Using slock

I've been using slock¹, from the suckless tools collection, to lock my computer recently. And I gotta say, it's really doesn't suck. Using it literally couldn't be any simpler: at any command prompt (ie, in a terminal emulator, awesomeWM's "run" box), you type "slock".

And that's it. Your computer is now locked. Mouse input is ignored, to unlock it you simply type your password at the blank screen. There's no password prompt, no screen saver, no options to mess with, nothing. Just your locked computer and a blank screen. If you're worried about burn-in, turn your monitor off---you should be doing that anyways.

¹Getting slock: slock is part of suckless tools, from suckless.org. In Ubuntu, it's part of the package suckless-tools:
sudo aptitude install suckless-tools
It's probably in the same package for most Ubuntu or Debian derivatives.

Review: Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. Title says it all, really.

"Some things you do for Love"

All you really need is to love, well and truly love, what you do.

When you love what you do, you work to get better at it just because you can. When you love what you do, it shows in what you do, and people can see that. Because when you love what you do, you've put a lot of work into it and you're good at it.

Dasher

Back to the Future is a very good movie.
Dvorak is a lovely keboard layout, and a vast improvement over Qwerty.
Dasher is great fun, admittedly probably a lot better than Qwerty, and certainly much better than not being able to use a computer at all. However, I'm not to certain about Dasher in and of itself.
I will of course grant that it's both the best alphabetic interface I've ever seen (okay, it's the only real alphabetic interface I've seen), and vastly better than anything I think Icould have come up with.

In related news, except for the latter addition of some newline characters (to make my markdown work right), this post was writen entirely in Dasher, despite haveing to go back and fix some parts. Explaines the non-sequitor of an opening surprisingly well, doesn't it?

Oh, right. Dasher is a lovely little program that provides a number of alternatives to a traditional keboard. The most ~~notable~~ obvious is the one where you dynamically zoom in on the letters you want, eventually building up words and paragraphs until you have however, long a string of text you decide you want. It's not replacing my trusty Dvorak anytime soon, but it seems like a great alternative for people for whom typeing is not an option.

What is Blogging?

The other day, I came across a post on "Penguin" Pete's blog where he outline a bunch of stuff on what blogging is and what it is not. He was reacting to someone complaining about wanting something like a blog, but not a blog.

The point is, blogging is blogging, you shouldn't be blogging if you don't like it, and a blog should have a point, or at least a theme. This made me realize that I haven't really established a theme for mine.

So why am I blogging? I have to admit, I wasn't entirely certain myself. At its core, this is pretty personal. I'm blogging because I feel like it, because I need a place to put my stuff where I can always get at it, and because there's things I want to keep track of. There's going to be a fair amount of reviews on here, even if they're too sparse to be of use to anyone else -- Those are here for me, to help me remember what-all I've read. There's also going to be a fair amou nt of tech stuff / how-tos on here, includeing Linux ones. ( *Le Gasp* Another Linux blog? No, another blog with Linux as a topic.) If these are helpful to you, so much the better, but again they're mainly here for my sake. So... Yeah. Whatever.

Commandline tips #1

Two cool and important things I learned the other day:

First, I learned how to use byobu/screen, most importantly to let a process such as irssi run on a tty and in a GUIterm.

Second, I learned that GUI programs WILL FAIL if you don't own some X for them to run on. Thus, it is impossible to start a GUI program, log out of your GUI session, log back in to your GUI session, and have your program still running -- even if you use something like screen.

Also, you can alias aptget="sudo apt-get". On Ubuntu-likes at least, this saves you about six keystrokes every time you want to install/remove something. You could alias aptget="sudo apt-get install", of course, but then you can't use it to remove stuff.

Hello Woild!

Hello world!

This is my second real blog post. The first one was "Idea"

Protip: You can backpost in blogger with the "Schedule" option. Just schedule it for sometime in the past, and away you go!