A new and proper avatar

It’s been years now since I found a rather amusing icon on the backwaters of the Internet somewhere, and decided to adopt it as a symbol of … me.

Fact is though, I don’t have license or permission to use the previous image, and as this site becomes more prominent (I laugh as I write that), I start to wonder if perhaps a freer image is important.

So I approached a semiprofessional artist sometime last year, and “commissioned” an original work to serve as a symbol. This one is fully owned by me, without any strictures or terms from the artist.

And it has replaced the old caricature, in the few places I use it. I am releasing the old image completely and hopefully avoiding any ownership issue that might have come about.

At the same time, I am really like the new image, for capturing the essence of what the old one meant to me, and at the same time adding an accent that the old one lacked.

This might not be much to clamor about, when the image is generally displayed in a 90-pixel square, it’s an important moment in local history. Inasmuch as this site is a “home.”

A comfortable limit

Over the years I’ve had a few offers to move beyond this medium into a venue that’s a bit broader — usually podcasts or something similar. And I am flattered by the offers, but I have to say no.

I am open about my efforts to maintain a severe divide between my online persona and my real life — open about being closed, so to speak. There’s no big secret — I’m not famous or influential at all, in fact it’s quite to the contrary.

However, I really feel there is a danger to giving up too much information to the Internet. You won’t find me on Facebook — K.Mandla or my real-life identity — or any other “social network,” unless the Ubuntu Forums counts.

It’s just too scary, if you ask me. The hottest commodity available in the world today is a secure grasp on an identity, and all the trappings that come with it.

And I don’t trust the Internet, with its flashing lights and shiny buttons, to keep that information secure. I’ve mentioned in the past my distrust of cloud computing, and this aversion is similar.

Something like a podcast — by virtue of tone of voice, accent or even speech patterns — would be giving away more information than I am comfortable with. More than the little I’ve made available already.

So I’ll say publicly, to the few offers I’ve received … thanks, but no thanks. This format, although I detest it in general, is a compromise between expression and privacy. For the time being, this is as far as I’ll go.

A couple (or four) free games

I am somewhat short on time today, but I should make note that opening an account at gog.com, like I did last week, I got four games for free. Two of them I recognized.

 

On the left, Beneath a Steel Sky, which is a point-and-click adventure game along the lines of … oh goodness, just about anything that predates 3D acceleration.

On the right, Tyrian, which is a top-down shooter in the vein of Spy Hunter or 1942 or Ikaruga or … there are too many to mention.

I’ve played both of them before, probably because BASS is in the repositories for Ubuntu, and because somewhere along the line I heard about the OpenTyrian project. And the game has been freeware since 2004, I believe.

The funny part is, since one runs via scummvm and the other via dosbox, “installing” the games through the gog.com installer means you can run them directly from within Linux, using those tools straightaway. Kind of wacky.

Anyway, there were two other games I didn’t recognize, and when I have time ( ) I might try them out. It’ll be a while: I have my current re-obsession with Icewind Dale to consider.

Quick tip: An OCPD screenshot command

This is the best tip I have for you today.

scrot -q 100 -d 5 `date +%F`-$HOSTNAME-$RANDOM.jpg &

I am one of those unnecessarily persnickety people who likes their screenshots arranged by date, and then by the identity of the machine that took it, and then with some sort of identifier to … identify it.

You might have noticed that in the file names of screenshots I post here, or you might not. Don’t feel bad if you didn’t. You would be equally persnickety if you did.

Point is, you can do that rather quickly with scrot and the date command, suffixed by the omnipresent host name variable, plus a random number to separate it from others.

Afterward, I usually change the random number to give me more information. A while back I was using the actual time, down to the second, to arrange them in sequence, but it seemed like overkill.

Jam this into your Openbox right-click menu and you have a point-and-click five-second delay screenshot tool. This is one of those times when ObMenu comes in handy. (Would someone please update that? )

For IceWM users … well, I’ve never been able to get environment variables working from within the menu or toolbar configuration files, so dump it into a script and trigger the script from your menu.

Unless someone can set me straight on why those don’t seem to work. Cheers if you can. …

Classic RPGs, thanks to gog and wine

I’m happier than a pig in mud today, after getting copies of three of my favorite games off gog.com, and finding that they all work flawlessly in Arch Linux and wine.

I’ve mentioned my unnatural affection for Neverwinter Nights, and I have an original boxed copy of the Platinum edition. I even “maintain” (if I can call it that) a quick step-through for a script that installs it.

The Baldur’s Gate series though, is probably the strongest true role-playing game ever written (in my humble and slightly biased opinion), and I’m afraid my experiences with most “modern” RPGs still don’t stand up to that one.

It’s the Icewind Dale pair that I’m really thrilled about now though. gog.com’s installer works perfectly in wine, and both of those games run in fullscreen at their best resolution, without a hitch.

Thus far, of course. For me to playtest the entire game would take … a very long time. I am willing to do it though, if the public demands it.

Neverwinter Nights in wine seems to be an unnecessary redundancy, but if you want the shortest route to getting it to work, that might be the solution though.

I have tried the aforementioned script in Arch, and got nothing, and I’ve tried the PKGBUILD from AUR and got nothing. In wine it works like a champ.

With a few small shortcomings. For one thing, as you can see, IceWM leaves its taskbar onscreen while the game is running, which makes it look like the root window is the game.

The easy and obvious way to fix that, without any Googling or terrifying text file editing, is just to set TaskBarAutoHide to 1 in .icewm/preferences, and restart IceWM from the program menu.

Not the most graceful fix, but it solves the problem in a jiffy.

Graphics are good, but I get a wicked slowdown during automated cutscenes or while there are heavy graphic effects underway. I expect that though, since it’s effectively translating the graphics between the two systems.

And it would probably disappear if I would use the established Linux client, rather than running the Windows version through wine. Wine is not an emulator, you know.

I have already found a few pages that give hints on how to make that work; if I can reliably get it going properly, I’ll explain how.

But for now I’m a little obsessed with a few of the games I have enjoyed off and on over the past decade or so. Behind on the times? Yes, I am.

But it’s either that or continue to tinker with Pentium laptops. What’s worse, 10-year-old games or 15-year-old computers?

Lightweight editors: One audio, one video

I still have a few low-profile graphical applications stacked up, found during some of my distro-surfing late last year. Both are audio-video editors, which are only vaguely useful to me.

It’s true I do, on occasion, have use for an audio editor. It’s rare, but probably once a year it comes in handy.

On the other hand, I have needed a video editor … let’s see, let me think about it … okay, I’ve got it: never in my entire life.

So my opinions on these two are relatively uneducated. Take them for what they are worth; my interest in them is that they appear to run lighter than some other options.

Here’s mhwaveedit:

 

I’ve been through audio editors from as far back as my Windows 98 days, and I really can’t give much more than opinion than the superficial.

This is arranged neatly, it’s fairly easy to figure out, and it seems to have enough options to make it useful. I have most of the common codecs installed on this Arch system, so opening and editing a file was a piece of cake.

I also like the right-side sliders, to control the axis and range of the sound diagram, and the playback speed. It has a few other straightforward tools.

I know there are bigger, heavier suites out there — and not just for Linux. So the audiophiles in the audience may find mhwaveedit less than complete.

On the other hand, if you just need to trim out an audio clip and you don’t want to monopolize a dual core machine for a small task, this will do the trick.

I am a mere interloper with audio editors, but I am a complete neophyte when it comes to video editing. I came across avidemux last month, and it was interesting.

 

Most of the tools and options available here are completely foreign to me. I had a little trouble finding a file it could open, but that might be an issue of codecs or file compatibility. I don’t know for sure.

Once I got it moving though, it was fun to mess with. Call me childish, but it was fun to skip through the video frame-by-frame.

And I should mention that there is a CLI version that handles many of its functions as text flags, to include things like normalizing files. That might be handy.

Whether or not avidemux is full-featured enough for your needs is for you to determine. I mention it because it’s considerably lighter than much of the software usually mentioned for video editing.

Keeping in mind, of course, that both of these will probably require some auxiliary libraries to use, and that might complicate your otherwise lightweight lifestyle. Be careful. …

A clever memory script in perl

About a year and a half ago, I mentioned a quick-draw python script that shows the amount of memory allocated to each running program, and shows you the results in a cute little table.

Well, maybe not cute.

Gabe sent an e-mail the other day with simpler, quicker perl script that does something similar, but relies only on top and some shrewd sed-like action to whittle the results down.

And those results look something like …

Mem% Cmd [num instances]

9.5 bash [5]
8.7 elinks [2]
8.3 alpine [1]
6.5 centerim [1]
4.9 ssh [2]
3.6 mc [1]
3.6 vim [1]
3.4 wyrd [1]
2.8 screen [2]
2.4 udevd [3]

With allowances given for WordPress.com’s mangling of code boxes.

Not exactly a mimic of the other script, but not intended to be. This shows memory percentage, but could probably be adjusted to show any of the information top allows. Rather clever, actually.

Gabe has given his permission to cut-and-paste this one, so here are the important bits:

#!/usr/bin/perl

# topsum v0.1 - sum multiple instances from top to get cumulative memory usage

@topsum = `top -n 1 -b`;

foreach $line (@topsum) {
    if ($inlist == 1) {
	@curline = split(/\s+/,$line);
	$cumulativemem{$curline[-1]}[0] += $curline[-3];
	++$cumulativemem{$curline[-1]}[1];
    }
    $inlist = 1 if ($line =~ /^\s+PID/);
}

print "\n\tMem%\tCmd [num instances]\n\n";
foreach (sort {$cumulativemem{$b}[0] <=> $cumulativemem{$a}[0]} keys %cumulativemem) {
    print "\t$cumulativemem{$_}[0]\t$_ \[$cumulativemem{$_}[1]\]\n" if ($cumulativemem{$_} > 0);
    ++$dummy;
    if ($dummy == 10) {print "\n"; last}
}

The nicest part about this script? You don’t need root permission to use it. A small bonus, from my perspective.

Mint vs. LMDE: Sudden weight gain

I’ve only had this Celeron M for about a week now, but I’ve already put four different distros on it, eradicated half of those again, reconfigured, tweaked and wiggled it so many times I almost lost track.

Now it is living out its existence as a remote media player. And it seems well suited to the task.

I did find a pair of screenshots from late last week though, showing a clean boot in both Linux Mint 10 and Linux Mint Debian Edition 201012, on that same machine.

 

Linux Mint Debian, left, and Linux Mint

Not surprisingly, the Debian version of Mint comes in a full 30Mb lower on the startup, taking into account both the screenshot tool and the system monitor there.

Whatever heft is added to Ubuntu when it leaves Debian is inherited in Mint, but to be fair there are a lot of twists and turns in the road from Debian to Ubuntu and Debian to LMDE.

It does beg the question though, at least from my point of view: What’s the advantage in using the Ubuntu rendition, if LMDE comes in lighter at the startup?

And is, presumably, lighter throughout … ?

distcc: Still no luck

This is about the third time now that I’ve tried to configure distcc between my 120Mhz Pentium running Crux, and my core duo running Arch. And sadly, it’s the third time I’ve failed.

I can configure the machines individually, but for some reason nothing is ever transferred between the two. The network is functioning, but the prt-get or pkgmk commands still build locally.

I’ve been over the wiki pages for both Crux and Arch on the subject, but to no avail. I even dug up a few third-party howtos and blog posts, but nothing seems to work.

As usual, I will blame my own misbegotten systems and configurations that occasionally get in the way. In most cases it looks like a simple one- or two-line adjustment to get it going.

But not for me. I can suffer for a while. I lasted five years without it, I can probably last a little longer.

Five-year anniversaries

I’ve let a couple of anniversaries slip by without mentioning them, but they are momentous, and deserve note.

First, it’s been five years now since I downloaded an Ubuntu ISO, and tried it out. That was in November 2005, and a lot changed because of that.

But more recently, and perhaps more importantly, I split away from Windows for good on New Year’s Day 2006. So it’s been five full years since I stopped using proprietary software altogether.

Seems like a long time.

Now when I originally wrote this post, this is the part where I got all smarmy and talked about how life changed and how I became a better person and blah, blah, blah.

I’ll spare you that. Suffice to say, things shifted considerably when I discovered Linux. My computing habits, my computer buying habits, my perspective on computer culture … all those things changed.

For the better, I hope. I also hope Linux does for you what it has done for me — opened my eyes and put money in my pocket. It’s not impossible.

Here’s to five more years!