GunderBlog

A clean-up that turned into digital archaeology (and an overhaul)

2026-10-09T19:00:00Z

This blog is a pile of old websites that I finally put in one place. It started as a small job: fix the post headers on a sloppy WordPress-to-Jekyll conversion I'd left sitting on GitHub Pages. The headers were full of WordPress leftovers, the titles had HTML junk in them, and there were a couple of hundred stray thumbnails and links that only worked on some servers. Then I started pulling on threads, and it turned into three projects in a trench coat.

The clean-up

Headers and titles. I stripped the WordPress cruft from every post, fixed the titles, and put the tags back (an early pass threw them away, and they came back from the original files).
Images. Everything moved into one media/ folder, the hundreds of unused resized copies went away, and one photo link that only broke on case-sensitive servers (.JPG against .jpg) got fixed.
Tidying. Posts that were only "upgraded WordPress" went away, and date-only titles got real ones. A handful of lines that had aged badly got edited. The rest stays as it was, as a snapshot of the time. Pull-quotes from an old theme came back as real pull-quotes.

The dig

Then came the digital archaeology. We went through old backup discs, forgotten folders and the odd corner of the internet, and kept finding more of me: the whole 2002 journal, the 2003 to 2005 journal, the photo pages (now galleries), the CD reviews that used to live in the side columns, and my DeviantArt journals. "I added photos" notes moved into the galleries they were about.

Doing our own research, this is roughly where each piece came from, oldest first.

1999: a movie I may never have seen

Warner Bros. ran a promotion for Deep Blue Sea that offered free web hosting on ACMEcity, a Geocities-style host, to anyone who wanted to "build your own Deep Blue Sea home page." I don't think I've ever actually seen the movie. I just liked making websites, and a free host was a free host. I was going by lacer8 around then. Whatever I built there disappeared when ACMEcity shut down in 2001, and I haven't found a copy anywhere.

2002: Web1000

The oldest thing I still have is the journal from a free host called Web1000. It starts with a preview of what the site would look like, and goes on through the first semester of college, a redesign, a forum and a digital camera that started the photo pages. In January 2003 Web1000 took the site down for most of a week because of a comment they'd added to every page, and that was one reason to move.

December 2003: My Own Domain

I got my own domain and, two days later, the forum came up. The site was hand-built in Dreamweaver, with a journal in the middle and CD, movie and game reviews down the side columns. By then I'd settled on joshg253 as my name online, and the journal ran until the end of 2005. I also kept a journal on DeviantArt (here's the first entry).

2006 to 2018: New Domain and WordPress

In 2006 started using the Kverke moniker and moved to blogging software: first Windows Live Spaces, then WordPress, with a forum and a photo site on subdomains. A few of these blogs were merged into one, called GunderBlog, which kept going until 2018. You can read it all in the archive.

Some of the research was detective work: figuring out which wallpaper I'd meant on a night in 2003 from file timestamps and an old sidebar, or dating a review by the first time it showed up. Some of it I never found, like that first 1999 site. Old links to things that no longer exist stayed dead on purpose.

The overhaul: v2

I moved the site from Jekyll to Eleventy, mostly so I could preview it on my own machine and have it make the thumbnails and galleries itself. That gave me tag and category pages, an Atom feed, a paginated home page, and a lightbox for photos. A GitHub Action builds and publishes the site every time I push.

Then I rebuilt the look, from the Hacker theme (public domain), and kept going:

an ASCII logo that scales to your screen
shell prompts on every page (click the name to change it from visitor; the part after the @ is your operating system)
an ls -l-style archive you can filter by typing
scanlines, a blinking cursor, titles that type themselves out, a glitch when you hover, and a boot screen when you refresh
Matrix rain
keyboard shortcuts: press ? to see them

All of it is optional. The buttons in the footer, or the m, c and f keys, switch the Matrix rain, scanlines and effects off, and the site remembers your choice.

How it got made

Claude and I did most of this in one long conversation. I described what I wanted and kept saying things like "make it more l337", and Claude wrote the scripts, the templates and the CSS, and tested the pages in a real browser. I made the calls about what stays and what goes. It's a good way to finally finish a project like this.

Now

Everything is here, on a static site generated from plain text files. Some things you can't read anymore, because those hosts are gone: the ACMEcity site and the WordPress.com blogs. That's the web for you.

pCloud

2018-03-18T17:21:03Z

2 years ago, the ruthless killing of the (then) best free cloud filesync app Copy was announced.

During the scramble to find a replacement for my beloved Copy, with whom I interacted on a seemingly unhealthy basis, I tried dozens of similar services. Spreadsheets were made. Long forgotten Posts may prevail on here somewhere.

Box is one I'd already used but gave up on -- there was a file size limit of 250MB or something dumb. No ISOs, which is the majority of my free pCloud storage right now.

pCloud is the one new-to-me service into whom I placed a non-trivial amount of my eggs.

Overall it's been great. Through various promotions the likes of "refugiados de Copy" and people using my Special Link to get their own free cloudness, I now have 55GB of free cloud storage in my pCloud, which the software will mount as the P: drive in Windows. That feature was annoying at first because I used to always set my PortableApps USB drive to P: on computers where it was used, but alas, no more.

Upload/download speeds could be better. The web-based "remote upload" feature is quite useful. Useful enough that I've requested it be added to the desktop application several times, along with some additional features that'd make it more robust (e.g. remote upload a whole FTP folder to your pCloud via URL).

pCloud now offers some Lifetime storage: https://www.pcloud.com/lifetime/

Though only 500GB and 2TB variants, and if you bought the 500GB and end up needing more space you'd still have to pay full price for the 2TB, and none of the storage amounts "stack", so you wouldn't even end up with 2.5TB in the end. And I haven't seen if you can add additional 2TB chunks later on. Crypto has its own additional Lifetime account price.

I've been thinking of pairing a Lifetime 2TB (not enough for ALL THE THINGS but I could probably kill my Dropbox and OneDrive accounts) and Lifetime Crypto, but you can't Crypto a sync'd folder so my lifelong dream of having my Home folder encrypted and sync'd across the universe would never be realized.

The final thing preventing me from trading currency for one of their Lifetime accounts is the several times in the past where I've been burned by supposed "Lifetime" accounts elsewhere. Here are a couple gems:

Slysoft AnyDVD: this went like "euh, The Pressure™, we gotta shut down!" Then [essentially] the next day resurfaced with a new company name complete with a slightly modified logo, selling the same product under the same name, telling Lifetime license holders of more than 7 minutes to Eff Off.

PasswordBox: For a while there I was constantly annoyed by being annoyed by LastPass's recurring annoyances and their sloth-like speed of fixing them. So I grabbed a [albeit cheap] "lifetime" license for PasswordBox. They sold it to Intel, Intel re-branded it, Lifetime license holders were given a trial of the "new product" TrueKey, after which they were allowed to [quietly, and I'm paraphrasing here] go inject fluid into shale beds at high pressure themselves.

On the other hand, there are a few Lifetime passes, etc. I still hold which have not yet imploded on me, so I've got that going for me, which is nice.

In conclusion, I'd want the current Lifetime cost to include Crypto, be able to stack additional Lifetime storage amounts, and some sort of (full refund or better) guarantee if their lifetime doesn't exceed my own.

YouTube subscriptions feeds in Inoreader

2017-03-21T19:09:49Z

Google used to let you subscribe to a single "newsubscriptionvideos" feed that would populate with new videos from the channels to which a specified user was subscribed. Then YouTube API v3 came out and removed the combined feed feature.

Nowadays, each Channel provides its own feed, and while this workaround is not completely automatic, it's better than manually adding removing individual feeds, especially if you have a lot of subscriptions.

I'm using the Inoreader web interface + Dropbox in Windows, but this should be able to be adjusted for most other Reader/Storage/OS combinations.

Go to YouTube and log in
Go to your Subscriptions (https://www.youtube.com/subscription_manager)
Download new via the link at bottom after Export to RSS readers (https://www.youtube.com/subscription_manager?action_takeout=1)
Save to Dropbox, e.g. Dropbox\Public\subscription_manager.xml
Right-click the file in the Dropbox folder --> Copy Dropbox link, Dropbox will automatically create and copy a link the file which will be something like https://www.dropbox.com/s/qwerty123456789/subscription_manager.xml?dl=0
Add it to Inoreader:
1. Click the Gear icon in the top right --> Preferences
2. Down a bit on the left, click OPML subscriptions, then New subscription on the top right
3. Paste the Dropbox link to the file in URL, changing the end to dl=1
4. Optionally add a Description -- if you leave it out, Inoreader just shows the URL as the name in OPML subscriptions
5. Specify an Inoreader folder to use for all feeds contained in your XML file, e.g. YouTube
6. You can choose Full Synchronization to not only add new feeds to the specified folder, but also remove feeds no longer present in the XML file
7. And you can optionally show notifications when Inoreader adds or removes feeds via the XML file
Inoreader will automatically update every hour with new videos from your YouTube Subscriptions contained in the XML file. You can also click Reload next to the feed in OPML subscriptions to force it to update now.

NOTE: You'll need to manually download the new XML file and replace your shared one any time you want changes reflected (i.e. you subscribe or unsubscribe from anything). The Dropbox link does not change, and Inoreader will read the new file next time it updates (every hour, and when you click Reload).

Of course, an interesting project would be to have a script run automatically every so often to fetch & replace the XML file, but that exercise is left up to the reader. ;)

Trellis, round 2

2017-03-18T08:27:59Z

Decided to try again, but with a Debian/Ubuntu-based system.

Found a VM of an essentially clean install of Mint 18 Xfce on my main PC, decided to go with that.

Made sure it was updated and created a Snapshot.

Installed the prereqs via apt. Ended up with versions: Ansible 2.1.1.0 (req >= 2.2) Virtualbox 5.0.32 (req >= 4.3.10) Vagrant 1.8.1 (req >= 1.8.5)

So as you can see, we're off to a great start with only one of the dependencies being fulfilled with proper versions via the default repositories.

Trying to install later versions and the Vagrant plugins ended up with permission errors while installing, so tried sudo-ing the install commands, which yielded different (and red!) errors.

My wine glass is empty and this Ukrainian Dark Ambient Black Metal album is about over, so to bed I head.

Trellis

2017-03-17T09:40:03Z

I've been using EasyEngine to set up Wordpress for a while. I found it after struggling to get a MultiUser WordPress site installed the way I wanted.

However, there hasn't been a lot of activity lately, and essentially regarding that, someone in their forums recommended Trellis as an alternative, and it sounded super interesting to me, so I checked it out.

Decided to give CentOS a try, did minimal install, then added KDE, and I'm not hating it as much as Gnome3.

Following the super simple instructions

https://roots.io/trellis/docs/installing-trellis/ Got to work installing the dependencies listed there, and a bunch of stuff not listed there:

Ansible

Was seeing errors trying to use the pip install method, ended up installing pycrypto with yum

Then found this section https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/intro_installation.html#latest-release-via-yum And already having set up EPEL, I installed it with yum

VirtuaBox

followed beginning of this https://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Virtualization/VirtualBox

Vagrant

Grabbed the RPM off their site, installed with yum

Vagrant Plugins

super easy: vagrant plugin install [plugin name]

Then onto the actual Trellis setup

was getting some errors trying to clone the repos, had to set up git config on this fresh OS, and got sidetracked setting up SSH and GPG keys for a bit.

Then was getting errors about not being able to build kernel modules for VirtualBox

eventually installed the specific kernel-devel-xxxniner and it worked after that.

Then errors about my machine not supporting NFS

Followed step one here https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-an-nfs-mount-on-centos-6

Finally vagrant up does its thing, but sits at Mounting NFS shared folders for a bit, so I open a new Konsole tab and ssh in.

Tried opening the ip I see with ifconfig in Firefox, doesn't do anything.

Eventually it times out waiting to mount the shared folders

Now I see it whined about the Guest Additions of the VM (5.0.26) not matching the installed version of VirtualBox (5.1.18 latest), and that you may see (wait for it) shared folders not working.

I'm guessing it'll be easier to remove VirtualBox and install the version that matches the VM, than it would be to make sure that these dynamic VM images it downloads are all updated.

EDIT:Maybe I'm wrong: https://github.com/dotless-de/vagrant-vbguest EDIT2: Ok, now that is slick, upon doing vagrant up, the plugin notices the versions mismatch and injects the current version into the VM.

Eh, still timing out at "Mounting NFS shared folders" Tried this https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/issues/3341#issuecomment-39015570 Still timing out

Read a bunch of Issues and Posts about similar problems, none of the fixes worked for me. Then I saw this one https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/issues/8381 which is a completely different problem, but it's NFS related and on the same (latest) version of VirtualBox. And the only reply says it's a bug in Vbox 5.1.18 so I removed Vbox 5.1 and installing 5.0 to see if that helps.

destroyed the VM, started a fresh one

Loads up, installs a bunch of stuff on the VM via Ansible

How do I view the site in a browser on the Host? example.dev

Time for bed...

Linux tinkering during January 2017

2017-02-11T09:16:42Z

TL;DR: Linux wot I done in Month One, Year One of Emperor-Lord Drumpf's reign.

Aside from two-fingered-typing up the past few posts filled with all the Linux-related alternate facts up through last year I could remember or make up, I've also done some more tinkering during the first month of the year.

Budgie

The Budgie desktop seems interesting, albeit a little rough in some places.

I tried out SolusOS, which is the official distro of Budgie desktop, but they also have a MATE version.

Looks like now Budgie is going to be Qt-based (i.e. what KDE is based on) instead of Gnome-based.

budgie-remix 16.10

Late last year an unofficial Ubuntu spin using Budgie called budgie-remix was approved as an official community flavor and is now Ubuntu Budgie, starting with 17.04.

I also tried the budgie-remix "fresh" 16.10 spin, and the apparently stale 16.10 was much better. This must be for someone to use as a base for their own distro or something.

AUI

I also installed Arch in a VM using the Archlinux Ultimate Install setup script a little while back. It turned out really nice. I chose Budgie, and it offered to install yaourt. I'd kinda like to try it bare-metal on the laptop, but the Arch Anywhere install is great and I probably don't need 2 installs of Arch on the same laptop.

RancherOS 0.7.1

Seems this is something I'd wanna set up on a "server" and use it headless. Don't have the means for that around the hovel at the moment.

Q4OS 1.8.2 & 2.2.1

Q4OS is a Debian-based distro featuring the Trinity desktop environment, which is a KDE 3.5 fork, with some extra features, including to easily make it look more like Windows XP or 7.

I installed 1.8.2 in VirtualBox. Letting it do the full-auto (illegal in most states) setup, it eventually let me set a password for the root account, and had wizards to install some extras. I could definitely see myself trying to move less tech-savvy relatives to Q4OS. It really looks & feels a lot like previous versions of Windows. After it noticed it was running in a VM it asked to install the VirtuaBox Guest Additions, and I let it do so. Then it suggested I log out and back in for full effect. I logged out, but the ~root account password would not work...

So, did the install again, this time manually. It was quick and easy, let me set up a user which I used to log in, and played a little more with it.

Then I figured let's try bleeding-edge version 2.2.1, which came in a handy 616 MB liveCD. Really couldn't tell the difference from the other, though it no doubt had some newer packages. The setup for the liveCD wouldn't let me have a hyphen in the hostname, so I powered it off.

Alpine 3.5.1

Still have the issue where I can't get it to connect to my WiFi during setup. Probably something to do with the password containing spaces...

MX-16

MX Linux (antiX + MEPIS)

This one is interesting, nice even, though I must admit: I am ~~somewhat~~ confused that two distros merged, yet there are still two distros?

Main bar on the side? I tried to like it, but eventually moved it to the bottom where it belongs.

Others

More new/updated ISOs I grabbed that'll have to wail til February or beyond:

siduction 16.1 "Patience" -- various DEs
yet more ArchBang betas and experiments
netrunner desktop 1701.2
Linux Mint 18.1 KDE
Linux Mint 18.1 Xfce
SparkyLinux -- several variants

Distro-hopping in 2016

2017-01-28T00:50:32Z

TL;DR: more gibberish about installing & running Linux, during 2016.

Main PC

The PC I built in 2011 currently runs Windows 10 Pro x64 and is the media/print server, video conversion, torrenting, and gaming rig. With constant new or recurring Windows annoyances re-triggering the question of just switching to Linux (but still requiring a Windows install to play most games) I finally tried some bare-metal installs on my PC.

The way I had it set up was cool: I had a cheap SSD in a USB3 SATA dock, and if it was powered on, the PC would boot to the GRUB menu on that SSD, otherwise I'd just see the BitLocker screen.

I installed Arch (using Architect) and Mint. It took some doing to get the 3 (vertical-horizontal-vertical) monitors aligned. Got the Audigy DG, Steam, and Minecraft working, looked into torrent apps, etc. It could work, maybe.

The confusion sets in with the disks I have in there that are software-RAID'd in Windows and BitLock'd. I've seen ways to access BitLock'd disks in Linux, and ways to access Windows software-RAID'd disks in Linux, but not disks that are both. I've yet to dig out some old SATA disks and unplug the existing disks to experiment further. This is really probably what would keep me from switching mainly to Linux on that PC, so most of the bare-metal Linux I do anymore is just on the VAIO laptop.

VAIO Laptop

I was doing Windows 10 Insider Builds on my VAIO laptop for a while. Only once did it kill my bootloader so I couldn't access my other OSs anymore, however, it was the build where it'd say my battery was a fake then shut down (regardless that the laptop was plugged in) that made me rethink running pre-release Windows builds.

Bought a cheap Wii off a neighbor on NextDoor, installed Homebrew Channel on it, and got Wii dev set up in Win10, Arch, Mint, and Ubuntu MATE. Also did the Java MOOC from University of Finland, and had that set up on all 4 as well.

Tired of setting up everything almost exactly the same 4 times, I had the brilliant idea of having a shared /home for the 3-4 different distros, which worked OK but there was definitely some oddness.

BBQLinux

I was thinking of looking into Android dev again and remembered BBQLinux, but since I already had Arch installed I just added reps to my old Architect install and updated it, and had to reinstall again using Architect. :\

Summer

~!# (Crunchbang)

During the summer I was fondly remembering #! (Crunchbang) 10 with it's minimalist style, and I remembered how after upgrading to #! 11 it lost something about it and I just stopped using it. So I checked out a couple follow-on projects: the BusenLabs "community continuation" and the #!++ (CrunchBang++) fork. There doesn't seem to be much going on with either after the initial scramble to get something out, and they are so similar that I couldn't even recommend one over the other without further testing.

Fall

During the Fall I tried out quite a few distros due to some serious binge-watching -- in October we try to watch as many horror-type movies as we can.

Fedora

In late September a buddy mentioned that he, too, had been using Mint as his go-to for his Linux needs for years, but had recently dumped it for Fedora and was amazed by its speed.

So I checked out Fedora 24, Gnome3 dark theme with a bunch of tweaks applied, better, but I still hate Gnome3 no matter how well she cleans up. Package management with dnf is similar enough to apt that it doesn't make a difference to me. Fedora always seems to have very new Kernels, which I like.

I somehow, again, found myself fondly remembering #! (Crunchbang) and then I thought "what about a Fedora-based system in the same vein as #! (with Openbox + tint2 + conky)?"

So, while binge-watching the latest season of Longmire, I experimented with that idea for a while: using a Fedora netinstall as a base, and configuring as necessary to make something similar to #!. Got it to a usable point, then got bored with it, and I also realized how much work (e.g. with "pipes" and such for the menus) the #! guys did to customize Debian/Openbox.

Viperr

That's when I found Viperr, which I played with while watching The Exorcist (1973) and Exorcist: The Beginning (2004), and would describe as "just ok". Really the thing that bugged me most about Viperr was with their theming: they used a couple different shades of blue (one more "neon" one more "pale") for different things that did not go together at all. Totally clashed.

So I dumped Viperr and moved on. "What about using other bases for a #!-esque desktop, such as Arch?"

Archbang

Basically #! but on an Arch foundation. There are a bunch of variations now, even some tiny experimental ones. I just preferred my Arch/Xfce install.

Qubes OS

Qubes is a really neat idea, separating types of activities into isolated VMs. I played with it for hours while watching Pet Sematary (1989), Pet Sematary II (1992), and Rosemary's Baby (1968), and others.

Ultimately, being unable to easily set up D0 (or whatever) the way I wanted, kinda turned me off.

GParted Live

Rearranging and resizing partitions, I eventually decided on the current setup (detailed in an earlier post) which is essentially four 20GB partitions for Linux distros, a shared 2GB swap partition, and the rest for Win10.

Arch Anywhere

I ended up reinstalling Arch again (twice) in October using a different tool called Arch Anywhere -- once while watching Hannibal (2001) and once while watching Graveyard Shift (1990).

Ubuntu variants 16.10 releases

Also while watching as many ~horror movies as we could in October, I also tried out all the 16.10 releases of the official Ubuntu flavors.

Ubuntu: I cannot stand Unity to begin with (see also: gnome3) and now there is no way to move the window controls to the right side. Get this crap off my computer.

Ubuntu-MATE: this one was promising. Worked fine, seemed to be more up to date than Mint, but once Mint 18 came out I had to have the Mint-Y themes and they just don't quite work on U-MATE.

Kubuntu: KDE has been bloated crap for a long time now, and Plasma is its gnome3, i.e. slow, unintutive, and really doesn't look all that great either. Would rather use an Apple product.

I also tried Lubuntu and Xubuntu, which were fine yet unremarkable. It is liikely my hatred for Gnome3 led me to skip Ubuntu-Gnome altogether.

openSUSE

As I've mentioned in a previous post, SuSE + KDE3 was my preferred distro/DE combo in college ('04-'05). Now openSUSE just seems like a complicated & bloated has-been.

Devuan

While I think most distros nowadays have done so, it seems that switching to the systemd init system is a pretty controversial topic within the Linux community. Devuan (~"dev one") is a fork of Debian without systemd. And since it's Linux, regardless that it's still in beta, there are already several distros based upon it.

In addition to Devuan, I tried out several Devuan-based distros (STAR, Zephyr, Nelum-Dev1, Refracta), and similar to Debian stable, it just doesn't seem interesting at all once it's installed, just super outdated. Maybe we don't need the latest kernel, but why not?

Alpine, Void, wattOS

These were some "super light" distros I wanted to check out. Although I found out quickly that wattOS is a lightened Ubuntu instead of its own super-light entity like the others.

Others

LinuxBBQ Cream -- one with 97,000 different environments, some neat, some shit. Probably tried a couple other LinuxBBQ releases as well.

Satanic Edition -- neat, except that after trying to do all the updates/upgrades, really not much of what made it special still remained. :(

Even More

ISOs I definitely tried (either in a VM or on the laptop) but since I neither had this post in mind nor took any notes at the time, I'm drawing a blank. That could also be a good thing, meaning I didn't hate them. :)

Antergos
Manjaro
Maui
Peppermint
Zorin
Linux Lite
Netrunner Rolling
Apricity

Still More?

ISOs I grabbed but may not have actually checked out recently.

Sabayon
Korora
prox3cubed
salix
slackel
crux

Linux Beginnings

2017-01-13T07:56:30Z

TL;DR: some background on my experiences with Linux, through 2015.

In 1999 or so I bought a boxed The Complete Linux Operating System 6.0 from the Tacoma CompUSA (or was it still Computer City then?). Or maybe I got it at Future Shop in South Hill? Or Borders in Tacoma? Or Borders in South Hill that replaced the Future Shop?! Anyway, it included Linux-Mandrake 6.0, which was purported to be "Red Hat Linux 6.0 with enhancements", stepped you through a super tedious installation, and once you finally got it installed, the GUI looked like crap. But it was an interesting learning experience.

Then around 2003 during college I revisited Linux, trying a few on my Dell Inspiron 5150 laptop and eventually buying a boxed copy of SuSE Professional (9.x series) from the Tacoma CompUSA.

I was amazed at how much easier installation was and how much more polished everything looked. I seem to remember hating Gnome2 and preferring KDE3 at the time. We also used Red Hat (also 9, I think) in class.

I also remember spending countless hours trying to get a PCMCIA SpeedBooster WiFi card to work in Linux on that laptop. Something about using a wrapper on the Windows drivers, building a module, and recompiling the Kernel. Not sure I ever got that card working in Linux.

Immediately after college I was working in a lab at Intel and some of the testing I did there required various Enterprise Linux distros on the SUT and/or clients.

Then I hadn't been using Linux at all since working on-site at Microsoft, but in 2010 I "needed" to root my Nook (the original gimmicky eInk + tiny touchscreen LCD one) and the available tools were for Linux only. So I did some research and found Linux Mint, got it installed in VirtualBox, setup a shared folder, and was able to root the Nook.

In 2011 I built a new PC and maxed it out with 24GB of memory, specifically so I'd be able to run more VMs. Since then I've always had an up-to-date Mint VM, and have tried dozens, if not hundreds, of versions of various distros in VirtualBox. In 2013 I picked up a 17" Sony VAIO E-series (SVE1712BCXB) laptop and immediately replaced the mismatched 4GB + 2GB DIMMs with a matching pair of faster 4GB DIMMs and swapped out the ultra-crappy 500GB HDD for a decent SSD. Within a couple months, I also set it to Legacy Mode and disabled Secure Boot to get Linux Mint to work. No idea if this would still be necessary today. I think once I get a larger SSD (or a new laptop!) I'll look into UEFI / SecureBoot / GPT again. By the end of 2015 I also had Arch installed on my laptop, using Architect Linux.

Adventures in Arch(itect)

In the past I've tried out Arch (and Gentoo) in VirtualBox and deemed them to be an amazing learning experience but too cumbersome for daily use. I stumbled across Architect Linux in 2015 and it basically provides a step-by-step installation for Arch so you can get up and running and start tweaking. You can select as many or few WMs/DEs as you like, but make sure you also install a network manager. After the Architect install, some other things to install:

yaourt - French for "yogurt", this wrapper will essentially replace pacman, adding colors and AUR to the results
libs32 - needed for Steam
infinality font patches - makes for a really smooth experience

So my current thought with Arch is that (if you use Architect) it's not a pain to get installed, and once it's up tweak to your heart's content. The package management allows you to install updates similar to APT but simpler:

pacman -Syu

yaourt -Syu

instead of

apt update && apt upgrade

The next post is about my 2016 with Linux. Save Save

Current Laptop OS Musings, 2017.01 Edition

2017-01-05T06:05:07Z

TL;DR: an incoherent rant detailing the OSs currently installed on my VAIO laptop upon entering 2017, gripes about them, and some other useless banter.

/dev/hda: Kingston HyperX 3K 240GB SATA III MLC SSD (SH103S3/240G)

Nice, fast SSD. No complaints, except I'd like a larger one to be able to install more distros simultaneously. I basically have four 20GB slots for Linux installs, but it'd be nice to be able to keep more around and see how they behave with updates and such to get a better feel and overall opinion of them.

/dev/hda1-3 (~143GB): Windows 10 Pro x64 RTM + latest updates, and 2 apparently necessary additional 500MB partitions for Windows 10 to function.

My biggest complaint with Windows 10 at the moment deals with Sleep/Standby, and more specifically laptops with external mice attached.

If I wake it with the external wireless/USB mouse, then look away for 2 minutes to respond to a text message, it'll put itself to sleep. This does not happen when I wake it with the power button.

There is a separate setting specifically for sleeping after being awoken by external device, and you have to modify the registry to even expose it. And then every system update resets & hides the setting again (I think).

/dev/hda4: extended partition containing the following:

/dev/hda5 (20GB): Arch/Xfce (installed using Arch Anywhere)

Really dig this setup. Biggest complaint (on all distros I think) is still how dark themes work with web elements in Firefox. Currently using a Stylish userstyle and manually adding additional things that don't show up right. Someday...

/dev/hda6 (20GB): Linux Mint 18.1/Cinnamon

Mint has been my go-to since '09 or so (Mint 7 maybe?), but over the past few years I've been disto-hopping more and more.

This is the latest version of good ol' Mint with their own desktop environment. And aside from the "dark themes vs web elements" issues noted above, I'm really diggin the look of the Mint-Y Dark theme and Icons. Mint 18 seemed to have some issues, though after the 18.1 update, I can't even remember what they were.

/dev/hda7 (20GB): Fedora 25/gnome3

Man, I still really do not like gnome3 -- so much that I refuse to write in all (or any!) caps like they seem to prefer. I purposely chose it for this Fedora install so I'd be forced to use it and perhaps get more used to it (as if that was the problem...) but even with all the tweaks that I can find applied, still not great. It does look nice. I dig the Nodoka theme, especially the midnight variation.

Wayland is the default display session in Fedora 25 and f.lux (one of my requirements) refuses to run under Wayland. Easy fix for that though: just need to select the non-Wayland session before you log in.

/dev/hda8 (20GB): 4MLinux 21/JWM (Joe's Window Manager)

This was a completely different distro, and a window manager I wanted to check out. It broke my GRUB install, and is not set up to automatically launch the WM, but it's interesting.

The Update Tool apparently only updates the system by installing the latest version? Might look into this a little more, or more likely just try something else on that partition.

/dev/hda9 (2GB): shared swap partition for all the distros

Likely never gets hit, but "just in case".

Change the order of tabs in Nova Launcher

2016-12-20T23:49:00Z

I created a 'games' tab to declutter my main Apps group a bit, but upon restarting the phone the games group is listed first:

This is not ideal.

My first thought was to long press on a Tab label, then drag the Tab. Nope.

Ok, well if not the obvious, then long press, select Edit Tab, and be able to change it there. Also nope.

Searching the tubes revealed that others also sought to rearrange/re-order the tabs, but did not provide a solution.

Poking around in Nova Settings I eventually figured out a way to do it:

Click the 3 dots in the top right, select Nova Settings (or get to Nova Settings with any other/preferred method):

Select "Apps & widget drawers", then scroll to the bottom, and under Drawer groups, select "Drawer groups".

Drag the handles (equals signs on the left) up or down to change the order.

Then back all the way out of Nova Settings and your changes should be reflected:

Save

Minecraft mod development with Forge on Windows 10: Setting up NetBeans

2016-12-07T05:55:09Z

Back when I was in University I preferred NetBeans for Java development. I recently took University of Finland's free Java MOOCs and that also happens to be the IDE their code-checking tools use. So I'm used to NetBeans' quirks and prefer to continue to use it.

The official Forge Documentation doesn't have setup info for Netbeans (just Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA) but their Wiki does have a section about importing an Eclipse project.

Sidenote:

As stated above, I recently did the UoF Java MOOCs and I still have their modified Netbeans v8.0.2 installed (Netbeans with TMC 0.8.18).

First experiment:

The next step in the official docs says for Eclipse just run gradlew eclipse so I tried gradlew netbeans . . . no go.

Second experiment:

(Thanks to this awesome post: https://epik.org.uk/effortless-minecraft-forge-with-netbeans/)

Open Netbeans, Tools -> Plugins. Available Plugins tab, search for 'gradle". I see two: Gradle JavaEE Support (last updated 12/26/14) and Gradle Support (last updated 1/9/16).

I chose the latter since it's been updated in the last 6 months (just barely). It also wanted to install "Groovy and Grails".

After restarting Netbeans, like magic my mod folder could now be opened as a Project.

I right-clicked on the Project and selected Tasks -> run -> runClient and Minecraft started but doesn't show anything about my completely empty Mod yet. So I did the same with example from Forge and it worked.

Make that a little less tedious: https://blogs.oracle.com/geertjan/entry/seamless_minecraft_forge_in_netbeans

And also a good link to continue.

Minecraft mod development with Forge on Windows 10: Setting up the Java Development Kit

2016-07-08T20:37:04Z

I've been studying Java again lately and decided to look into doing a Minecraft mod as more practice.

I'm currently running Windows 10 x64 RTM + latest updates (v1511 build 10586.420).

I started following the Getting Started guide in the Forge Documentation and once I got to Step 4 had some issues, so this first post is what I had to do to get the gradlew setupDecompWorkspace step working:

Install the latest JDK

I installed the latest JDK (JDK 8 update 91) via Ninite, and uninstalled any older versions.

Sidenote:

Ninite allows you select one or more application and download a tiny installer for the selected software, which when run always installs the latest version(s) with no annoying dialogs, etc. Highly recommended for anything they support.

Set the JAVA_HOME variable

Hit Start, start typing 'environment' or 'variables'. It should show you "Edit the system environment variables" after 3 letters or so, click on that.

Then click on "Environment Variables..." button on the bottom right of the dialog that comes up.

Look for a Variable named JAVA_HOME in the top and bottom panes. If one exists, make sure the path points to your JDK install directory (not including /bin at the end). E.g. today mine looks like:

C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.8.0_91

If you don't see one, create a new one in either the top or bottom pane and make sure the value points to your JDK directory, same as above.

Continue with the Forge Documentation

Then I continued to follow the official guide here.

Inoreader’s Integration Options, Pt. 2

2016-05-29T05:06:57Z

In Part One, I looked at a couple image-heavy sites and how they behaved when adding their posts to each of the external services available via Inoreader. This time I'll look at guitar lessons from a few different places – same as with the previous post, the websites differ and therefore show up differently in each service.

Guitar World lessons

Firefox

The actual article in Firefox:

Inoreader

The article in Inoreader:

Pocket

Pocket doesn't let the reading area get very wide, so the images can get pretty small, which makes some of the Examples hard to read.

Instapaper

Instapaper allows a wider reading area than Pocket, so the Examples don't get squished and are easy to read.

Readability

Readability also allows wider reading area, but apparently compressed the images more than the others, making the Examples blurry and harder to read.

Evernote

Evernote looks pretty good:

OneNote

OneNote makes the images blurrier than EverNote:

Dropbox

The PDF actually turned out decent this time, but the images are a little blurry: Voids of whitespace occupy areas once lush with embedded video, resulting in an essentially wasted last page in this example, but you could use a PDF tool to delete it if needed:

Another Guitar World Sample

Another example yields nearly exact results with most of the services, except this time the strange splitting of web elements across pages in the resulting Dropbox PDF. Sliced bottom off a line of text: Sliced a few pixels off the top: More off the next image: And even more off the next one. At least it's between the text in the image, but this specific example would better unsliced:

Verdict for Guitar World

Read it later: Instapaper -- Pocket scales the images width-wise, making them hard to read. Readability compresses the images making them blurry, also making them hard to read.

Editable copy: Evernote -- OneNote has slightly blurrier images.

Inconsistent PDF results: Dropbox -- first sample yielded a decent PDF but the second was the same element-splitting weirdness we've seen previously. If you were to actually print them, both samples provided plenty of whitespace for notes. :)

Premier Guitar

Firefox

The actual article in Firefox has a link to a PDF version of the lesson, embedded video, and links for each Example that open a new tab with a cool audio player that follows the musical notation & guitar tabulature as it plays.

Inoreader

The article in Inoreader just contains a summary text:

Pocket

Just a link to the actual article again.

Instapaper

Includes some webpage artifacts, and the first image twice at the top:

Also included are the PDF link, the embedded video, and the player links:

Readability

The PDF link, and the embedded video are lost:

The player links are intact:

Evernote

Loses the PDF link, the embedded video, and the player links:

OneNote

Also loses the PDF link, the embedded video, and the player links:

Dropbox

Starts out good, but also loses the PDF link, the embedded video, and the player links:

Vast whitespace again:

Sliced off text again:

Verdict for Premier Guitar

Read it later: Instapaper -- Nothing is perfect for this one, but at least Instapaper doesn't lose any of the links.

Editable: It doesn't matter -- Evernote and OneNote both lose the links to what essentially makes these lessons.

Meh PDF: Dropbox, but it's useless for this example because of the individual links & audio for each example.

Guitar Chalk

Firefox

The actual article in Firefox has an embedded video, several images, and a few links:

Inoreader

The article in Inoreader is just a summary:

Pocket

Loses the video, the images, and the links:

Instapaper

Loses the video and images:

Readability

Only loses the video:

Evernote

Also only loses the video:

OneNote

Loses the video. Before each image, there is an empty space the same size as the image that follows it:

Dropbox

Loses the video, slices the images terribly again:

Verdict for Guitar Chalk

This one is a mess -- might be better just to tag it in Inoreader.

Tune In Next Time

I need to look in Pocket to see if anything else doesn't appear as expected, which is how I started along this path in the first place. Looks like it's gonna be a little while before I can see my old articles in Inoreader though. :\

Depending on the outcome of that, the next post will either be a wrap-up (with an overview, recommendations, a table with source vs service, and links to the previous posts), or yet more experimenting. :)

DRAFT: Inoreader's Integration Options, Pt. 3

2016-05-28T13:28:24Z

In Part Two, ...

In this part, ...

???

Firefox

The actual article in Firefox:

[screenshots]

Inoreader

The article in Inoreader:

[screenshots]

Pocket

Notes

[screenshots]

Instapaper

Notes

[screenshots]

Readability

Notes

[screenshots]

Evernote

Notes

[screenshots]

OneNote

Notes

[screenshots]

Dropbox

Notes

[screenshots]

Verdict for ???

Notes

Tune In Next Time

I need to look in Pocket to see if anything else doesn't appear as expected, which is how I started along this path in the first place.

Depending on the outcome of that, the next post will either be a wrap-up (with an overview, a table with source vs service, and links to the previous posts), or yet more experimenting. :)

	Pocket	Instapaper	Readability	Evernote	OneNote	Dropbox
What If?	NO	Yes	Yes	NO	Yes	sure
Darryl Cunningham
Guitar World
Premier Guitar
Guitar 3

Inoreader’s Integration Options, Pt. 1

2016-05-24T00:09:34Z

After Google’s announcement regarding Reader’s impending doom, I spent weeks trying out alternatives, including self-hosted offerings. I eventually settled on Inoreader, after seeing someone recommend it in a comment on a post about Google Reader alternatives.

This post is regarding the “integration” options you can see at the top of each post in Column View (and at the bottom of each post in Expanded View) allowing you to send articles to different external services: Pocket, Instapaper, Readability, Evernote, OneNote, and Dropbox.

You need to connect each service in Inoreader to use them: Gear icon –> Preferences –> Integration

I will add several types of articles to each service and report the findings. I’m using Firefox 46.0.1 on Windows 10 Pro x64 RTM with latest updates.

Randall Munroe’s “What If?”

Firefox

The actual article in Firefox:

Inoreader

The article in Inoreader – using the Dark theme makes the stick figure drawings hard to see due to their transparent backgrounds. Because of this, I've switched to light themes in Instapaper and Readability.

Pocket

Just has a link which opens the actual article in a new tab.

Instapaper

No surprises here:

Readability

No surprises here either:

Evernote

Throws an error in Inoreader and doesn’t add anything to Evernote.

OneNote

Adds an editable version of the article as a new Page in the Notebook selected in Inoreader's Integration Preferences:

Includes some useful info in the footer of the Note:

Dropbox

Inoreader created a PDF of the article and placed it in my Dropbox:

Verdict for What If?:

Read it later: Instapaper or Readability – it's basically up to the user's preference between the two since the results are very similar. ~~I need to check out and compare their Android apps to see if I lean one way or the other.~~ [UPDATE] I prefer the Instapaper Android app over the Readability Android app and here's why: Readability's app seems like an iOS port, only lets you choose between white or black, and none of the 5 font choices affected the yucky sans-serif font in which the text was actually displayed. Instapaper has 4 colors (white, sepia, grey, black) and the font selection actually works.

Editable copy: OneNote.

Weird PDF: Dropbox.

Darryl Cunningham Investigates

Firefox

The top of the actual article in Firefox:

Inoreader

The top of the article in Inoreader:

Pocket

As you'd normally expect, but not after seeing the previous example:

Instapaper

So far so good: Bunch of website garbage tacked onto the bottom:

Readability

The top looks promising: Again with the additional website artifacts at the bottom:

Evernote

Looks fine, and editable:

OneNote

Adds an editable version of the article as a new Page in the Notebook selected in Inoreader's Integration Preferences:

Again includes some additional info in the footer of the Note:

Dropbox

Creates a PDF and puts it in your Dropbox. Such whitespace! Did it put one image per page? Kinda?

Verdict for Darryl Cunningham Investigates

Read it later: Pocket is the clear winner – both Instapaper & Readability added a bunch of website crap to the bottom.

Editable copy: user preference between Evernote and OneNote – I'm leaning toward Evernote because OneNote Online is slooowwww.

Really weird PDF: Dropbox

Tune In Next Time

In Part Two I'll look at guitar lessons from a few different places – like with the above, the websites differ and therefore show up differently in each service.

Open Live Writer

2016-03-29T18:46:00Z

I just installed v0.6.0.0 of Open Live Writer and am giving it a go on Windows 10 Pro RTM, with latest updates.

I’d used Windows Live Writer in the past but not in a long time, so this seems a little more advanced than what I remember.

It’s basically like WordPad, but allows you to publish directly to blogs powered by WordPress, Blogger, and many more. You can add multiple blogs to it and choose which one you want to publish (or push a draft) to via dropdown.

During installation it asks if you want to use a test post to download your theme so you can more accurately preview your posts before you publish, but it failed to download my theme for some reason.

I haven’t closed this post yet, and it’s smart enough to update the same post each time I hit publish instead of making a new one, which would be annoying.

Pidgin + Google Apps for Your Domain with 2-factor Authentication

2016-01-26T06:08:47Z

Create an app-specific password for Pidgin: https://security.google.com/settings/security/apppasswords
Add a new account in Pidgin:
- Basic tab:
  - Protocol: Google Talk or XMPP
  - Username: {yourusername}
  - Domain: {yourdomain.tld}
  - Resource: {left blank}
  - Password: {app-specific password}
  - Remember password: Checked
- Advanced tab:
  - Connection security: Use Old-style SSL
  - Connect port: 443
  - Connect server: talk.google.com
  - File transfer proxies: proxy.eu.jabber.org (the default)

Hat-tip: https://superuser.com/a/894407

Remove internal AHCI/SATA from the Safely Remove on Windows 10

2016-01-26T00:43:43Z

I have my motherboard set to use devices as AHCI, and all my SATA drives show up under the Safely Remove icon in Windows 10. Since I rarely need to remove the boot SSD while I'm actively using the computer, I don't want to see it or any of the other internal drives in that menu.

Run RegEdit and navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\storahci\Parameters\Device

Add a new Multi String Value called TreatAsInternalPort set the value like so (I have 8 internal drives I want to hide, so 0-7):

(note the newlines after each number, including the last one)

Found here: https://superuser.com/questions/12955/how-can-i-remove-the-option-to-eject-sata-drives-from-the-windows-7-tray-icon/961242#961242

DRAFT: Arch(itect) bare-metal install

2016-01-25T22:23:54Z

{Copy/paste from other bare-metal install post}

DRAFT: Linux Mint bare-metal install

2016-01-25T22:16:13Z

I've installed Arch and Linux Mint "bare-metal" on my main PC, which I built in 2011 and have upgraded a bit since.

I also have them both installed on my 2012 VAIO laptop, which I've just bumped to 8GB RAM and tossed in an SSD.

Rundown of my hardware

monitors (nVidia), sound (Audigy DG), Steam

TODO: Disable "Hardware clock set to UTC!
TODO: http://stevenrosenberg.net/blog/linux/debian/2012_0116_debian_shutdown_beep
TODO: http://steamcommunity.com/app/378720/discussions/0/490125737485986607
TODO: BitLocker
TODO: swRAID - R: & S: Xfce: http://www.webupd8.org/2013/07/whisker-menu-update-brings-support-for.html

DRAFT: Remove interna AHCI/SATA from the safely remove on Windows 10

2016-01-25T21:53:52Z

Regedit Navigate to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\storahci\Parameters\Device Add a new Multi String Value called TreatAsInternalPort set the value (I have 8 internal drives, so 0-7):

0 1 2 4 5 6 7

(note the newlines after each number, including the last one)

http://superuser.com/questions/12955/how-can-i-remove-the-option-to-eject-sata-drives-from-the-windows-7-tray-icon/961242#961242

DRAFT: Adventures in Arch(itect)

2016-01-11T09:52:42Z

In the past I've tried out Arch (and Gentoo) and deemed them to be an amazing learning experience but too cumbersome for daily use.

I stumbled across Architect Linux recently and it basically provides a step-by-step installation for Arch so you can get up and running and start tweaking.

Select as many or few WMs/DEs as you like

After Architect install, some other things to install:

yaourt - French for "yogurt", this wrapper will essentially replace pacman, adding colors and AUR to the results libs32 - needed for Steam infinality font patches - makes for a really smooth experience

DRAFT: Markdown test

2016-01-11T09:39:53Z

Hone

Htwo

Hthree

Hone

Htwo

Hthree

Ubuntu MATE 15.10 Beta 1 in VirtualBox 5.0.2

2015-08-31T22:45:13Z

Background

Anymore when it comes to Linux distros I prefer a Debian/Ubuntu base and the MATE (maté) Desktop Environment (again, my desktop Linux distro of choice is Linux Mint MATE edition). Just give me APT + MATE + Firefox, please.

Earlier this year I jumped at the chance to try the official MATE spin of Ubuntu 15.04 Beta, as I do like to try out new builds but I can't stand Unity (or GNOME3 for that matter). Overall, it seemed like a fine OS but I saw no reason to switch from Mint.

Ubuntu MATE 15.10 Beta 1 was announced recently so I decided to check it out as well. This time I'm using a PC I built with 6 cores and 24GB of RAM, running Windows 10 RTM, so Microsoft will also probably have some decent data on how well this runs. ;)

Downloading the ISO and VirtualBox

This time I grabbed the .torrent for the Ubuntu MATE 15.10 Beta 1 ISO and it downloaded a lot faster (~4.4MB/s average).

I had already downloaded & installed VirtualBox v5.0.2 prior to this.

Installing VirtualBox

I uncheck a few things when I install VirtualBox:

VirtualBox USB Support
VirtualBox Bridged Networking
VirtualBox Host-Only Networking
VirtualBox Python 2.x Support

Creating the VM

I created a new VM with default options except:

Memory size: 4096 MB
10.00 GB VDI

Change VM Settings

Since the ISO was still downloading I decided to change some more of the VM's Settings to my liking:

General/Advanced

Shared Clipboard: Bidirectional

Drag'n'Drop: Host To Guest

System/Motherboard

Boot Order: unchecked Floppy

Pointing Devices: PS/2 Mouse

System/Processor

Processor(s): 4 CPUs

Extended Features: check Enable PAE/NX

Display/Screen

Video Memory: bump up to 32 MB

Acceleration: check Enable 3D Acceleration

Storage

Removed the IDE Controller

Checked "Use Host I/O Cache" for the SATA Controller

Checked "Solid-state Drive" for the UbuntuMate.vdi

Added an empty Optical Drive to the SATA controller

Changed the ports so the Optical Drive is Port 0 and the SSD is Port 1

Audio

Audio Controller: Intel HD Audio

USB

Unchecked "Enable USB Controller"

Some of the above settings won't have any effect until after the Guest Additions are installed.

Installing Ubuntu Mate

I booted to the ISO and immediately started the install instead of trying the Live version.

During install I checked both "Download updates..." and "Install 3rd-party software" boxes.

However, after reading the comments in latest DistroWatch Weekly, I deviated slightly from my standard VM partitioning scheme leftover from the magnetic hard drive days (2GB swap at the beginning, and Ext4 the rest for /), and chose to try XFS instead Ext4.

Note that the ~8GB should be plenty of space to try out a distro (as long as it's not one of the ones that include EVERYTHING), but I've run out of space in the past doing things like downloading & building open-source software & games.

I also set it to logon automatically and didn't bother with encrypting the home directory.

Once the install was complete I hit the Restart Now button, then pressed Enter after verifying the Installer did indeed eject the ISO (disc icon is grey at the bottom of the VirtualBox window), and let it reboot.

Initial Login and Updating

Close the Welcome screen. Optionally uncheck "Show this Welcome when I log on." so it doesn't show up again when you reboot.

Then let's make sure our fresh installation is up to date:

Open a Terminal -- There are few ways to do that:

Press F12 to show Tilda, a drop-down terminal similar to Guake, which is based upon the ~-activated consoles in games like Quake
Right-click on the Desktop (or something on the Desktop) and choose Open In Terminal
Applications -> System Tools -> MATE Terminal

Then:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo reboot

Installing Guest Additions

In the VirtualBox window's menu, choose Devices -> Insert Guest Additions CD image...

Then back in the VM, hit Cancel at the Autorun prompt (it won't work anyway). A disc icon labeled "VBOXADDITIONS..." should now be visible on your desktop.

Right-click on the disc icon -> Open in Terminal, then:

sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run

The installer complains about missing headers but continues on to build the modules and eventually we don't need to keep hitting Ctrl to escape the mouse cursor, so good enough pour moi.

Reboot just to make sure the Guest Additions stuff is all loaded:

sudo reboot

All Done?

We're done with the Guest Additions disc for now, so right-click on it and choose Eject.

It's all set up, updated, and ready to be customized, etc.

Mildly interesting is that Firefox is only at v38.0 -- v40.0.3 is released as of this writing.

Below are my usual next steps with notes regarding this specific install.

Totally optional things I also like to do

change the resolution
- I usually choose 1280x960 because it fits nicely above the Windows Taskbar, however the Monitors configuration opens then closes immediately
  - An error reporting dialog opened allowing me to send info re: Monitors crashing to Ubuntu, which I did.
- Workaround: manually resize the VM window itself and it will adjust the VM's Desktop
  - upon rebooting it keeps the new resolution
get rid of the Welcome screen for good
- uncheck "Show this Welcome when I log on.", click Close.
disable autolocking when the screensaver starts
- Control Center -> Screensaver
  - OR System -> Preferences -> Look and Feel -> Screensaver
- uncheck "Lock screen when screensaver is active"
change to 12-hour clock, add my city so the temperature shows
reduce the # of ~~Virtual Desktops~~ Workspaces to 1
- I don't use them and don't want to accidentally hit some hotkey that switches to a different one
rearrange the desktop Panels:
- delete the bottom Ppanel
- move top Panel to the bottom, remove Menu Bar & Power button, and add/move missing elements:
  - MATE Menu, and remove the Button text
  - Window List
  - Show Desktop
  - a shortcut to Terminal
- Ends up looking like this: https://imgur.com/N6bpfoI
Firefox:
- set the browser start page to something related to the current distro
  - In this case: ubuntu-mate.org
- change the default search engine to DuckDuckGo
install a couple more things:
- localepurge
- apt-fast
  - OR setup mirrors in your sources.list

Gran Turismo 6 – GT Kart Championship 125 (non-shifter) B-Spec guide

2015-06-22T23:17:33Z

The kart races frustrate the hell out of me, so I let my B-Spec driver do them. Use the settings below for each track, tell the driver to Push it Hard!

I don't think it matters (does it?) but I used the Red Bull Racing Kart 125.

Race 1

Car Settings / Transmission

Reset to Default

1st Gear) 1.630 (all the way right)

Final Gear) 4.300 (all the way left)

Ends up being ~57 mph Max.

Race 2

Car Settings / Transmission

Reset to Default

Max Speed) 87mph

Race 3

Car Settings / Transmission

Reset to Default

62 mph/1.373 - 3rd place

68 mph/1.251 - 3rd

(default) 75/1.149 - 6th place

Best I can get is 3rd place using the 62 or 68 mph settings. :\

Ubuntu MATE 15.04 Beta 1 in VirtualBox

2015-03-11T23:15:16Z

My distro of choice is Linux Mint MATE edition, so naturally I was excited to hear there is an official MATE spin of Ubuntu. MATE (maté) is a fork of the old GNOME2 desktop environment, with bugfixes and enhancements.

Here's my experience this evening while watching season 9 & 10 of Red vs. Blue.

I started downloading the Ubuntu MATE 15.04 Beta 1 ISO and while that trickled in at only ~1MB/s, I downloaded and installed VirtualBox v4.3.24.

I created a new VM with default options (including only an 8GB VDI) besides bumping up Memory size to 2GB.

I booted to the ISO and immediately started the install instead of trying the Live version. During install I checked both "Download updates..." and "Install 3rd-party software" boxes, and my standard VM partitioning scheme leftover from the magnetic hard drive days (2GB swap at the beginning, and Ext4 the rest for /). Note that this will be plenty of space to try out a distro (as long as it's not one of the ones that include EVERYTHING), but I've run out of space in the past doing things like downloading & building open-source software & games.

I also set it to logon automatically and didn't bother with encrypting the home directory.

First thing, updated (using the new F12 ~Guake terminal, Tilda):

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

sudo reboot

And when it came back up it no longer had Guest Additions installed since it upgraded the kernel, so I installed linux headers for the new/current kernel and gcc so the Guest Additions would build & install:

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r) gcc

Inserted Guest Additions disc via the Devices menu in VirtualBox, then right-clicked on disc icon -> open in Terminal

sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditionsInstall.run

Still complains about not having headers for the current verison of the kernel, but it seems to have worked anyway.

Rebooted, and we're back with seamless mouse integration and adjustable resolution.

Then followed this: https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/enabling-indicators-in-ubuntu-mate-14-10-and-15-04/22

Which didn't do anything noticeable (to me at least).

Totally optional things I also like to do:

disable autolocking when the screensaver starts
- Control Center -> Screensaver, uncheck "Lock screen when screensaver is active"
change to 12-hour clock, add my city so the temperature shows
rearrange the menu:
- delete bottom panel, move top one to bottom, add missing elements (window list)
set the browser start page to something related to the current distro
- I used ubuntu-mate.org
install a couple more things:
- localepurge

More Portable App Adventures

2015-03-08T23:10:03Z

In the previous post I indicated that I've been interested in making webpages & graphics for a long time now, and was recently remembering using Dreamweaver, mainly for the syncing tools, but still hand-coding most of it.

Microsoft released their Expression Web 4 for free and it reminds me a lot of Dreamweaver back in the day.

I've been trying to make a portable version of it, with no luck.

Failed with Cameyo.

I think ThinApp made something usable. It didn't work at all on another computer, although that one had Windows 10 TP so might need to check it out on another computer that doesn't have the settings saved on it.

Alternative is Dreamweaver CS5.5 (v11.5) or later, since that's when they introduced support for FTPS. No luck Portable-izing that one either.

Reminiscing about making web pages

2015-03-01T20:03:27Z

I taught myself HTML during Xmas break one year while I was in middle school. Since then I've always had some sort of website as a hobby.

I was wondering if I could find any of my old stuff online again recently, and brainstorming & research have yielded:

*) Crosswinds -- had free hosting, then paid to remove ads maybe, defintely paid for an email address

*) Deep Blue Sea fan page -- they provided all the assets, maybe there was a contest or something too. Not a fan of the movie but sharks are cool.

acmecity.com/deepbluesea

I think AcmeCity was similar to Geocites.

*) ~smc.web1000.net during high school, and maybe something else on that host -- I think they had multiple domains to choose from. Seems like most sites on there were porn.

*) joshg253.com during college -- I have some back ups. I used a credit card and student discount to grab Macromedia Studio MX (or Studio MX 2004?) and Adobe Creative Suite 2.

Then I guess I took a few years off with no site (really? or just some free hosting maybe?) then registered kverke.com in 2007, which I now want to re-purpose for my musical endeavors.

Sideload Android apps on your Amazon Fire TV Stick

2015-02-01T02:34:48Z

I picked up an Amazon Fire TV Stick during the 2-day Prime preorder discount and received it after everyone else bought theirs at Best Buy for the same price.

Overall, it's a pretty slick device, with a few shortcomings, but it ended up not being super useful at home since I already have a PS3 connected to our one TV that can stream Prime video, Netflix, etc. I figured it'd be awesome when traveling though, provided we actually had decent (or any WiFi) where we end up. However, there is no built-in way to log into e.g. hotel Wi-Fi, but you can sideload Firefox via adb, which I assume you can use that to log in since it's a working browser, but I haven't been to a hotel since I installed Firefox on mine.

I also wanted to see if I could get Twilight installed to lessen the blue light in the evenings. It installed and will work, but you can't adjust the sliders manually, nor set a location automatically or manually. However, you can force the filter on or off, so it can still be useful.

Procedure

The install procedure is the same for either app.

On the Fire TV Stick

Go to Settings -> System -> Developer Options
Turn on ADB debugging and Apps from Unknown Sources
Then under Settings -> System -> About -> Network
Make note of the IP address, e.g. 192.168.1.123

On a computer on the same network as your Fire TV Stick

Download the .APKs you want.
- Firefox - I just grabbed the latest mobile build from Mozilla's FTP site at the time, which was Firefox 34
- Twilight - I just searched for 'twilight apk' and ended up grabbing it here.
Install adb
- (I already had this installed, maybe I'll fill in steps later)
Open a command window
CD to the folder where you dropped the .APKs
Connect to the IP address from above; e.g.
- ```
adb connect 192.168.1.123
```
Install the .APKs on the FireStick; e.g.
- ```
adb install firefox.apk
```

Post-install

(back on the FireStick)

Go to Settings -> Applications -> Manage All Installed Applications
Scroll down to your newly installed app, press Ok, Launch application

Some notes on the two apps

Firefox

It's pretty tedious to use the browser with the included remote, but should suffice for e.g. entering login information on a hotel WiFi access form.

Twilight

Not being able to adjust the bars, and since it won't get a location automatically, and you can't set one manually, you basically end up with 2 settings:

At the top, select ether

Default, and use Force filter at the bottom to toggle it on & off, or
Bed Reading, which is much dimmer and automatically checks Force filter when selected.

Kind of a pain, but may lead to getting to sleep earlier, which may lead to you finally getting that raise you've been working on for the past 9 years...

Other thoughts

I don't see a quicker way to open the apps besides Settings -> Applications -> Manage All Installed Applications -> app -> Launch application, and for Twilight you have to do that and toggle it on & off via its Force filter setting. So, not great, but it works. Basically.

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2015-01-29T05:47:29Z

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