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Start this month with some Kate, fluxbox, and two of the better distros available:

Totaltiy will be right over us at 1442 EST.

Kids are excited. Went to park for better view.

R.I.P Jerry Lewis

Not just a comedic actor. Prolific director and a pioneer in the techniques used to film comedy.

Posting this as a reminder for myself (mostly) and anyone else that happens to land here after an internet search (welcome to the forum, check out VSIDO).

After installing and working with Void linux on a Toshiba Satellite, the touchpad quit working. Normally, I use a script to toggle it off when the window manager starts since I typically have a usb mouse attached. After about 2 days the touchpad just quit working - couldn't toggle it back on, and it wouldn't work at grub menu or login screen.

Turns out this Toshiba Satellite (and some other laptops) has a special function key binding (FN + F5) that toggles the touchpad on/off. I apparently toggled it off when using xev to ket the various keysyms.

The issue is that the touchpad remains off upon reboot. So a quick FN + F5 solved my problem.

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Upgrades ......

Went to Pennsylvania to visit my sister and brother in-law. Nice trip, kids get to run around on their 4-acre property. On the way back, stopped at the Gettysburg National Monument:



Almost too much to see in one day. If we had gotten there at 6:00 AM, could have seen it all. Just got too hot this afternoon.

Anyone else having this issue with nitrogen and conky -

I will change the wallpaper with nitrogen while conky is running. However, the settings are not saved and "nitrogen --restore" fails. Either get the old wallpaper, or a blank desktop.

In a terminal:

nitrogen --restore

yields this error:

UNKNOWN ROOT WINDOW TYPE DETECTED, will attempt to set via normal X procedure

The fix appears to be to:

1. stop conky
2. set new wallpaper

So the conky (1.10) window seems to be messing nitrogen up.

Extreme fix is to delete the two files in $HOME/.config/nitrogen and then set the wallpaper with nitrogen without conky running.

As an added measure, I also added a "sleep 5s &&" to the conky line in ~/.fluxbox/startup and start it up last.

This behavior also occurs in openbox; same fix.

Quote@PackRat What camera do you use now-a-days? And do you use any application for post processing?

@hackerdefo - you motivated me to shoot some film this month. Got the holiday this week and some upcoming travel plans.

Got them all cleaned up and ready to go:

Summer keeps rolling along.

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debian sid - fluxbox -mpv

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fluxbox -

Willie Mays celebrates #86

Arguably the best all around player ever - 5 tool player that knew how to use them all.

Loved watching him play toward the end of his career when I was a kid. Wish I could have seen him in his prime.

I was working on a yad command (battery notification) and came across this internal yad command (from the yad man page):

--notification
              Display notification icon.

so the command:

yad --notification

sends a notification icon to the system tray. That got me thinking that yad can be used with conky so that conky can send notifications to the system tray - low battery, high cpu, that sort of thing. The goal is to make conky proactive instead of reactive (in the sense that the user needs to be reading it). That way, if a window is covering the conky, a user can still get critical information.

Proof of concept:

My usual conky with fluxbox - I have it docked in the slit so it's always visible, and use "if" to colorize the output for CPU and MEM:



Add a bit of code (snippet)-

chage:

${offset 8}${if_match ${memperc}<=50}${color7}

to

${offset 8}${if_match ${memperc}<=50}${color7}${exec yad --notification}

and sure enough, I get a notification icon (which can be changed in yad) - but the conky itself no longer displays. Same result using execpi, texeci and not docking the conky.



There has to be a way to make this work without a lot of scripting which could get cpu and mem intensive.

Thoughts?

I seldom use the webcam on my laptop. Privacy issues aside, it would be nice to have a properly formatted bash script that will tooggle the integrated webcam off/on and save myself some memory and power use.

This method works just fine so it's easy to blacklist the module at boot and then use the command:

sudo modprobe uvcvideo

to load the module if I want to use the webcam.

But my inner script-kiddee says there has to be an elegant way to do this (surprisingly, I didn't find one online - but I didn't specifically check the Arch Forum either).

I could probably hack something together but that would fail the elegant test.

So a script that checks and then  loads/unloads the uvcvideo module would be a handy item.

I'll post this here in case someone has a solution that will be useful to me others.

Tried to get the live session of the new uEFI capable iso ( 9 April 2017 build ).

Always got to the grub menu, but the first couple efforts hanged - I let it sit for a minute or so  just to see if it was slow, but no joy.

Finally went to completion, and auto logged into a live session, but the keyboard was dead (mouse worked) so I couldn't do anything.

This laptop - Toshiba 875D - isn't particularly user friendly when it comes to Linux uEFI - had some issues with Fedora and Ubuntu boot/live sessions as well so if you're shopping around might not be the one to get.

If someone knows a trick to get the keyboard going, please share the information in case someone else has the same issue.

Otherwise an excellent effort by Team VSIDO - (live session was smooth as silk on my non-uEFI machines)

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The usual suspects, my latest green fluxbox style. Spring officially begins on April 3 -

   

A very rare geologic occurrance -



USGS Interview

crazy stuff; miss working with those USGS people.

To Ozi and our other down-under users:

What does the vsido-exit script look like these days? Still using all the dbus commands?

Maybe update the exit script to take advantage of systemd - and any additional enhancements (if any) it brings to the table.

Rained off and on for this year's First Day Hike.
But still a great start to our new year - and a nice break from all the shiny new Christmas toys.

Falls at Musgrove Mill.

Hope everyone is off to a great start in the new year -




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