any suggestions as to how to fix this? Settings I can tweak somewhere to make it work properly?

I'm fairly excited for Unity, as it looks like a promising new direction for Ubuntu. However, I do have a concern - will it be possible to use Unity without the global menu?

I have my window manager set to focus-follows-mouse/sloppy focus, and find the productivity gains to be immense. Sloppy focus is incompatible, however, with global menus, as it is possible for the focus to change while you move from window to menu.

Will Unity support an option to use window menus while still using Unity?

I am trying to rip a CD with Sound Juicer over X11 forwarding (CD is in the desktop across the room, I'm SSHing in from my laptop), but Sound Juicer cannot find my CD drive. It works correctly when I am logged in directly to the machine in a GNOME session. My user is in the cdrom group.

I suspect that some combination of udisks, PolicyKit, and ConsoleKit is to blame — that it is configured to allow users with active console sessions to enumerate and/or access drives, but not other users.

How can I configure my system to allow me to access this? I cannot seem to locate any PolicyKit or ConsoleKit configuration programs like I seem to remember Fedora having when they rolled out PolicyKit?

The other option I see, which I find to be unlikely, is that Sound Juicer requires some GNOME session services to be running in order to locate the drive.

Update: Based on the accepted answer, it does require GNOME session services, namely a D-Bus session bus by which it can run gvfs. If sound-juicer fails, running dbus-launch sound-juicer works. Alternatively, dbus-launch can be hooked in to your login scripts to run at SSH login.