Those interviews, years later

A 14-hour work day kept me from making a note yesterday, so here’s the link I wanted to post, just a little bit late.

It’s nice to think that the community interviews idea I borrowed from aysiu almost four years ago is still rolling. And it’s also nice to see new and unusual faces in the lineup.

And the questions are more or less the same too. I guess good ideas can take on a life of their own.

A companion wiki

In between everything else, I’ve been working on transferring a rather large personal wiki to an online host. You can take a look at it here; it’s not quite done yet.

Before you complain about the host, please look at the pages. It should be painfully obvious that my wiki needs were very thin, and so this works just as well for me as any other.

I am doing this mostly to alleviate the burden of keeping track of console-based software that I’ve looked at, over the life of this blog.

Oddly enough, I’m in the same position today as I was five years ago, when I started the site you’re reading now: I had a lot of notes and reminders that I wanted to keep in an organized fashion, in a place I could access remotely.

Only this time I need something more like a reference, instead of a diary. Just a link to the home page and a quick blurb about the program is all I usually need.

So it’s not necessarily comprehensive, and I doubt it ever would be. I’m debating if I want to open it up to everyone, or keep it as a personal resource.

I’m also working on a similar project with a few other people, so this one might remain in this form, as a personal version of that larger effort.

If you skim the site you’ll see that I’ve only worked up through the letter C in my list, so it’s still a work in progress.

I don’t plan to add much more than a link and a blurb; if the home page is one click away, it should have all the information I need.

I might add a screenshot or two if the home page lacks one, but that sounds like a bit of effort. Wouldn’t want that, you know.

The Joker

This is almost funny. It’s definitely not deliberate.

Since the Sotec machine has been back in the house, I’ve given it a quick dust-off, and been happy to see that almost nothing has changed since the last time I touched it.

It still has a few quirks, like a tetchy CDROM and a some curmudgeonly keys. But for the most part, if properly managed, it’ll perform.

Framebuffer support in Debian though is kind of humorous. With most of the settings I tried in Grub2 (my very good friend Grub2 ), the screen had a distinct greenish wash to it.

Which made the entire experience appear in a purple-and-green tint. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Joker.

Under a full-scale X environment everything is fine, of course. And dropping the color depth to 8bpp makes everything right, more or less. Seems like it should be able to do better though. …

I’ll have to tinker with a few other 586-friendly distros, and see if I get the same mischievousness. No harm, no foul … but comical just the same.

Get it? Comical?! Ha! A pun!

P.S.: That’s dvtm by the way, and quite enjoyable at 450Mhz. But when your G key is acting up, it gets a little frustrating. …

Relatively frilly, relatively sparse: tload

Here’s one you might not have known you had: tload.

That’s it lurking in the upper left corner, with the simple display of hyphens and asterisks. Not very fancy, but most of the best tools are clean and simple.

You get a graphical display of the system load, customizable only to a tiny degree, and not much compared to what some other system monitors will give you.

But the nice thing is, it seems to be quite common. I’ve checked both Debian and Arch now, and both of them (apparently) have it by default.

So if you’re like me, and you understand load averages but find them quite dull, tload is a little more interesting to look at. Not much, but a little.

Veggies are good for you: beets

I’ve moaned and whined more than enough about the apparent lack of a pretty, frilly music tag editor for the console. I am sure everyone is rightly sick of it.

So I promise not to repeat that bored old tune when I mention beets.

Very nifty, really. Scans your library and checks online resources for proximity to posted albums, then adjusts the titles to match.

Multicolor, handles special characters and seems to have a grasp of what’s in a collection. I’m still exploring it, but it looks like a neat tool. I could get to like this.

P.S.: Thanks, aperson.