Archives

All posts by Cirrus

Linux Desktop

Posted by Cirrus on April 5, 2013
Posted in: General TechnoBabble. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

2013-04-05--1365186923_1630x1079_scrot

Click Here for a better view

The image above is a scrot (screencapture) from my 2nd monitor which i tend to use for CLI apps, in this post i aim to show you what apps im using and share some of my dotfiles, even though this is on an Archlinux OS, there is no reason why it cannot be replicated on any GNU/Linux system.

Now from the top, the terminal emulator im using is named ’tilda’ and in the prefs of the emulator i have it execute the ‘tmux’ command on startup, tmux is what allows us to split the terminal up into individual panes, here is a link to my .tmux.conf  which you should create in your home dir.,  after installing tmux of course, so install tmux and paste contents of this into a file named .tmux.conf  in your home dir.  .tmux.conf  (now do  source ~/.tmux.conf   so the new conf wil be seen) then     browse to your repo for the emulator named tilda (tilda is a GTK dropdown terminal emulator)  once installed right click for its prefs and edit to suit, then add the word ‘ tmux ‘ in the title command tab in the custom command field, now when you start tilda tmux will execute , using ctrl+a+” or % (Ctrl+a+shift 2/5) will split the panes accordingly.

Now that we have the blank canvas, lets get painting :)   OK in the top left pane is my IRC client of choice named weechat, being a Scot i was drawn to the name, turns out its an amazing highly configurable IRC client,  it has a very large selection of scripts so you can tweak it till your hearts content, weechat too will be in all good repo’s  (also runs on Mac OSX)  once installed have a look at my weechat cheat sheet it shows how to set up weechat so we can connect to our favourite servers & #chatrooms weechat.txt  you should also check out my buddy FiXato’s guide Here

Directly below weechat to the left is ncmpcc which is a media player for MPD (music player daemon) i use it to stream my music over http and to annoy the neighbours. MPD can be difficult to set up for the novice so if you are a new linux user id suggest replacing MPD/ncmpcc with ‘ mp3blaster ‘ which as you see is just an ncurses media player, however if you want to stick with MPD/ncmpcpp then check out MPD  Once installed and configged , install ncmpcc and here is my modified config which belongs in /home/USER/.ncmpcpp/config.

  Beside ncmpcc to the right is simply the links browser which as you might have guessed is a browser which again can be installed from any good repo.

If we keep going right this is youtube-viewer which i love, it enables us to watch you tube video without using the much despised flash plugin, the mplayer config file doesn’t  require much editing, below ill show you how to use it ..

             youtube-viewer -C                           #start youtube-player with colour output

youtube-viewer -d [URL]                #download said you tube video

youtube-viewer -login                                         # Login to your account

             youtube-viewer -C -S               # colour output & option to access your subscriptions

The chosen you tube video will open in an application named mplayer, to have mplayer maintain its size add xy=600 to ~/.mplayer/config file. Your distro will most probably come with mplayer installed if not simply install it from your favourite repo.

If You use an Nvidia GPU listed here

then  enable VDPAU by adding these two lines to ~/.mplayer/config file

vo=vdpau,

vc=ffh264vdpau,ffmpeg12vdpau,ffodivxvdpau,ffwmv3vdpau,ffvc1vdpau

If you use another GPU, for best results i suggest you read the mplayer section in the tremendous

Archlinux Wiki

Last but by no means least is an excellent RSS reader named newsbeuter this runs too on Mac OSX systems, simply install it and add URLs of feeds to  /home/USER/.newsbeuter/urls  here is a list of some of my chosen feeds, edit to suit.  RSS URL’s

As you can see i prefer to use the terminal for things as its more stable/faster than any GUI equivalent  , It might not have lots of big shiny buttons but it gets  the job done and done well, (this is what the shiny buttons are doing under the surface).  I hope you found something of interest. Who knows it might even urge an OSX user to use his terminal, If you get stuck or have any questions feel free to leave a comment.

Regards

Cirrus

Anonymous Android

Posted by Cirrus on January 16, 2013
Posted in: Software. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

2013011502493520130115023839

I came across a nice tool for keeping your droid anonymous online,  excellent work from the folks over at The Guardian Project and i have to say this is without doubt the fastest tor  network ive ever used.

Welcome to Orbot, one of the many great features is that you can choose what droid apps will use tor, or you can have everything connect via tor.  I spent a good few hours playing with this with both the Orweb Privacy Browser and the Firefox ProxyMob Add-On  and i was impressed. They also have an app named Giggerbot (Secure Instant Messaging XMPP) which works for Google talk. I would urge anyone who is concerned about their online privacy to give this a go. Its free and is available from the Google play store.

Falcon PRO – The Ultimate Twitter Experience on Android

Posted by Cirrus on December 19, 2012
Posted in: Software. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . 1 comment

falcon_pro_twitter

Recently there was a poll on G+ as to which twitter client for Android people used and recommended, this won hands down.

Falcon PRO – The Ultimate Twitter Experience on Android

Falcon Pro brings the Ultimate Twitter Experience to your Android Phone and Tablet.

Looking for a Twitter app with an Innovative UI, Buttery animations, Extra fast loading times and Unique Features ? Look no further, Falcon Pro is what you need.

::::: Falcon Pro Features :::::

* Double Sliding Menu UI like you’ve never seen before
* Beautiful Phone and Tablet UI
* Extra smooth scrolling
* Real Time, Expandable notifications
* Super fast internal browser with Instapaper integration
* Offline favoriting
* Tweet Drafts
* Inline preview of Photos and Videos
* TweetMarker support to use on multiple devices
* In-app preview of Play Store links
* Zoomable pics
* See your most popular tweets
* Fast access to Saved Searches and Lists

+ All core features you would expect from a mobile Twitter client.

Falcon Pro is fast and smooth on phones and tablets running Android 2.2 and above.

Click above image to Download the .apk

If you like it please purchase it from the play store, it’s well worth the price tag of £ 0.64p

Install Google Chrome in Sabayon

Posted by Cirrus on November 23, 2012
Posted in: General TechnoBabble. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . 4 comments

Google chrome browser isnt included in sabayon/gentoo ‘s entropy , heres how we install it ..

first off grab chrome here , now we install the package to handle .rpm wrappers

so we open package manager (rigo in sabayon) and install package named rpm or use terminal to install it with

emerge rpm

then in terminal cd to folder where you saved the newly downloaded google-chrome .rpm  and type

rpm -i xxx.rpm

(xxx being name of package)

It will probably tell you that you cannot install the package because of some dependencies. If you think you meet these dependencies, then

rpm -i --nodeps xxx.rpm

(again xxx being name of package)

Now you can enjoy chrome and say goodbye to chromium with its broken hardware acceleration

see here for how to get the most out of google chrome

enter this in URL bar or click hyperlink if you are currently using chrome or chromium and tweak till your hearts content

chrome://chrome-urls/

This is how we want chrome://gpu-internals/ to look afterwards

Getting Android to be as Stallman-friendly as possible

Posted by Cirrus on November 5, 2012
Posted in: Hardware. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . 1 comment

The BusyBox slash forked Linux-based Android operating system is more popular than ever nowadays. Even though large parts of it are released under the Apache license, Android is far from completely free software.

Those who know me, will know about my skeptical opinion about proprietary binary blobs. I simply do not trust proprietary software to be safe, so I try as hard as I can to live a completely proprietary software-free life. I simply refuse to believe that proprietary software vendors do not have any bad intentions, and would not hurt my privacy if they could make bigger profits by doing so. You can call me paranoid; I just call it realistic.

On my computers, I am almost there. I primarily run Debian, and the only non-free parts I have installed are the Adobe Flash Player and unrar. Flash alternatives like Gnash and Lightspark just aren’t up to par with the “real” Flash Player, and the adoption of HTML5 video isn’t going as fast as I’d like it to go. Also, the last time I checked the open source edition of unrar, it wasn’t able to properly open many archives, although I haven’t looked into it recently; so things might have changed. Either way, in both cases I want to get rid of (the need for) the programs, so I really hope that it will become possible to do so in the near future.

Android, however, clearly shows a different mentality than ‘regular’ GNU/Linux. Even though the Android project itself is completely open source and released under the Apache license; many (if not all) Android developers could not care less about freedom. 90% of the Play Store is proprietary software, and after all those years, it still doesn’t offer an option to filter applications by license.

Continue Reading

Getting people to understand the importance of freedom over convenience; why is it so hard?

Posted by Cirrus on October 29, 2012
Posted in: General TechnoBabble. Tagged: , , , . Leave a Comment

I visited something one may call a family reunion today. Even though those who know me are likely aware of the fact that something like that is not really my style; I have nothing against the people personally, so I did my best to be friendly and polite, have some general conversations, and possibly end up getting one or two people interested in leaving the proprietary computing ecosystem and be liberated by GNU/Linux and other free software.

The usual people with whom I have such conversations about the importance of free software (and more importantly, digital freedom) do not know very much about the subject, but are usually surprisingly willing to listen to what I have to say, although I’ve come to believe that the reason for them doing so is more likely due to the fact that I offer to bring new life to their old computers free of charge, than that they are honestly interested in the potential dangers I try to protect them from. I don’t think I’ll ever know their true intentions, and I try not to think about it that much; merely to avoid another major disappointment in my life.

Regardless of that, today I was talking with a relative who does know what he is talking about, and perhaps (or even likely) knows more about computer-related subjects than I do. But sadly, it did not take very long for me to find out that even though he was well informed about the subject – and wasn’t too shy about letting me know about that either – he still reasoned like an average computer user. He told me that he just couldn’t care less about how content is presented to him, as long as it “just works” (and we all know that slogan, don’t we?)

Even though American corporations like Microsoft and Apple will have full control over everything we do with our (not so very) “personal” computers, and are able to spy on us, steal our personal data, apply censorship to the applications we are allowed to run, add DRM to media content, and lock us in to proprietary file formats, it was considered all right by him, as long as working with his computer would take as little effort as possible. So basically, someone “smarter” than me is still part of the everyday ”OMG this Silverlight movie doesn’t work, so GNU/Linux sucks” crowd. As you can probably imagine, it was one of the most depressing thoughts I had in a long time; finding out that respect for two of the companies in ICT I consider to be the most evil of all time, is even present in this group of users.

Continue Reading