dlb is dead. long live dgb.

optimistically i announce, the intent to cease posting to digit's linux blog.

i'll now be posting to digitsgnublog.tk

bless yas.

all the best.

c me there.

:)

sidness

i just re-read http://digitslinuxblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/so-browsers-n-stuff.html and realised, when i mentioned i was on squeeze, that i hadnt told my blog what i did after that... i upped my crunchbang to debian sid. the bleedin edge debian. :)

it's actually rather nice. quite quite useable. ok, so i wouldnt recommend it to complete newbies, but it's totally useable, and not yet throwing any nasty bumps at me, so doesnt seem to warrant, at all, the scaremongering i've witnessed it receive in the 7 years i've been using linux. "oh no, dont use sid unless you really know what you're doing".... well i dont "really know what i'm doing", and i managed gentoo, slackware and arch ok, so i think sid shouldn't pose any problems i can't handle either. :P

also... it's not quite as bleeding edge as arch, or even gentoo for that matter. heck, by comparison it's downright ancient! from all the hype, i really expected more problems, and newer software. this feels barely a scratch above squeeze! (and remember, squeeze is now their stable branch, not their testing branch).

anyways, having said that, and being someone who's gotten spoiled with gentoo, arch and slackware, sid is definitely preferable to leaving my crunchbang lagging behind the times with a stable branch. ....'he says for now, before there's been any trouble'.

idk, maybe the hyped warning was more viable back in the day, and all the stuff synaptic seems to have been doing to protect me from installing broken packages, is a more recent addition. whether new or old, it's probably the biggest factor in making sure my sid box remains useable.

...anyways, that's enough waffling to my blog.... i got stuff to do. :)

mypaint n other musings

just been playing around with mypaint.

oh my!

tis very lush indeed.


right from the off, i am quite taken with this piece of software, and shall be installing it on all my operating systems asap.

i'm a wacom fanboy. i have my wacom intuous1 a4 usb tablet for the big workstation, and my lenovo x60t is also wacom "penabled".

mypaint makes the gimp look rather "industrial". stoic, sterile and starchy, even.

mypaint has now even got me considering reviving "the worker", a comic strip series i started back in 4th year of highschool, during "graphic communication" short course class.

it's such a joy drawing with this.

somewhat like "painter" that those of you from the proprietary software world will be familiar with.

given my recent increase in development interaction [started writing bug reports and feature requests for sunflower file manager and others], methink's i'll be getting to grips with this and seeing if i can lend a hand or drop some suggestions.

oh how i love free software.

the longer one is away from proprietary software, and the more one spends time with freedomware/"free software"/"open source software", the more one blends and becomes one with the software.

like just recently i saw a thread about visualisations in vlc (seems to be one of the areas of fluff it lags behind other media players), and how a guy from slackware had got them working... hehe, those slack guys live so much closer to the metal, if anyone was gonna sus it, it'd be a slacker. praise bob! XD

suffice to say, i'm living the dream more and more.

bring on the free energy, so we can make our way towards the negligeable-reproduction-cost for hardware, so the free software movement really will need to change their name to the freedomware movement, to include the free hardware movement too. :) viva liberty!



...

oh, but back to sunflower... mmm, i do love it when you find something that not only do you love massively, but also find so much room for improvement!

sunflower has got me thinking of ditching pcmanfm, my long time fave file manager. only thinking though. not likely to put any action towards that for a while. there are still a few niggles with sunflower. but certain enough i've rearranged a few keybinds in my openbox* configuration to accomodate it.

*yes! shocker! i'm back in openbox, not xmonad or scrotwm just now. ... partly/only because i'm on a fresh crunchbang install. i had realised i didnt have a proper working useable os on my laptop anymore, having been tinkering around making lightweight slack, slitaz and arch distros in numerous partitions. it was a distro-development minefeild... not a properly working and usable [for the every day joe] laptop anymore. ... so i've been installing a number of games too... and wine apps.... like musagi!

yes, indeedy, creativity and creativity's productivity, are returning. the development insanity is retreating. ... well... i'm still working on the EPIC install/remaster script for witch... got it up to being ready for some first test runs, just for the gentoo installation section. there's still millions to do for it. debug and clean up the gentoo install section, write the install sections for funtoo, exherbo, etc etc etc, and debug them, re-write as smaller functions so it becomes more modularised and interchangeable between distro bases, and of course, last but not least, the remastery bit which rather than a hack of slitaz's tazlito, looks more likely now i'll hack out a script version of: http://blahonga2.yanson.org/howtos/livecd/ (phew, i thought i'd have to use metro if i wanted a more gentoo-esq native way... good ol slackers to the rescue again)

nnnnnoice.

oh, and one last bit about the creativity...
i've been making a few more audio tracks recently (not just with musagi)... i might get that next album out soon after all...
heh, there, i've done it now, we'll see if that saps the projects energy, or lights a fire under my ass to get it done. SURELY i have enough tracks by now to pick from for "pHϕmorphia". ...oh man, i havn't even thought what the cover will look like yet...

ah the joys of productivity. i better not work too hard, and have a repeat of winter 2008/09, where i worked so focused and like a workaholic, i neglected my vitaminD levels, fell into a deep ass nasty S.A.D. that triggered the worst anxiety episodes of my life (yeah, even worse than when i was getting subtle death threats n being told i was getting too close and too loud... but that's a story for my biography, not my blog, lol.)

rather looking forward to the future again. they say those with aquarius sunsigns always think 50 years ahead, and yep, that's pretty close to the truth of it, though as laudible and high minded as that might sound, living it, can be incredibly painful at times. i think it's more like we're from the future, and get born into the past. ... so i get incredibly impatient waiting for stuff to come to fruition, like how i remember/expect them to be, and sometimes, it gets fucking terrifying that it might not pan out like that, as we experience the [alegedly] necessary brinkmanship that causes us to realise where we're going, and steer a new collective path.

what caused this turn around in perception? maybe it was the year of supplementing with 5000iu of cholecalciferol (vitD3) a day to bring my levels back up. maybe it was just that cumulation of experiences on the course that tipped the balance. or maybe it was that moment when i looked around and counted how many wind turbines i could see from my house, and i remembered how far we'd come in my lifetime, and consciously eased my impatience with that aquarian future-born expectation, and just took it as a sign that we are heading in the right direction after all. we are heading to satya yuga.

...and it's hands on.

:)

so... browsers n stuff...

chrome's not my cuppa (philosophically/ideologically/ethically or pragmatically), idkwtf is up with firefox4+++++, and none of the others are quite doing it for me. ...so uzbl is still my main cuppa. it's not quite so convenient for getting the plugins you want on the go, but makes up for that with configurability, and putting so much more power in your hands, with it's integration with linux, via it's adherence to the unix philosophy.

having said that, i concede, i have been spending a lot of time with seamonkey/iceape recently, after months of almost nothing but uzbl.

mainly, at least to begin with, it was for it's excellent get-the-job-done wysiwyg html editor.

but i snuck in some use of it's browser, and then realised if i was going to do that, i should get iceape kitted out for browsing, with obvious important stuff like betterprivacy, ghostery, noscript, flashblock, etc. and then of course adding stuff i feel like i cant do without (compact menu, littlemonkey, video downloadhelper, etc)...

so yeah, here i come championing and bigging-up (big-up-ing?) uzbl, and i'm not even using it right now. i'm typing this into the blogger web interface, using iceape. :O

but wait, there's a reason for that...

i'm on a fresh install of crunchbang!

... "but crunchbang doesnt come with iceape!" i hear you cry. indeed... so why didnt i install uzbl instead of iceape?

debian repositories. *sigh*. it feels like the dark ages. now before anyone starts a forest fire from the sparks flying from the speed of their kneejerks, please take into account, that i have come from a prolongued intensive use of arch, gentoo and slackware. and not only that, but i've been using rather more leet management of my packages, picking and choosing which packages i use from stable, which are testing, and which are bleeding edge, since gentoo's portage is ace for letting you do that sort of thing. uzbl is one i set for "**9999" (the bleeding edge).

ok, i know, it's "debian squeeze" and squeeze is now their stable, right? ...buuuuut the uzbl they have is from april 2010. for something that's still calling itself alpha, and under reasonably heavy development, that is dinosaur stuff. i doubt any of the plugins will have much of a chance working with that old hat.

so indeed, since, conversely, slightly older iceape/seamonkey is actually better (in terms of plugins working with it, compared to bleeding edge seamonkey where plugins havnt caught up, as arch users will likely be familiar with), i installed iceape first... to nav around the net, sorting things out n whatnot, rather than chrome. ... and was about to install uzbl just then, when an idea struck me... since i do this a fair amount... wanting uzbl with me as i do... and requiring to install it in such case, that i should create a script for it. and so that's what i did.

i made ddumb,
(and have gone for "release-early" for once)
http://wastedartist.com/scripts/ddumb.html
... and that's why i'm writing this from iceape, and not uzbl.
not even tried it yet. just excitedly threw it up on the net. ^_^

let the noobs de-noob / the sharn o git

the sharn of git:

git's hard to learn, if you dont use it alot to begin with.
(typing half a dozen commands one day, that you had to look up, and never again until ages later, doesnt do much to help learn em)

learning [code] happens much faster, when you collaborate on projects, and everyone fills the knowledge gaps of everyone else.

collaborating is much easier with git, and without git, it's almost impossible to collaborate propperly, since it's the daddy of collaboration aids.



... anyone see a problem with this loop of soft exclussivity?


pre-noobs not allowed in the party that de-noobs them, because they're pre-noobs/noobs.


logic fail in the grand plan.  ... oh that's right, it wasnt planned, it evolved.  ...well, we better fix that then.  :)

stuff i love n other stuff.

been using blender again.  i forgot how much i love it.  ok, so i'm not fluent n free flowing with it, able to get it to do what i want without looking up manuals, tutorials and so on like i could with softimage|XSI (especially since 2.5 changed it so much), but the potential is there.

uzbl is still as much a treat as ever.  ... though there are "addons" that would make it all the sweeter, such as a script manager... for easier portability of whole configurations, not just the config file, which, unless u have no additional scripts, is not entirely convenient on it's own.  "uzballs" are planned, but no work done on them yet i hear.  good to know it's at least been thought of and is in the pipeline.

xmonad.... xmonad xmonad xmonad.  oh how i love xmonad.

scrotwm too...  i'm using it more these days, and even find it the superior to xmonad in a couple of ways... though sorely lacking in a couple others.

oops, almost forgot... tilda.  ^_^  it's so standard to me now i dont even notice it.

i suppose i should also at least mention, gentoo.   i mean gentoo for "real men".  i'm no longer on toorox, (nor sabayon nor papug or whatever).  a proper stage3 gentoo install from the ground up.  :)  and oh boy do i love it.  got a make.conf sorted nice n minimal, and am keeping my system nice n lean.  a speed machine!  :)

here's the biggie... the new guy to the list.  if you know me, or have been through this blog a few times, you'll likely have witnessed my apraisals of the previous apps (and distro), this one, i just discovered a couple days ago (thnx cog).

gmusicbrowser.

gmusic browser utterly trounces all other music players for linux (and for any other system for that matter).  ok, sure, it's still kinda young, n has a rare ocassional scabby edge, but you can see it's already kicking bottoms.  the customiseability of the interface layouts, the choice of backends, ratings, web features, scalable (designed with >10,000 tracks in mind), fast, clean, light... they done good, boys.  they done good.  one to watch.

+

i tried google+ for less than a day.  that was enough to know "NO!".  what epic chain fail.  yes, i had to coin a new phrase to depict it.  chain fail.   ok, so lets say you can overlook the privacy/security/bigbrother concerns about letting google in that far into your social life and to know all that more about you than they already do from your searchings, and that you can even overlook that they report it all to govs (as they've now admitted), the chain fail kicks in hardest if you're not on one of the 4 big name browsers, explorer, firefox, opera and safari (iirc), in which case, they wont even let you in.  ok, so no worries, just change what useragent your browser is broadcasting, right?  nope.  you can get into it then, but stuff wont work right.  i dont like a site that tells me which browser i'm supposed to use.  even if it told me i had to use uzbl, i would still not be pleased.  to highlight the stupidity of this... i can surf facebook, with a text browser, and still have acceptible levels of functionality. .... ok, i can rant on about this for a while.  suffice to say, google plus is actually google minus.

... and i'm not happy with facebook either.  bring on diaspora or anon+.

"anon+.. what is anon+?"
:)  a bright future for the net.  huzzah!   bring it on.

... and if they dont....
........me and some of the boys have been talking about how we could create better (than facebook).

uzbl gtk themes

smplgut-uzbl

^^^ link to my uzbl inspired gtk theme set i made.

originally just 4.  now expanded to ten uzbl-esq gtk themes to pick n choose from.

mostly dark, a few middle-ish, and a light one too.

likely makes little difference to most uzbl setups, but makes the rest of your apps look nice.  

you dont need to use, nor even know what uzbl is, to make use of these themes.  :)

thnx to those of you who use flattr.