Just so long as you don’t depend on it. In this case we’ve got Gmail’s automated translation feature, which I’ve probably only used once or twice in the past decade in order to see how it worked. Today it had the nice idea to suggest interference in English.
The original message. Must be French!After translation. Yup, removing that one word really helped me understand this mysterious language.
There is in fact French text hiding in the conversation history. Funny thing though — there’s no suggestion to translate on any of the preceding or following messages that are actually in French. So it goes.
You need to install hplip. It looks like something’s still off about the colors compared to Ubuntu and Windows, and I can’t figure out what the difference is. Alas. :/ Also, don’t buy HP.
A minimal Debian install comes without the ability to view man pages. Fair enough, it’s minimal after all. But they can be quite useful. A sudo apt install man later results in man pages being shown. That’s all, folks? Unnfortunately not, because the man pages are shown using the more command, which doesn’t allow for scrolling up and down with the arrow keys or j and k, Pg Up and Pg Dn, and all the other usual niceties. To fix you need to sudo apt install less, a “pager program similar to more.” And better, at least on any machine with sufficient RAM. Meaning anything anyone is likely to use in 2016, or probably also in 1990 for that matter.
QuiteRSS is a terrific piece of software. It only has one flaw, which is that it only runs on my desktop. Unfortunately this has led to me increasingly getting behind on the things I like to read. Sometimes this is fine, like when I can read a book instead, but other times it’s mildly frustrating.
QuiteRSS in three-column mode.
It would seem that none of the online feeds readers, whether self-hosted or SaaS, support the paradigm I’m used to. They’re all following the “golden standard” of nightmarish, thankfully-it’s-gone Google Reader. Basically I use feeds like emails. Most I delete after reading. Those I want to keep for reference I keep around, marked read.
But not so with these feedreaders. Feeds you want to keep for later reading should preferably be favorited, bookmarked, or maybe saved to a system like Wallabag. This has advantages too, of course. By centralizing your to-read list in one location, like Wallabag or Pocket, you don’t have the problem of remembering what’s where, or that you have loads of unread open tabs in various browsers.
Long story short, after sampling a whole bunch of feedreaders I opted for FreshRSS. It suffers from the omnipresent “no pages” disease. Got a feed with a thousand items? (Yes, they exist.) You can go to the start or the beginning by sorting in ascending or descending order, but reading things somewhere down the middle? Forget it.
These minor inconveniences are worth it, however. This way I can easily read my feeds from any computer anywhere in the world. The feeds are always updated, provided you set up a cron job. I don’t have to start up my computer or risk missing anything if I’m on vacation for a few days. I can quickly check them on my cellphone during an otherwise wasted moment. Overall I’m happy. Goodbye, QuiteRSS. You were a good friend after Opera died, but it’s time to move on.
PS Here are some feed-related links that should go along nicely with any feed reader.
Feed Creator allows you to create feeds for webpages that are missing them.
So does RSS-Bridge, but since it’s self-hosted it fits perfectly next to FreshRSS in the kluit spirit.
Tubes is a tool I wrote a few years back that can filter and fix up feeds. Useful if a website happens to have a feed, but not on a per-category basis or some such. Or of course because you might want to subscribe to an hourly news podcast, but only get the news once a day.
Just a quick demonstration of the power of openclipart.org. I dubbed my “personal cloud” experiment kluit: a Dutch word meaning both clod and the ball of earth around the roots of a tree. In other words, kluit is firmly grounded because you’ve got your own ground with you wherever you go. Be like Dracula. With a name in mind, I also wanted a matching logo. Following a quick search for leaves, root (or was it tree) and after a little initial play something like attraction, this is the quick and satisfying result.
A couple of floating leaves still connected with their roots. This arrangement symbolizes how creating your personal cloud keeps it grounded.
According to the timestamp on Getting Started.pdf, I’ve been a happy Dropbox user since 2010. For probably equally many years, they’ve had the most obnoxious Android app. Perhaps I don’t want to put my whole Dropbox on my Android phone (although I’m not so sure I don’t), but obviously you should be able to select a whole directory to sync. Solutions like Dropsync are unfortunately super slow, probably because it seems to be mostly a clever hack that syncs files one by one.
Instead of a similar alternative, I’ve really always been irked by the lack of an easy to use Unison-like sync for my phone. Running Unison in a chroot just doesn’t quite cut it… The obvious solution is something like Syncthing or Bittorrent Sync, which works regardless whether or not there’s a remote server involved. And if there is, it’d be a remote server under my own control.
Syncthing isn’t ideal because of its lack of subdirectory selection. But since in reality it’s almost exclusively a one-way street anyway, it doesn’t matter so much. The main point is that this is all easier than running an FTP server on the device, plugging it in over USB, running a webserver on it to drop files into a browser window or whatever other overly complicated solutions might exist. To install Syncthing, get it on F-Droid. Or Google Play, if you don’t think it’s obnoxious.
You can get by almost entirely on F-Droid alone. In fact it’s where most of the best software is found.
Unfortunately Syncthing can’t sync wherever. Oh well, we’ll just sync within its own directory instead.
On my phone, Syncthing can’t handle the MicroSD card, but we can trick it.
It’ll make some things a touch more complicated. Maybe a symlink? Oh drat, FAT32 strikes again. Meh.
Aard Dictionary doesn’t care where it’s located.Add a favorite, a shortcut, or both. It’ll be difficult to interact with the directory otherwise.
The sync problem isn’t really solved yet, but it’s sure a lot better. All in all, Android is still awful and you should probably consider getting an Ubuntu Phone instead. The end.
As for Syncthing, perhaps its most interesting property is that it can largely replace both Dropbox and Unison. In fact it can probably completely replace Unison for me, because I haven’t actually bothered replicating my stuff onto a separate physical HDD in years. And Syncthing definitely makes it easier to add more of my laptops and whatnot into the mix. On the flipside, the fact that I run Unison once a week or so forces a kind of built-in review of the changes I made, so I can undo them if desired. In this way it’s more like a backup. But of course, Syncthing can sync between more than two computers at once, while the changes are happening. It’s worth a look, if nothing else.
I didn’t spot it in the Debian changelog, but apparently the latest libinput10 update on Debian/stretch (unstable) broke my EmulateWheel option. Because the scroll ring on my trackball is broken, it’s all I’ve got. It’s also rather nice on trackballs without any kind of scrolling functionality at all, such as the Logitech Trackman Marble.
Scanning man libinput doesn’t list any entries for those options anymore, but it does contain the following:
Option "ScrollButton" "int"
Designates a button as scroll button. If the ScrollMethod is button and the button is logically held down, x/y axis movement is converted into scroll events.
Option "ScrollMethod" "string"
Enables a scroll method. Permitted values are none, twofinger, edge, button. Not all devices support all options. If an option is unsupported, the default scroll option for this device is used.
Note how this would allow you to disable two-finger scroll on e.g. our Wacom drawing tablet if you don’t like it. (But I do!) In any case, adjusting my xorg.conf accordingly:
Works like a charm. Better yet, it now also scrolls horizontally. Which can be disabled with Option "HorizontalScrolling" "false" if you so desire. All’s well that ends well.
