feedelli.org

Tablets. Do we need one? Do we want one? I think the answers for me are probably “not really”.

But I’d been thinking for a while about getting a new device just for reading feeds and e-books. The desktop gets tiring when all you want to do is churn through feeds. The couch beckons. But the netbook isn’t a great device for this by nature. You still have to be positioned in a certain way.

I thought about a Kindle. But the Kindle fire doesn’t seem to be coming out over here, and the other devices don’t properly support web browsing. Also, the Amazon devices are probably unacceptably locked down. I thought about a Galaxy tablet or something expensive like that, but in the end I couldn’t really justify the cost. I looked at budget tablets such as this Ainol, but after some research decided it was too much of a risk.

In the end I decided why not just go for that one tablet that’s been pushed out in front of me the last few months: the Vivaldi. Make Play Live’s tablet is actually a Zenithink C71 with KDE Plasma pre-loaded. If there is a tablet for me, it’s this one. Cheap, open to relentless hacking, and comes with Ice Cream Sandwich.

So I ordered it on Amazon, and it came to about €100. It was dispatched from Hong Kong yesterday and I hope to get it within a week. I’ll post a review then, and following that my experiences installing Plasma Active.

I wanted a shortcut to launch a file manager using WIN-F, sort of like with Crunchbang. I’m slowly trying to get used to Midnight Commander as my file manager, instead of Nautilus. So I needed a terminal to launch with mc running. Sounds easy, right?

I was seeing a weird bug with mc not filling the terminal when running it as a parameter to a terminal command.

Examples:

terminator -e mc was giving me

while

gnome-terminal -e mc

gave me

xterm gave something similiar as well.

Seemed to work fine on Gnome, so it was something Awesome related, possiby to fo with Awesome resizing the window AFTER mc had sized itself, leaving it with the wrong size.

So I thought maybe there was some way to make it start after the window had been resized. Couldn’t find a way to do that, but found a simple solution - just make it wait a bit.

So for terminator the command became

terminator -e 'sleep 0.1; mc'

and for gnome-terminal

gnome-terminal -x bash -c 'sleep 0.1; mc'

This gives Awesome time to resize the window and Midnight Commander then can size itself to fill the terminal.

So then I just added

awful.key({ modkey,           }, "f", function () awful.util.spawn("terminator -e 'sleep 0.1; mc'") end),

to my key bindings section of rc.lua.

Vanilla Awesome doesn’t do anything when you press the print screen key. It’s been one of those things that’s been a minor annoyance, but fixing it got left by the wayside because obviously if I was taking a screenshot I was doing something much more interesting…

Once again Lua and Awesome make this fun to fix.

In rc.lua, I went to the section with my keys (searching for awful.key), and added the following line:

I like gnome-screenshot but that can be replaced with your screenshotter of choice.

Note that the label for your Print Screen key - “Print” here - may be different. You can find out by running xev and pressing your Print Screen key and checking the output.

There’s been a lot of rumblings recently about AAA games being released for Linux. I think the reasons for this can be traced back to the success of the Humble Indie Bundles and paid proprietary games being made available in the Ubuntu software center.

I admit, there’s a little boy inside me that thinks it would be awesome for big-budget new titles to be playable on Linux (this little boy has a lot more free time than me). But when the brief flash of excitement is gone after reading these headlines, I’m reminded what’s wrong: these games will all remain proprietary software.

The inevitable will happen: these games will become available on Linux: it’s just good business. But they will be obnoxiously big binary blobs. A lot of people seem to be excited about this, and I wonder if people have forgotten that Linux support does not mean open-source. We’ve been eased into the idea with the fanfare around other proprietary games being released (they’re proprietary, but at least they’re DRM free and don’t ignore Linux!). Are we blinkered by the fact that Linux is ‘ready for the big-time’? Do we just love these games so much that it doesn’t matter they’re completely closed-source?

Or are games different? The medium is certainly different. Modern games are closer to blockbusters than pieces of software. We go to them for spectacle and story and fun. Most of us own a games console and happily buy silly plastic discs to put in it, while the idea of paying for software on a disc for our desktop has become laughable. There seems to be a feeling in the community that while proprietary software is distasteful, proprietary games are less so. I’m going to try to tune in more to this in future.

So as you may or may not notice my site looks a little bit different. Behind the scenes it’s completely different. I’ve moved completely over to Jekyll, so what you’re looking at now is a static html page that has been ‘compiled’ by Jekyll.

The move was disastrous. It was the first time I’ve tried any kind of site migration. I don’t even have that much content here, and the site was already pretty new to begin with, but moving it was a real pain. I won’t go into details other than it was some of the most fruitless and dreary work I’ve ever done with web stuff. Still, I managed to keep most of the content, despite at least one accidental deletion (I’m going to start backing up soon, I swear! Is Rsync the way to go??).

So it didn’t go off without a hitch, (sorry if you got old posts in your feed!!) but some things seemed to work well such as Apache redirects from the old URLs.

I’m ok with the new look, and it’s a huge improvement being able to type posts in my editor of choice (vim), and have them saved as a simple text file. Markdown is even starting to feel more agreeable. The site feels more ‘fat-free’ now. We’ll see how it goes.

As I’m getting the hang of Awesome’s config file and Lua, I’m finding it to be really powerful. Yesterday I added a volume control widget, and today I’m doing something I’ve been meaning to do for a while - adding a hotkey for opening a browser.

To do this you need to find the key bindings section in rc.lua. I wanted to have mod key + w open Chromium. This is similiar to something I found really handy in Crunchbang. By default, mod key + w opens another Awesome menu at the cursor, which is something I haven’t used once and can’t imagine using, so I replaced that.

So in the callback function where it had said

mymainmenu:show({keygrabber=true}) 

I replaced with

awful.util.spawn("chromium-browser")

and restarted Awesome with mod + shift + r.

And voila, mod key and w spawns a Chromium.

I’ve started to enjoy keeping lists. Lists of albums I’ve listened to this year, lists of films I watch, lists of stuff I need to buy and stuff I need to do (although TaskWarrior is starting to replace a lot of this).

Like the list of podcasts I have here, I decided why not have a list of blogs I read. I spend almost as much time reading blogs as I do listening to podcasts. I think the podcast list has been of some value to some people, which is awesome.

One caveat: I subscribe to new blogs a lot more often than I do to new podcasts, so the list will constantly be in flux. So… Git. A Git-managed blogroll which I’ll try to keep up-to-date with my Google Reader. The idea in managing it in Git is that I’ll have a reference a few years down the line if I want to check around when I subscribed to a certain blog, or to feed a future curiousity about what I was reading back in 2012.

I’ll keep the list displayed somewhere along the side of the site, and hopefully someone might be interested in following some of the links, and possibly subscribing too.

I’m trying to set up my server so that I can edit blog posts locally and push them to a bare Git repository on my server, which will auto-publish the changes with Jekyll. I’m using a post-receive hook to do this.

I was getting a weird error that I was stuck on for a couple of hours. Ruby is installed on the server under RVM, and Jekyll is installed as a Gem. I added RVM to my PATH in .bashrc and the jekyll command worked fine from the command line. So I added a post-receive script that would do some magic and run Jekyll to generate the new site from the updated Git repository after it receives a push. But when I pushed from my local machine, I was getting the error jekyll: command not found from the post-receive script.

The solution was to add the -l flag to #!bin/bash at the top of the script. I found this out here.