Note to self: Title Case in vim

Strictly as a note to myself, because I’ll never remember this on its own …

:s/\<\(\w\)\(\w*\)\>/\u\1\L\2/g

That will convert a line of text to Title Case in vim, either on the line it’s issued or over selected blocks.

vim has single-key case conversion anyway (the tilde key) but this might be the quickest way to arbitrarily switch everything to title case.

Not my discovery or idea; found by way of the Vim Tips Wiki.

Less one … and a half

I should probably mention, just as a side note, that I’ve managed to reduce the number of junk computers in the house by one and a half.

The one is the Dynabook, which I knew from the start just wasn’t a keeper. Too many physical shortcomings, too many esoteric hardware points, and while the screen was beautiful, I couldn’t get anything to show on it except a low-grade flashing cursor.

So it has gone the way of all flesh, which is to say, the recycling shop. It seemed to run Windows fine and I got Slitaz working once or twice, so perhaps someone with more patience or more expertise than me will find a way to put it to use.

I know I should be a little more appreciative of gifts, and at the same time make my best effort to keep a machine in use for as long as I can, but even from the first moment, it was obviously not going to stay around long.

Discarded hardware is a fact of modern culture, and the predominance of machines I see are in tip-top shape. I feel guilty saying it, but I can afford to discriminate.

So a beaten and battered 700Mhz Celeron, while technically usable if I lower my standards, just doesn’t appeal. There are too many near-perfect ones at hand.

And the half? Well, that one is now a clock, of course. So it doesn’t count as a whole computer, just a half.

Case in point: A 133Mhz photo frame

Thirty-two megabytes might be the old way of doing business, but around this house it’s more than enough to get the job done.

Looking back at the weather clock escapade, I realize I had taken on one of the more intensive projects — not a huge task of course, but there are others on my list that are more obvious, and easier to wrangle. Such as …

That’s a lowly 133Mhz Pentium, the economy-class traveler of 1998, with little more than a 12-inch screen and a cantankerous Trident video card to boast of. And it only has 32Mb of PC66 in it because I’m too lazy and too much of a skinflint to order more.

And so it’s running Debian Lenny. Out of date, yes. Out of work … not on your life.

While you admire my impromptu photo frame and wonder at its magnificentness , I shall give you a few details.

First, I can say up front that putting this together was definitely easier than the weather clock. I installed Debian (which only took about two hours ), then added the non-free and contrib repositories.

With those two I could move from a kernel-supported wired connection to a ralink-based wireless card. Rather than play footsie with Debian’s wireless configuration — and because wicd-curses isn’t in the Lenny repos — I jammed the wireless configuration and dhclient commands straight into rc.local. Works fine, if you want to know.

After that, I added a rough slew of programs, all of which revolved around feh.

xorg rxvt-unicode xfonts-terminus mc elinks-lite htop nfs-common ntpdate rsync most unclutter

and the Openbox suite. Configuration is almost identical to the settings I used for the weather clock — autostart.sh handles all the DPMS options, almost nothing in .xinitrc, etc.

Of course, I have to rip out xserver-xorg-video-trident, because that driver causes the machine to spasm. That will remove xserver-xorg-video-all, but that’s just a metapackage, so it doesn’t matter.

Things like ntpdate and rsync and nfs-common are really only for my own convenience. This machine has no USB port, so the only practical way to get pictures on and off the machine — without burning a CD of them — is via network.

Ideally, I’d like for this to seek out a USB drive whenever one was inserted, copy the photos to the internal drive and sift through them one at a time.

To that end, this howto — although I didn’t try it — should do the trick. I suppose it could be adjusted for a CD drive, but I’m not going to burn up a dozen CDs just to try it out.

For the record, the command to get a full-screen, randomized 10-second slideshow of anything with a .jpg extension on it … is this:

feh -ZzFx -D 10 photos/*.jpg &

That at the end of autostart.sh will fork off feh into its own world, and give you the contents of the photos/ directory, one every 10 seconds.

Total cost for the project: US$10, which is still cheaper than a generic photo frame from your local big box store. And you have the added educational value of installing Debian and setting up your computer.

I should say I tried doing this first in Awesome (awesome 2, to be more precise) but got a single-pixel border around the left and top of the full screen instance of feh, which sort of ruined the effect.

I also tried running it without a window manager altogether, but had trouble getting unclutter to start alongside feh, and having them both quit when feh was told to stop.

In the end, Openbox was just easier and quicker, even if it is somewhat heavier than an outdated version of awesome.

(As a side note, I should mention that awesome is quite speedy in its Lenny version. And while rollover effects (a la GTK2) on a machine this slow are a nightmare, it doesn’t suffer too badly in Debian. I will still stick with console applications any day though. )

If I can get my hands on a decent Pentium II with a reliable video card and a USB port somewhere on it, I might try this again for fun. Of course, I suppose if I hadn’t torn apart the K6-2, it might have done this just as well.

Poor man’s SSD: No news is no news

I haven’t mentioned it, because there wasn’t really anything to report. But since Anton Eliasson noted the six-month anniversary of the CF card installation, I suppose I should acknowledge it.

That’s right, six months with CF cards in two different machines, and a third one ordered a couple of weeks ago. Nothing wrong. Nothing broken. Nothing lost to hardware faults.

In sum, nothing to report. Even on the card that was “stress-tested” for the better part of a month.

For the most part I am overjoyed that the experiment has gone so well. After all, this is one of my personal triumphs, even if it wasn’t altogether my idea.

But to be honest, there is a tiny part of me that’s just a little itty-bitty bit angry. I think it’s the same sense of frustration I had when I finally jumped ship from Windows, years ago.

Seeing through the veil of misinformation — in this case, all the advertising dreck and forum posts railing against the idea as a disaster waiting to happen — is both liberating … and irritating, to a much lesser degree.

So yes, I am happy that I have installed CF cards and adapters in three pre-1998 machines and seen nary a one cough up a fault.

But at the same time, I have to wonder now and again … who else is lying to me about what is possible, and what is not, with my computers?

I guess that’s for me to discover.

P.S.: Total spent to outfit three machines: Roughly US$100. Put that in your newfangled SSD and smoke it.

From 32 to 43

Disappointed? Saddened? Nostalgic? I’m trying to describe my reaction to Debian’s increased memory requirement.

It’s no surprise really, that the text-based installer on the business card CD wants 43Mb of memory to install. Mentally I had always put that number at 32Mb, which I really only inherited from working with Ubuntu for years.

Not so any more. Even as far back as a year ago, machines I upgraded from stable to testing couldn’t boot on 32Mb of memory. And the installer now says 43Mb is the bare minimum, officially.

It may be that there is a way to circumvent that — after all, the installer doesn’t quit, it just tells you that you’re on thin ice.

But I guess what that means is I need to invest in a couple of old sticks of PC66 … and stop whining about the old days. This is progress, take it or leave it.

More vaguely unattached ideas

Once again I seem to have collected a few small notes and links that would do better lumped together, rather than alone.

• In the way of updates, I should mention that the Tamsyn font I learned about a month ago has been updated to include line drawing symbols, which makes it much more attractive in text-based user interfaces.

  

  That’s 7×14 and very clean. Even 6×11 is very readable, and the way that looks, I might have to feed it into my Debian systems. I could use a little vacation from Terminus.

• Also from the font department: I regularly use a Japanese keyboard but rarely go through the hoops to set up multilingual characters or international fonts beyond what is default in Xorg. To that end, there’s a very good series of posts at Chip’s Tips on getting urxvt to show CJK and other letter sets. And if that’s not enough, the Gentoo archives wiki page on UTF-8 is very helpful.
• The Mebius has been updated to Crux 2.7, which is only important because I had held off for so long on making the jump. Directly updating from the Crux 2.7-i586 ISO was easy, but still needed two or three packages recompiled — most notably imlib2 and anything that required openssl (think: elinks beta, alpine, etc.). In any case, I put that off for far too long.
• I got a note from Brandon about an HP Pavilion laptop with a Trident-brand graphics card in it, that has some horrific wrapping effects when using the framebuffer.

  

  I have seen this on my Trident-based machines that can work with the framebuffer module, but I usually only lost one pixel — not entire rows of characters. If anyone knows how to tweak the framebuffer module to push those things back around to their proper side, both Brandon and I would be thankful.

• Similarly, Jose Catre-Vandis sent along a link about setting up jinamp to play music for a party — shuffled playback only, with no intervention required. I was a little surprised, since my own run-in with jinamp a long time ago was very superficial and not much to my interest. A tool for every job though, and this time it sounds like jinamp was exactly what was needed. And one small +1 for the wiki.
• Lastly, I mention this not as a console game, but as a game that will make you feel like you’re at the console.
   

  That’s asciiportal, which definitely isn’t The Orange Box, but will remind you of it, if you know it. It’ll take a little more in the way of resources to run asciiportal than, for example, robot finds kitten, but that’s not a good reason not to try it out. For a little while at least.

I think that’s about it for now.

The next time I complain

I’m making a note for myself of this, so that the next time I open my big fat mouth and complain about something, I can give myself a nice big slap across the face with a cold, wet fish.

It’s important to remember that the people who build and design these things — the same things I so blithely praise or deride on a daily basis — are just that: people.

Some of them are facing challenges in life that I would quail from. And yet it doesn’t stop them from pursuing their passions and interests.

The fact that they share these things freely, without regard for money or ownership or membership, is amazing in every sense.

The next time I complain or lambaste something for being too this or too that, too sluggish or too fat, too cumbersome or too obtuse … I want to remember Adrian Hands, tapping out a patch with his feet, and savoring the small moment when it was accepted.

A gold smiley for Adrian, wherever you are:

Bend the universe to your will: Gearhead

It’s a fair bet that if I haven’t updated this page in a day, that something new has absorbed my attention. This time it’s Gearhead.

Before I start out, I should mention that yes, I found this the same way I’ve been finding a lot of new console programs lately, via Debian’s package search pages.

And yes, I mention this quick on the tail of freesweep, which I don’t actively dislike. I just prefer something with a little more … depth. Gearhead definitely comes through on that point.

Comes through in spades, really. Gearhead reminds me of my years of tabletop gaming, with cardboard tiles and hex maps, firing arcs and reload times and overheating weapons.

If you remember (or still play) things like BattleTech or Star Fleet Battles, Gearhead will be a natural transition for you. Many of the principles are the same.

But there’s a role-playing element at work here too — you’re not just ticking off ammunition and waiting to incur enough damage to knock over a robot.

I haven’t had the chance to dig very deeply into that aspect — I’ve only been playing for a day or so — but luckily there’s a wiki that will show you how to get started. Pilot attributes must count for something.

Personally I didn’t need much coaching to get started. Not that I’m some kind of genius or something, just that the game is menu-driven on almost every point, and most of the indicators and commands are fairly self-explanatory.

But with this much to absorb me, this is definitely going into my book as a keeper for the console — right alongside Crawl — as a game I can really sink my teeth into.

Some side notes: First, I know there is a Gearhead2, which I tried on my Pentium machine running Debian, but it was terrifically laggy and sometimes took 20-30 seconds to move between menu options.

I see on the wiki that Gearhead2 is described as “in the making,” so it might be that it’s sluggish because it’s not quite done. Or it might just be too heavy for 120Mhz.

Both are possible. But either way, I definitely have my hands full with Gearhead. I can wait a little bit for the sequel.

Second, if you prefer a graphical version, I see that there are tile-based oblique-view animated versions that have developed around Gearhead{1,2}, much like the renditions that accompany Nethack, etc.

If you get one of those running, please send a screenshot.