I can’t bear local radio, but there are times when I want to listen to new music that I don’t already have in my collection. I hate browser-based players (don’t know why), and I want fast access to my favourite stations without having to scroll through a list. My simple solution was to create a file for each station with the connection information, save it in /home, then create a launcher for each on the panel. I made little custom icons with the stations’ logos so I wouldn’t have to even look at the mouseover text. That worked very well, and I was satisfied with the result even though I don’t know why they open with Totem instead of VLC, which is the default application for the file types. Anyway, I don’t mind Totem, so I was content…until I got sick of the stupid Totem logo in the screen. Totem is a media player, not just a music player, so you can’t make the whole screen go away. There are visualisations that you can use when you’re playing a file that doesn’t have video, but I find visualisations distracting and annoying. I keep Totem on my second screen; over with my Screenlets stuff, so it’s not in the way, but I can see it when I’m doing something at the computer. It doesn’t minimise to a panel icon, but if I want it to completely get out of my sight, I can put it on another workspace. That’s a little less convenient if I have to shut it off to talk on the phone or something, but if it bugs me, it’s an option. Most of the time, though, I just leave it over there and try not to look at the boring Totem logo…until this morning. It occurred to me that the logo was most likely just an image file of some kind that displayed when Totem wasn’t told to display anything else. The directory most apps use for stuff like that is /usr/share/(name of program), so I checked there and in the totem directory, there was a file called “totem_logo.png” with a size of 1280×1024. Ah–it just sizes it down when I have the player size set small. I went to my wallpaper directory and found an image that I like, opened it in GIMP, resized appropriately and saved as PNG called “totem_logo”. As root, I renamed the old logo (just in case it didn’t work and I needed it again), and copied the new logo into /usr/share/totem. Fired up Rix FM…and there was my little penguin. If this were a Windows app, the logo would be hard-coded in, or some weird-ass proprietary file type that would crash the program if it wasn’t exactly the right file size. This isn’t Windows, though; it’s Linux, and that means I get to change stuff and tinker until it’s the way I want it. When I get tired of the penguin, I’ll make a different logo and use that instead. 😀