The Black Oblong of Monospace Mystery
Posted on Sun, Jan 24, 2021
| Alan Pope
I originally titled this post “Don’t be afraid of the command line”, but decided “Black Oblong of Monospace Mystery” was more fun. Is the command line really scary? It doesn’t feel like that to me, but I grew up with an interface which looks like this on first boot.
Not exactly friendly, but I was 9 at the time, and this was normal. Typing things using the keyboard was pretty much a daily activity.
[Read More]Kingdom Rush
Posted on Sat, Jan 23, 2021
(Last modified on Fri, Jan 22, 2021)
| Alan Pope
Last week I posted about my guilty collection of unplayed games in Digital Hoarding: Gaming Edition. In short, I have a ton of games I’ve bought over the years and never played, even once. I set myself an internal goal to play more of the games I already have, and reign in my game purchasing.
I used the dynamic collection feature of Steam to show me the unplayed games, sorted by their steam review score.
[Read More]Book Review: Off to Be the Wizard: Magic 2.0, Book 1
Posted on Fri, Jan 22, 2021
| Alan Pope
I don’t read anywhere near enough books. Since The Event though, I’ve been walking more, and as I mentioned in my AirDots review, I enjoy reading listening to books as I walk. I’m a massive time travel fiction fan. There’s rarely a film with a time travel element that I’m not a fan of. The whole concept of re-writing history, broken timelines, butterfly effects and incongruity enthralls me.
I’m not sure how I discovered Off to Be the Wizard (affiliate link) by Scott Meyer, but it’s been on my Audible wishlist for a few months.
[Read More]Building Nothing
Posted on Thu, Jan 21, 2021
| Alan Pope
Last week I wrote a blog post titled null which did rather well! Note the giant (for my blog) spike on the right of this goaccess graph.
That’s the Hackernews effect. It was super to see the conversations over in the comments there. Quite proud to get 3 blog posts and one git repo on the front page of HN in the first month of the year. Don’t expect me to keep that momentum up, but we’ll come back to that another day.
[Read More]Xiaomi Redmi AirDots S Review
Posted on Wed, Jan 20, 2021
| Alan Pope
This is a somewhat belated review, as I’ve had these headphones for over 6 months now, but I use them often enough for a long term review I think. Also, I’m no MKBHD, so this isn’t a deep dive into the audio response of these things. Set expectations accordingly. This is more of a ramble than a review.
I’m no audiophile. I tend to listen to music while working on whatever headphones are nearby.
[Read More]Embarrassing Bugs
Posted on Tue, Jan 19, 2021
| Alan Pope
Well, this is embarrassing! I recently filed a bug against an open source project because I genuinely thought it was broken. It was (almost, probably, entirely) my fault. I thought I’d fess up and explain what happened. It might be useful for others.
As I mentioned yesterday, I recently upgraded my Ubuntu machines, including my main desktop. It’s a funky Skull Canyon NUC with a weird hybrid Intel / AMD GPU setup and an external nVidia card in an enclosure.
[Read More]Upgrading Ubuntu
Posted on Mon, Jan 18, 2021
| Alan Pope
I tend to run Ubuntu on my computers as the primary operating system. Given I work for Canonical, this isn’t especially surprising. However I have run Ubuntu on pretty much everything since 2005 or so - long before I started working at Canonical (in 2011). Mostly I will upgrade as each new release comes out, only doing a clean install once in a while.
I ran GNOME 2 for all the years from 2004 through to Unity being released, then switched to that.
[Read More]Discovering Rocketbooks
Posted on Sun, Jan 17, 2021
(Last modified on Sun, Feb 28, 2021)
| Alan Pope
A few weeks days ago (it seems like longer at this rate) I blogged about my problem with notebooks. I was on the verge of buying an epaper writing device - likely a Remarkable 2 as I published it.
Within a few minutes, in the Ubuntu Podcast Telegram channel, Dalton Durst of UBPorts fame, gave me pause for thought.
Put simply Rocketbooks are notepads with erasable not-quite-paper and not-quite-whiteboard material. During the conversation Dalton shared this photo of his books in use.
[Read More]13th Twitter-versary
Posted on Sat, Jan 16, 2021
| Alan Pope
I woke up this morning to a notification injected into my timeline in the Twitter app.
Apparently it’s my “Twitter anniversary” which I can “celebrate” by tweeting out a pre-made picture of the number 13. That’s too easy. Instead I recently downloaded my Twitter data. Let me be self-indulgent and take a look and see what happened over those 13 years.
For those who haven’t tried downloading their Twitter data, what you get is a browseable archive with a summary front page.
[Read More]Distrowatch is Not a Measure of Popularity
Posted on Fri, Jan 15, 2021
| Alan Pope
Here’s a fun blog post where I get possibly irrationally annoyed by people who use a web page incorrectly. Let me get this off my chest and then move on to better topics tomorrow.
Distrowatch is a popular website among Linux enthusiasts. The main page consists of reverse-chronological news articles of interest to Linux users. Often this consists of new stable and development release announcements, reviews and weekly roundups.
In addition, there are boxes surrounding the content highlighting the latest Linux distributions, podcasts, software packages and some advertising.
[Read More]Breaking my Crowdfunding Hiatus
Posted on Thu, Jan 14, 2021
| Alan Pope
Just days after blogging about My Crowdfunding Stats, I’ve broken my “no crowdfunding” streak of near 18-months by backing something small, but delightful!
Last night a tweet by Tom Brinton crossed my desk. Tom is creating a notebook in which every page is a procedurally generated portable dungeon crawler. The campaign is called “Tiny Paper Dungeons” and it runs until 2nd February 2021.
Tom has previously made a project in a similar vein called NUTRI-TRACK.
[Read More]null
Posted on Wed, Jan 13, 2021
(Last modified on Wed, Feb 21, 2024)
| Alan Pope
I quite like to break things. While I’m not a QA or security professional, I have developed a knack for doing “stupid” things with software which causes it to malfunction. Some developer friends of mine have lamented that they didn’t show me software before they released it. Because I sometimes find annoying bugs immediately after they release.
Here’s some fun examples of pushing the boundaries of software, sometimes by doing things a little “out there”, beyond what the developer expected or tested.
[Read More]Digital Hoarding: Ubuntu Mirror
Posted on Tue, Jan 12, 2021
| Alan Pope
I have a bunch of Ubuntu machines on my local network at home. They all periodically need to check for updates then download & install them. Rather than have them all reach out to the official mirrors externally to my network, I decided to run my own mirror internally. This post is just a set of notes for anyone else who might be looking to do something similar.
I also do a lot of software building, and re-building, which pulls all kinds of random libraries, compilers and other packages from the archive.
[Read More]Digital Hoarding: Gaming Edition
Posted on Mon, Jan 11, 2021
| Alan Pope
Another in a series of “I have identified a problem here!”. I appear have quite a few video games. More than I can probably play in my time left on Earth. Let’s set aside all the retro games I have for a moment, and consider only the ones that run on my primary computer, a PC. To be clear, I’m only talking about ’native’ games.
Aside: I hate the word ’native’ in this context, because what’s native?
[Read More]My Crowdfunding Stats
Posted on Sun, Jan 10, 2021
| Alan Pope
While writing my Ouya post the other day, I was reminded of the various projects I’ve backed on crowdfunding sites over the years. Between May 2012 and August 2019 I helped fund 68 separate projects. Most for “beer money” (around a tenner) through “toy money” (up to fifty quid) up to “need to have a think about this money” (a hundred quid or so). The vast majority have been successful, and I’ve received my backer reward in a timely fashion.
[Read More]Two Displays & Two Computers
Posted on Sat, Jan 9, 2021
| Alan Pope
In my messy office I have a main desk I work at. I have two portait displays on a hefty, but inexpensive BONTEC Dual Monitor Stand (affiliate link), clamped to the back, to lift the monitors up off the desk. The monitors are 3-year-old, low-end 24" ASUS VS248HR (affiliate link) “Gaming Monitor’s” 🤣.
I recently bought a Raspberry Pi 400 which also sits on my desk for quick-release arm64-action! The problem I have had with other Pi’s is the spiders web of cables needed, and additional keyboard.
[Read More]A Problem with Notebooks
Posted on Fri, Jan 8, 2021
| Alan Pope
I cleared a shelf out this week, and rediscovered eight different books, all different shapes and sizes. Some date back seven or eight years, others are more modern. None of them are full, none are recent. Each one contains approximately a dozen pages of notes.
I think I have a problem that needs solving, maybe.
I love a good notebook. I’m not a book snob though. I know some brands that prolific writers will use above all others.
[Read More]Hush Keyboards with Hushboard
Posted on Thu, Jan 7, 2021
(Last modified on Mon, Jan 11, 2021)
| Alan Pope
Yesterday while surfing the ASCII highways of IRC (yes, IRC) a URL linking to a MacOS application scrolled by my screen. Unclack is a small MacOS utility which silences the microphone of the user when they’re typing. The purpose is to prevent the noise of typing being passed through to other participants when on a Zoom / Skype / Jitsi call. Neat.
They don’t make a Linux version, and I couldn’t see anything similar, so I did what I usually do in this instance, throw the idea towards my friendly local coder, Stuart Langridge.
[Read More]My GNOME Tweaks
Posted on Wed, Jan 6, 2021
| Alan Pope
One of the neat things about GNOME Shell is that it’s pretty tweakable - to some degree - to customise it to a user’s preferences. I know some people use GNOME Shell stock experience. I don’t. I have previously written about some of my must-have extensions and add-ons. This supplements that with what I do to further tweak my (currently) Ubuntu 20.10 system to my liking.
Note: These are the settings I configure on my computer that I use all day every day.
[Read More]Ouya was a Success
Posted on Tue, Jan 5, 2021
| Alan Pope
On 11th July 2012, the Ouya burst onto the scene via popular crowdfunding site - Kickstarter. It was billed as “A New Kind of Video Game Console” which sold for $99/£99 at launch. It was essentially an Nvidia Tegra 3 based ARM System on Chip crammed into a tiny box which sat under / near your TV and was operated with supplied bluetooth game controllers. They far exceeded the target of $950,000, reaching $8,596,474, setting some high expectations among the backers and interested onlookers.
[Read More]