Posts
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Welcome to the MODcast (again)
Since updating and reviving my webpage, I noticed that the HTML5 embedded audio player had stop working on my MODcast page, where I serve a continuous playlist of 242,430 MOD files (think chiptune music if you do not know what MOD files are).
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qutebrowser is pretty dang awesome
I’ve used a lot of web browsers. My journey down the “Information Super Highway” actually started before there were paved roads i.e. before the WWW existed. My first use of the internet was mainly using tools like gopher, archie, veronica, ftp, email, and usenet. The first web browsers I can remember using were Cello and Mosaic, but I may have used an older text mode web browser on a BBS prior to that.
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Update
It’s been a while…actually, almost 40 months since my last post. In fact, it’s been so long I thought I should update Jekyll before posting this. It will be interesting to see if this thing still works.
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Sid to Arch
I’ve been using debian linux since 1995; when I say using, I mean at least one machine in my house has been running debian constantly during that entire time, be it a server install running stable, a laptop or desktop computer for the wife or one of my daughters running stable, or maybe testing, and always my personal daily driver laptop running sid. So when I changed my two personal daily driver laptops (not any of my servers or other family member’s computers) from debian sid to arch linux this past July, it could be asked, why arch and why now?
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Pen and Paper
Nothing earth shattering to see here, just a overdue, short post about two things that I have carried with me everyday since since graduating college in 1989: a pen and some kind of pocket notebook.
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Adding a repurposed caps lock as a third mod key in i3
When the i3 window manager is run for the first time, a configuration wizard runs and allows you to set the modifier, or mod key, that you want to use for your keybindings. The configuration wizard allows you to choose either the Alt key or the Super key, i.e. one or the other, but not more than one. i3 though has support for all five modifier keys, and these can be set in your i3 config file. My i3 config file was set up to use two mod keys: mod4, the Super key, and mod1, the Alt key. For a while, I was happily using two mod keys, but recently I have found myself needing to use a third. This quick and dirty post will explain how, and why I repurposed my Caps Lock key as mod3.
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My gemini capsule has launched.
And we have liftoff! I have a gemini capsule now.
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How to build and install i3-gaps from source on debian
i3-gaps is a fork of the i3 window manager that is kept up to date with upstream i3, and adds the feature of allowing you to have visible and configurable gaps between windows. This feature is just eye candy, and may or may not actually aid the user by providing some visible space between windows (at the expense of some screen real estate) to make clearer the distinction between adjacent windows. What cannot be argued though, is that i3-gaps just looks better. Seriously though, it is just regular i3 but with re-sizable gaps between windows that can be turned on or off.
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Fosstodon
I have posted before about my experiences in the linux and FOSS community, and specifically about getting in, fitting in, taking part in, and later dropping out of the community. Since the recent rebirth of this dormant website, I have revisited mastodon, and logged back in to my fosstodon account again for the first time. I say the first time because I honestly cannot remember the last time I had logged in, but thankfully bitwarden had my password. In the short two week period, at the time of this writing, that I have been back on fosstodon, I can say it has been enjoyable and eye opening.
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Welcome to the MODcast
Shortly after I set up my gopher hole last year, I downloaded all of the MOD files off of textfiles.com thinking I would mirror them on my gopher site. I decided not to once I had finished the 54 gig download of over 140,000 MOD files. The directory structure of the downloaded files was going to make it a little cumbersome to be useful on a gopher site. As an aside, I can’t remember the exact details, but I pretty sure I used wget, or maybe it was curl, to grab the files; either way it was easy. I kept the files and have enjoyed listening to them as background music on several occasions since then.
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Using Mastodon for comments on a static blog
This is a static blog. As such, providing the means for readers to add comments is not something that is built-in. This blog post is really just a test to try out adding comment functionality using mastodon as implemented and explained by @carl: here, on a Hugo static site; as well as by @xosem: here on a Jekyll static site.
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i3 scratchpad and vim like marks
I’ve been using linux a LONG time, and without a doubt the best and most versatile graphical environment I have ever used is the i3 tiling window manger. Technically I use a fork called i3-gaps, but I will talk about that in another post one day. What makes i3 the best (for me) is that it fits the way I work, is easily customized, and that all the navigation can be done with the keyboard. Two really cool features of i3 are the scratchpad and vim like marks.
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checkrestart and needrestart
I saw a toot on mastodon today talking about the program checkrestart. checkrestart, which is part of the debian-goodies package, can check and see which processes need to be restarted after an upgrade . So why is this cool, what does it do, and is it worth installing?
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Underground Hacking, Madness, and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier
Underground: Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier is a book written by Suelette Dreyfus with research by Julian Assange in 1997. The book’s title is an apt description of what the book is about, so I won’t go into detail about that. One of the unusual things about Underground is that the authors licensed the book as literary freeware, which means that the book is available to anyone, anywhere at no cost, and with almost no restrictions whatsoever, except for commercial use of course. The book is available at Project Gutenburg as well as at underground-book.net. After reading Underground in 2007, I tried to contact Suelette Dreyfus about making a festival text to speech audio version available as a serialized podcast. I never could get in touch with her, so I emailed Julian Assange about this:
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festival, or the more things change the more they stay the same
Many moons ago, I had a podcast that I recorded from my car during my commute. As a time saving measure, instead of correcting mistakes, or even worse, re-recording all or a portion of the podcast, I would use festival and the festival program, text2wave to have a computer generated, female voice, interrupt me and read aloud any corrections that were needed. She more or less became part of the show and was personified as Lynn. It was silly, and fun, but it solved a problem, worked for me, and in some way sort of reminded me of the fun my brother and sister had as kids back in the 70s using a tape cassette recorder and the heating ducts in our floor to broadcast our “radio station” from one room to the other.
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fwupdmgr ftw!
fwupdmgr is awesome. Used to be, updating the bios and firmware on a computer with linux installed was more difficult than it is now. Sadly, Dell Poweredge machines aren’t on the supported list (yet) of machines able to use fwupdmgr, and are therefore a real pain in the neck when BIOS and firmware updates come around; having to boot off a usb drive and execute a windows .exe file is never fun. Thankfully, Lenovo Thinkpads are supported and firmware updates are easy.
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gophernicus
Yesterday I changed my gopher server from pygopherd to gophernicus on one of my debian stable servers.
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i3 launch mode
The i3 window manager is cool and awesome in lots of ways. It is fast and lightweight, its keyboard driven, its well documented, and via it’s config file it is super easy to get it to do just about anything you need. Those are the things that come to mind first when I think of i3. In addition to that though, there are a couple of lesser known features that are worth mentioning, understanding, and using. One of these is the scratchpad, and I will post about that some time in the future. The other super cool feature is modes. i3 has modes like vim has modes. What is cool about i3’s modes is that you can define the keybindings, and even create new modes.
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A one line solution to a self-inflicted problem
I use pywal with the variety wallpaper changer to automatically change the color scheme of urxvt. I have all this happening in the background and set to a one hour interval. I also have a hot key assigned in my i3 config file so that i can make all this happen whenever I like as well. This all really cool, and I will probably submit a post one day explaining all that in case anyone is interested, but having a terminal color scheme that changes based on the colors in your wallpaper on an hourly basis can wreak havoc sometimes; stuff like syntax highlighting in vim, and tmux status bars can sometimes become hard to read when the colors switch to a less than ideal scheme.
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My favorite watch Casio G-Shock GWM5610-1
I like watches. I got my first one when I was 4 years old; it was of course a child’s plastic watch (the ticking movement was a playground seesaw), but it was high tech in it’s own way–it was transparent and you could see the plastic colored gears turn inside of it. One of the first, school-aged, childhood conversations I can remember was in kindergarten and was centered around my cool (and in my 4 year old mind, space-age) watch and the recent moon landing.
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orpie a RPN calculator you can use in your terminal
I bought my first RPN calculator in 1984 during my freshman year at Clemson University. It was an HP-11C. I don’t remember the reason I chose a RPN calculator. I know I needed an scientific calculator, but RPN (Reverse Polish Notation) was new to me; prior to this purchase, all I had ever used were Casio and TI algebraic calculators. Thinking back on it now, if I had to guess, it was probably the bullet-pointed marketing, or the long equation solved simply example on the box that sold me; but whatever the reason, I clearly remember sitting down in the library, reading the manual, and learning to use this RPN calculator. That first 30 minutes to an hour of playing with this new, strange little calculator (the HP-11C was designed to fit in a front shirt pocket–making it a true pocket calculator) quite literally changed my life!
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Back Seat Dropout
From the gopher hole: My name is dave. I am 54 years old and I’ve been using linux and only linux on all my personal computers for 25 years. Before linux I used dos, windows, and os/2. Before windows, I played a lot of DnD. Before DnD, I wore out a trs-80 entering programs in BASIC from magazines and before that I played a lot of games on an atari 2600.
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My window manager journey from floating to tiling
From the gopher hole: I started using linux in 1995. From 1995 to July of 2019, whenever I used a graphical environment, I used a floating window manager. During that time I mostly used standalone window managers, with the occasional stint of working in a desktop environment. Best as I can remember, my linux graphical linux journey started with twm and progressed roughly as follows: twm; fvwm; window maker; afterstep; fvwm2; fluxbox; openbox. This progression was occasionally interrupted spending time in the desktop environments: enlightenment; cde; tkdesk; gnome; kde; lxde; rox; and; xfce. Keep in mind that this was all over a 24 year period. I was not in a constant state of changing window managers, I ended up using openbox with the tint2 panel for the vast majority of this time.
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2020 year in review
From the gopher hole: It’s been a while…since Feb. 29th; that was pre-COVID.
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Welcome to web log!
and I’m back…..again, maybe.
-dsyates
(o\_!_/o)