FreddieFreeloader   Rantings of a paranoid computer hobbyist

Taking a foray into other lesser-known WMs. Here’s a nice interview by Softpedia on the creator of FVWM-Crystal Maciej Delmanowski. On my part it is a bit hard to forget my fluxbox keyboard habits that I’ve been used to for so long it’s almost second nature. But it’s a learning experience and I like fvwm-crystal so far. I already tried out Ion3 and ratpoison (and even E17) but somehow I keep going back to fluxbox. Maybe FVWM-Crystal will change that… or not. Let’s see if it holds out to my stubborn fluxbox fingers And no, I still won’t use Gnome/KDE/Xfce (aka gnome-wannabe) even at gunpoint. In my head I still think of those DEs as something made to welcome Windows migrants, which I’m not thankfully. I came from C64. No offense to those DE’s users btw, it’s just a personal view.

Looking forward to this one: Desktop Supercomputing. While generally people are looking into faster applications and media and all that, I’m quite excited about it’s implications on cryptography. Imagine this coupled with rainbow tables and rainbowcrack and life couldn’t be much easier.

While looking for a prayer video for my wife, I stumbled upon Fr. Stephen Cuyos’ blog. I like his site. It has this feeling of openness. And he’s into Linux (Ubuntu, but I forgive him for that :). Though I came from Catholic schools since elementary, I’m anything but religious (even having a priest uncle didn’t do me any good :), but I still find his well-made site quite… nice.

HJSplit is famous in the DOS/Windows world as a way to split/join large files for easy network transfer. I’m just confused why they bothered to make an HJSplit version for linux. This HJSplit for Linux even requires you to install a separate library which add to the garbage for such a useless app (for nix). If you’re on linux and you encounter a file split via HJSplit, just use the venerable `cat` and you’d be fine.

cat split-files.rar.* > split-files.rar

There’s a tool called nrg2iso to convert .nrg files to .iso files. You can use that. Just emerge/apt-get/make the tool and you’re done.

nrg2iso cd-image.nrg cd-image.iso

OR

You can use the `dd` command. The difference between an NRG and ISO file is basically a 300kb header that Nero adds to a simple ISO file. So we can just trim this header off and you’ll have your ISO file.

dd bs=1k if=cd-image.nrg of=cd-image.iso skip=300

That’s it.

http://www.apple.com/safari/

Looking like a greyed-out firefox. Tabbed browsing, google search bar beside the url bar — reminds me of my favorite browser, no, not lynx, not dillo either — firefox. So far I’ve noticed nothing new after a few minutes of browsing. Loads pages fast though. Scrollbars, check-boxes, form boxes all have been “appled”. Fonts look cleaner. Ah. Just another browser. Relatively huge download (28mb) compared to FF’s 5.7mb.

Because it’s the most natural thing to me in terms of irc. I was never a big fan of fancy gui stuff. Not because of the appearance — guis look rad. But I never did like using the mouse. It’s the most unnatural act for me. Grab and point. It drives me mad. It breaks up my train of thought. Now it’s rare that I find somebody who’s *not* using either Gnome or KDE. Quite rare nowadays. And when I find someone like that I tend to look closer and see what they’re up to. Most of the time they like simple unobtrusive stuff. I’m blabbing. Have to stop. Well at least you get my idea.

Somebody already made a list for me so it would be lame for me to reiterate them here. Here are the cool features of irssi.

So to all those x-chat/chatzilla/*favorite gui irc client* users out there, dudes you don’t know what you’re missing.

Last month I tried uploading to my Google/Picasaweb acccount via Picasa. It broke. Didn’t try that again. That was on XP.

On Gentoo I have F-spot running and experimented uploading to Picasaweb. F-spot’s upload to Flickr is good enough that I use it as my resident Gentoo “flickr uploadr”. There’s another app from the KDE shop (predictably) named Kflickr. Tried that last year and that works too.

F-spot is technically still in beta but it’s maturing quite nicely in such a short time.