[Mon Dec 31 12:01:37 CST 2018]

Every once in a while, I like trying a different desktop environment or window manager to dislodge my old habits when using the GUI. I feel it's a good way to avoid mental fossilization. So, about a week ago or so, I started playing with the i3 window manager. So far, I'm quite impressed. It's an extremely minimalist environment. That's for sure. However, it's also highly customizable, it can be fully controlled from the keyboard, and it also makes it easier to concentrate on the task at hand. Altogether, I think it's a very good choice for advanced users. Aside from the excellent official documentation, you should probably also take a look at John Lozano's Configuring i3 page, which is also a very good resource.

Now, I do have a couple of recommendations to make. First of all, if you have been using desktop files to launch applications in a previous desktop environment, you may want to switch from dmenu to i3-dmenu-desktop as an app launcher. It automatically detect all your desktop files config. Also, a major issue I ran into was that, right after switching to i3, my HP ZBook laptop would go into suspend mode after 10 minutes of inactivity or so. While I found these directions on how to configure systemd to prevent going into sleep mode, the thing is that it still didn't work as expected. In the end, this other answer from AskUbuntu provided the solution. Simply use the following commands to disable the screensaver and power management features:

$ xset s off

$ xset -dpms

So far, that has been working nicely for me. {link to this entry}

[Sat Dec 29 09:47:47 CST 2018]

Not long ago, I ran this Firefox add-on that allowed me to quickly send a link to a URL from the browser using Gmail. For whatever reason, the add-on was discontinued, and it wasn't until now that I spent sometime searching around for a qay to accomplish the same thing using some other method. As it turned out, it is now an option built into Firefox itself. You can also customize your toolbar to add a mailto icon. {link to this entry}

[Sat Dec 29 09:39:13 CST 2018]

After spendig a few days on vacation, I returned to my computer today, launched mutt to connect to Office 365 and, when I exited the email client, it showed an error on the terminal that I had not seen before:

GPGME: CMS protocol not available

A quick search turned up Debian bug 849762, as well as a solution. Simply running mutt with the following options fixes it:

$ mutt -e "set crypt_use_gpgme=no"

In my case, I just added a new alias to my .bashrc to always run mutt with those options. {link to this entry}

[Fri Dec 14 15:11:44 CST 2018]

In addition to what I wrote yesterday about tmux and GNU screen, it turned out that it's not true that screen doesn't support both vertical and horizontal splits, as can be seen in this short tutorial on GNU Screen splitting. Also, notice that the tutorial was written back in 2011. In other words, GNU screen has supported the feature for quite a few years already. {link to this entry}

[Thu Dec 13 13:11:22 CST 2018]

About a week or two ago, I noticed a conversation among coworkers about tmux that picqued my curiosity. I have been a long time screen user, but a few of the arguments (see, for example, this comparison) had me half-convinced, so I decided to give it a try. So, the last couple of days I've tried using tmux. However, I must say that, in the end, I had little choice but to return to "good old GNU screen". Why? Well, the first issue I ran into was that, apparently, tmux ignores its own configuration file, even when one passes it as an argument using the -f option. Yes, sure, I can go into command mode, and run source-file ~/.tmux.conf, but then why even have a -f option at all? Personally, I see that as a bug. However, far more important than that (admittedly) minor issue is the fact that, when running mutt inside tmux, I found myself having to refresh the terminal constantly to redraw the screen. Now, this is annoying for someone like me who spends a considerable amount of time dealing with email in the terminal screen. And no, it was not a problem with gnome-terminal. I also tested it with xterm and rxvt, and they both showed the very same problem.

In conclusion, sorry to say, but tmux doesn't feel stable enough and, at least in its current state, it would be more of a nuissance than anything else during my workday. GNU screen, on the other hand, may feel a bit outdated and definitely not "cool" enough, but it's rock-solid. To me, that's what matters. {link to this entry}

[Wed Dec 12 19:07:05 CST 2018]

I have been playing with a very simple, small, light, and very fast browser called uzbl the last few days. Let's be clear. This is definitely not your mother's browser. It doesn't have any of the bells and whistles that most users depend on, and it's not the browser you should be using to view JavaScript-ridden websites. However, it is very functional and elegant in its simplicity. But, best of all, you can control it all using exclusively the keyboard. In any case, one of the issues I ran into while using it was that, for whatever reason, copying the URL to the clipboard using the keyboard shortcut recommended in the documentation didn't work. As it turned out, the problem was not so much with uzbl as with xclip, the tool uzbl relies on (in this sense, the program follows the traditional UNIX philosophy) to copy text. And, the solution to the problem came from this exchange on the Ask Ubuntu website. Basically, edit the configuration file and, wherever relevant, run xclip with the -selection clipboard arguments. That did the trick. {link to this entry}

[Wed Dec 5 15:03:22 CST 2018]

I was just wondering if there was a CLI application that I could run to stream music from an existing YouTube video (i.e., to play the audio only, without the video). An initial search returned things like youtube-dl that, although nice and all, appear to have a tendency to break easily. It didn't take long to discover that it's just as easy to use an existing application like mpv or MPlayer to do this. In my case, I opted for mpv, which you can run as follows:

$ mpv --no-video <YouTube_URL>

A simple bash alias made it easier to use it from the command prompt. {link to this entry}