I’ve been using Window Managers (WM) in Linux for around five years. I first wrote about them back in 2018, and mentioned them often subsequently. In my mind WMs can be categorised into two broad camps, and further subdivisions can be applied. The two broad camps are stacking window managers (where windows for newly-opened apps appear over previous apps), and dynamic tiling window managers where new windows open adjacent to current windows on some predetermined basis.
I’ve been gradually reviewing and revising the packages I use to complete particular tasks and the way the underlying data (my data) is being stored. Where possible I prefer to have my data stored on systems I own in something like plain text format, and retrievable or at least accessible through a number of means. The types of tasks I have in mind, the primary package I use to access this data and some backup packages are listed below:
My most recent Linux distribution and Window Manager change was back in December when I landed on Debian Testing running OpenBox for my Window Manager. I ran in to a couple of Debian update issues recently which required me to roll back to a prior kernel. Whilst I resolved that issue, I decided to look at some alternative distros and reconsider my use of WM. I ran openSUSE Tumbleweed for a month-or-so.
This website is coming up to its sixth anniversary. Until how I have used the same company for both domain registration and web hosting. For the first five years the domain registration was around $23/year and the hosting was $36/year. The company took the decision last year to remove this low-cost hosting and the price jumped to $108 for 2022/2023. I let it slide for one year to see how things would pan out for 2023/2024.
Five months ago I wrote something on reading and note-taking and made mention of the Zettelkasten Method, Evergreen Notes, Digital Gardens, Smart Notes and Second Brains. Let me try to provide some context and background to that: The Zettelkasten Method is a method of making notes and thinking about things and committing these thoughts to writing using slips of paper or index cards (zettels) that are stored in boxes or cases (kastens).
Three years ago I posted about installing Debian and Openbox. Well. I’ve done it again. Only a month ago I had declared I was fully slack but here I am writing on a machine running Fedora 36 writing about my Debian 11 installation. I ran into a couple of issues with Slackware. Some apps were very slow to open. I thought I had it figured out, but apparently not. I also couldn’t get Wine to run correctly so opted for a couple of other tried-and-true distros.
After last week writing about my trying Slackware for the first time and how it may become my daily driver if/when my Arch installation breaks, I can report that Arch broke and I now have Slackware 15 installed on my primary notebook. I’m not sure what the problem with my Arch installation was. I’d had some difficulties with our router and had made some adjustmants to DHCP and DNS on the router and Arch install, and so my internet would disconnect after about 10 minutes of uptime.
For the past fortnight I’ve been using Slackware 15 on a secondary notebook. Slackware is the oldest Linux distribution still in active development–having been released in July 1993 by Patrick Volkerding. Patrick is still in charge of the project and has the title of ‘Benevolent Dictator for Life’1 I’d obviously heard of Slackware over the years as I’ve tried alternative distros such as Fedora, Arch, Debian (and its children, Ubuntu and Mint), Void and openSUSE, but I had never tried Slackware until a fortnight ago so thought it was well overdue.
Something Bill Muehlenberg quoted on his site yesterday from CH Spurgeon has got me thinking. Bill quotes Spurgeon as follows: Master those books you have. Read them thoroughly. Bathe in them until they saturate you. Read and reread them, masticate and digest them. Let them go into your very self. Peruse a good book several times and make notes and analysis of it. A student will find that his mental constitution is more affected by one book thoroughly mastered than by twenty books he has merely skimmed.
I most recently wrote about my Linux distro of choice and window managers a little over a year ago. At that time I was running the i3 window manager on an Arch distro. That is still my setup of choice, but in the interim I did use both dwm and Qtile for quite a while (probably 9 months in dwm and two months using Qtile). dwm did take some fiddling with patches to install a systray, but it eventually came together.
For some reason every six or twelve months I tend to switch Linux distros. Some of that history can be read here, here, here, here, here and here. My mid-2021 switch has been from Fedora 32 running Gnome 3 to Arch running i3. What precipitated this flip? A couple of things: a new release of the Gnome Desktop Environment had been released and Fedora seemed a little slow (to me) in making it available in their stable branch.
Around three months ago I made the switch from Firefox to Brave for my default browser. Brave seemed to offer more rigorous ad and tracker-blocking functionality, and it told me how many trackers it had blocked, how much hadn’t been downloaded, and how much time had been saved by not downloading ads and trackers. One of the ‘features’ of brave is the ability to view ads and earn points (‘Brave rewards’) for the privilege.
It’s now been a little over two weeks since I installed LineageOS on my Samsung A5 phone. During that time I’ve installed, removed, replaced and set defaults and permissions for the apps I use. I thought it may be useful for posterity to describe what apps I am using (and why). First off, I didn’t install the so-called Gapps (Google Apps) package on my phone so I don’t have the Play store directly available.
After a couple of hours of spinning my wheels going nowhere this morning, my Samsung A5 2017 android phone is now free of all Google and Samsung apps. After some consideration of both privacy concerns particularly relating to google described here and more general security concerns described here I looked into replacing the Google-provided operating system on my Samsung phone. One of the side benefits is to rid myself of all of the annoying and bloated Samsung apps that can’t be deleted by an everyday user.
This is a follow on post to the one the other day on internet security. In many ways the issues of security and privacy go hand in hand, but you cannot guarantee privacy without ensuring security, so security needs to be dealt with before or concurrently with privacy issues. When I think of internet privacy the primary offenders that come to mind are Facebook, Microsoft and Google (and their myriad products).
Around twelve months ago I came across a reference to a website, have i been pwned?, which details data breaches where user data such as ones email address, password, date of birth and other information had been stolen and then made available to other people. I entered the main couple of email address that I use1 and discovered that I had, in fact been pwned. I couldn’t tell anyone because I didn’t know how to pronounce ‘pwned’.
Around twelve months ago I posted about how I was migrating this blog back to Hugo. That migration lasted around 6 months at which time I switched to Grav. I had fiddled around with Grav in the very early says of this blog but had commenced with Hugo. Just before Christmas 2019 there were some changes made to Hugo which meant the theme I was using1 broke and my site wouldn’t render properly.
Twelve months ago to the day I posted about the steps I’d undertaken to install the Debian linux distro and set up Openbox as the Window Manager. Twelve months on and I’m ready to post about install Fedora and running Xfce as the Desktop Environment. The primary reasons for Fedora are: It is an independent distro, it has a sizeable community, and packages are updated within a reasonable timeframe. And the primary reasons for the Xfce Desktop Environment are: Small footprint so it’s fast to load, has a ‘desktop’ where I can store files and display Conky monitors, and autostart programs and keyboard shortcuts are easy to configure.
Back in mid-2017 I wrote about the different Linux distributions I’ve used over the years. At that time I was using Ubuntu 16.04 running the Gnome desktop. Not long after that I switched over to Fedora running release 25 - also with the Gnome desktop. I can’t recall why I switched because it’s a bit like swapping one SUV for another (they all look the same to me). Perhaps I thought Fedora was a more ‘pure’ form of Linux than that provided by Ubuntu?
As I’ve written about previously, I’ve maintained1 a number of websites or blogs over the years. After some fiddling over the past few days I have finally copied/migrated posts from two previous blogs “adventures in suburbia” (2006-2008) and “inelegant sufficiency” (2010-2011) to this site. They have been set up with their own categories (Adventures in Suburbia and Inelegant Sufficiency) but their old tags or categories have been combined with the tags of the more recent content.
This blog began a little over two years ago. In that time it has been created/managed/manifested firstly by Hugo, then by Wordpress, then by HTMLy, and now back to Hugo. I worked out that my first round with Hugo was 9 months (May 2017 to Feb 2018), then 7 months on Wordpress (Mar to Sep 2018) and 8 months in HTMLy (Oct 2018 to May 2019). Why change? I have different thoughts about ease of use, aesthetics, flat file vs database and ease of access/update.
Over recent weeks I’ve been fiddling to install Debian running Openbox on a few computers. The reason is that I have three notebooks including a 32-bit machine that is probably 10+ years old, a 64-bit machine that would be around the same and even my everyday machine is closing in on 7 years. I had been running Manjaro on these machines but Manjaro dropped official support for 32 bit machines a number of months ago.
A quick plug for a piece of software I’ve been using for the last couple of months to record our church’s finances. The package is Manager. It handles GST calculations and reports, seems OK for small, manual payrolls, is free, works on multiple platforms and seems to conform to standard accounting principles. It also has a very active forum and many guides have been written for common tasks. Overall it will fit the bill for monitoring our church finances and produces a range of Profit and Loss and Balance Sheet reports.
In my continuing albeit sporadic pursuit of plain-text tools for completing tasks, I came across a tool called jrnl which is a command-line journaling program. It is written in Python and is cross platform. I have installed it on both my home linux machine and work win 7 machine. It’s pretty minimalist but allows one line journals to be entered from a command line, or they can be edited in a standard text editor.
Around a year ago (?) one of my daughters bought a mechanical keyboard. I’d never given much thought to keyboards but had gone through a few over the years. The first computer I used that wasn’t a dumb terminal hanging off a mainframe was an IBM XT. It came with the very solid keyboard complete with key clicks. You knew when a key had been pressed. My early home computers (mid 1990s through to early 2000s) were also desktops with, presumably, sturdy keyboards, but I can’t remember what they were like.
I’ve been spending a little time recently looking at different Windows Managers (WM) for my linux-based notebook running the Manjaro distribution. My usual approach had been to run some form of standard Desktop Environment (DE) such at Cinnamon, Gnome 2 or 3, XFCE or LXDE. But for some reason I was drawn to check out some different windows managers. To my non-geek mind, a desktop environment provides the whole package in terms of screen functionality and access whereas a window manager looks after the administration and placement of windows or apps on a screen.
I had a thought this morning – not always a good thing – that if I were creating a website where the purpose was to present Biblical truth regularly, then it would be hard to go past the name “Bible Butcher: Fresh Meat Daily!” Perhaps it is a good thing that I’m not creating such a website, otherwise biblebutcher.com may have been registered.
Around a month ago I decided that it would be a good idea to begin to learn and use Vim as my primary text editor. Prior to that I had used Notepad++ on Windows-based machines and either Mousepad or Leafpad on my Linux-based machines. Vim (pronounced, not surprisingly to rhyme with “him”) is an updated, improved version of a program called Vi (pronounced, somewhat surprisingly as “vee-eye”). Vim stands for Vi-improved.
… of Linux distro. I wrote about my history of Linux Distros here. At the time I indicated I was using Ubuntu 16.04 with the Gnome 3 desktop. That was true (and technically is at the moment), but it won’t be for long. I find frequent issues with my current setup. Nautilus (the file manager) simply refuses to start when I first fire up the machine three times out of four.
At work we have a website that uses Joomla. The site administrator has left the organisation so the site’s administration is falling to me. I haven’t had much to do with Joomla (or the work website) in the past. I had looked Joomla briefly (along with WordPress, Drupal, Hugo, Grav and Jekyll) last year when considering what sort of engine could best drive the great beast egeiro.net. As a result, I’ve had to spend time installing/running/checking/modifying/learning Joomla over recent weeks.
Last year I posted some brief ponderings about a few different wikis. At the time I was intent on getting to grips with TiddlyWiki. I began doing that and used it within my employment for around 5 or 6 weeks. During that time I migrated my previous notes into TiddlyWiki and began using it to take notes during meetings and to record a range of tasks and activities. Shortly after that, however, I came across what was, for me, was a major hurdle.
I really like the simplicity yet elegance of Anders Noren’s WordPress themes. Currently I’m using Hemingway. The only change I make is to show excerpts rather than full posts on the front and summary pages. This is easily done by editing the theme file directly. The change needed is to access Appearance – Editor in the admin panel, select file content.php and change line 65 (which may change) from <?php the_content(); ?
When I first began this blog in May 2017 I wanted to avoid heavy CMS’ like WordPress, Joomla etc. I instead wanted a flat file system and chose Hugo. I still like the idea or the philosophy behind a flat file approach, but my setup meant I could only update posts from one machine. I think this was somewhat limiting so I reconsidered my platform. After fiddling with Joomla, I have instead gone for WordPress.
My search for productivity tools that suit my platforms (linux @ home, windows @ work) and work philosophy (KISS, plain text preferred for transportability, not being locked into a particular tool or suite) continues. I’m now using TiddlyWiki for general notes - one wiki file for home stuff and another wiki file for work stuff. I use minimal formatting in the tiddlers, but try to make good use of tags so I can track/trace ideas.
Over the years I’ve searched for, tried, stopped using, used again, reconsidered, stopped using, considered some more on note-taking/recording/filing systems. Generally I’ve opted for computer-based systems but have also tried paper-based methods. The list is probably not complete, and in no particular order: Treepad Zim GTD Bullet Journalling CherryTree DIY Planner Written to do lists Online to do lists Spreadsheets with to do lists Pocket notebooks - cheap ones from the supermarket that only collect info, not retain it.
A few months ago I read a brief article on a local news website about personal kanban and how it can help organise aspects of our lives. I’d only ever heard of kanban within the context of manufacturing environments so was intrigued enough to read the article, buy the book and eventually read the book. As a result I have recently begun to implement personal kanban without my work context. The book, Personal Kanban, is by Jim Benson and Tonianne deMaria Barry and was interesting, engaging and funny.
As I’ve mentioned previously, we got our first “personal computer” back in 1995. It came with an array of pretty amazing software (or so I thought at the time) including Encarta, MS Money and MS Works. Being fairly keen to put these software workhorses to the plough, I loaded up MS Money and proceeded to track our personal finances using it. The excitement grew thin after a while so MS Money was shelved.
I’ve been running this site for a couple of months now and wanted to implement some form of footnoting. When I write, I tend to include a lot of text in parentheses (just like this) as they indicate a side thought. An alternative way of rendering that side thought is via a footnote1 I’d come across a site also created in Hugo by But She’s a Girl which had quite elegant footnotes.
In my last post I spoke about some hobbies (ie. interests) I have had over the decades. One such interest was bromeliads. I had a collection of around 30 different species of broms from around 6 to 8 different genera. The genera included Aechmea, Vriesia, Tillandsia, Billbergia, Cryptanthus, Neoregelia and Nidularium. Many of my broms were identified species, but some were mongrels or unidentified. Here’s a selection of the now ex-collection1:
Over the years I’ve tried many different distributions (distros) of Linux, running a variety of Desktop Environments. I bought my first desktop computer back in 1995. It was extortionately expensive for what you got. Around $3,000 if I recall correctly. It came with Win 3.1 (soon upgraded to Win 95), 8MB of memory (yep, you read that right), a 540MB hard drive (yep, again), a 3 1/2 inch floppy drive and not much else.
In my previous post I was extolling some of the benefits of darktable such as cross-platform (Linux/Mac preferred), fast operation, comprehensive processing, etc. I also indicated there is plenty of online support to fasttrack understanding the software. Here are just a few resources I’ve started with: Robert Hutton’s youtube tutorials are an excellent start! Cambridge in Colour has a straightforward summary of digital image workflow. Jim McCormick has a nice summarised darktable workflow.
After a bit of testing, fiddling and pondering I’ve decided to opt for Hugo as my CMS. It’s flat file, a single executable, multi-platform (which only needs to cover GNU-Linux and Windows in my stable), lightweight, well documented and has a swag of themes. We’re ready to roll…
Over the years I’ve created and maintained a number of websites and/or blogs. The first was created in the free space offered by my then dial-up ISP. It was called “The Lounge Room” and comprised of a collection of anecdotes and stories I’d read. It was all hand-coded html. My second site was another hand-coded html site called “Sandprints in my Mind”. It was my first attempt at what some might call a blog.
Welcome to egeiro.net. At the moment this is a greenfield website. The only real content exists in my head.