Razor blades

I use a wide variety of razor blades from many different countries of the world:
Germany, Egypt, Japan, U.K, Greece, Turkey, Korea, Russia ...

There is a great article about razor blades here. In order to know the origin of some of these blades in more detail, take a look at this post

Shaving shavette

Today I tried the Parker shavette I got on Wednesday. I must say that it is easier to handle for me than the straight razor. I imagine that on the one hand, the cutting surface of the blade is smaller than the razor and on the other hand I am a tad used to the feel of a blade on my face so I was a bit bolder when using it. I even dared shave the chin area without any fear. I got a couple of little nicks due to my carelessness, though.

One thing worth noticing is that following MrFrood's advice I chose a mild Merkur blade which was one of the most suitable (in my small collection of blades) for this shaving session.

All in all I must say it was a nice experience that I'm willing to repeat soon.

Leaving you some pics...

About to try the shavette for the first time.

Starting with the sideburns as usual.

Take it easy, man!

New razor and shavette

Today I received my new Merkur razor and Parker shavette to add to my collection.

My first cut-throat razor experience

Well, I finally gathered the strength to try my first cut-throat (also called straight) razor. All I can say is: "Man, if you like aggressive shaving, look no further." Nothing, not even the sharpest double edge blades I have tried in my life can compare to using a straight razor.

I must admit it is very difficult to use. I guess it takes several weeks until you can properly shave with one of them, but I have to say that the first experience was not really bad at all. Not a single cut or nick!!! Good for me!!!

Here are some pics I took:


* After taking a shower I applied the shaving soap. It is La Toja soap, made in Spain. It is a great shaving soap with a lovely scent. If you've never used it, you should give it a try.

 * Applying the lather with a brush. Badger brushes are considered among the best ones. They are soft and play well with water.

* Here is the cut-throat razor ready to be used. It is easy to learn how to hold it in your hand correctly. I had never had one but it feels pretty natural to hold one from the very first moment.

* Actually shaving. I started with the sideburns. I was not afraid to cut myself in that area. Then I did the area under the nostrils, the neck and the lower lip. I wasn't brave enough to shave the chin though. I was really afraid to cut the skin in that area. I sure need more practice.

* In this last picture, you can see the results, but be warned that I'm lying here. The results were by far *not* that good. I shaved myself again with a regular DE razor. Why am I publishing the picture then? Just to prove that there are no cuts or nicks whatsoever and that I survived my first cut-throat razor experience.

I will practice until I master the art of classic shaving. There is plenty of things to learn but I'm willing to take the challenge. (Thanks again to my friend Mr. Frood for encouraging me to get the razor).

My first cut-throat razor

A couple of weeks ago I ordered a straight razor which I received today.

I am really excited about it but I still need to gather the courage to try it. I am seriously  considering to get a shavette as well.

Shaving

This very week, my good old friend MrFrood sent me some shaving gear really worth trying. So far I've only tried the "Timor" blades and the "Proraso" cream. And my conclusion is:

- Timor blades are far superior to the Wilkinson Sword ones. Timor blades are thinner and may I say, sharper. They cut like hell.Oh my!!!

- The Proraso cream is simply and plainly put: Excellent! (Nothing more to say!)

Here are some pics of the process:

Shaving gear, mainly sponsored by MrFrood.

Applying the cream with the brush.

Taking selfies of myself...

Actually shaving...

Once again, thanks to the Frood for being an everyday guidance on many aspects of life and first and foremost, for being a good friend, even in the distance ;)

Mucho sol 2

Today I finished installing the four remaining solar panels on the roof of the house. Everything went well except for the fact that I hadn't carefully checked the size of the new luxor panels. They are one centimeter wider than the kyocera ones so I had to do some extra work to make them fit in the frame (which I built with the kyocera measures in mind *sigh*)

I took several pictures. The inverters are still not in their definitive placement. They are in the shed for the time being. I'll move them to an appropriate place next week.

Solar panels to light up my life :p

Two soladin 600 inverters at work.

Mucho sol

The solar panels I ordered last week arrived Tuesday after lunch time. I only had a little time to open the huge cardboard box to check that everything was right. Solar panels' upper layer is made of glass, it is extremely resistant, but it is still glass after all and needs handling with care.

I took a couple of pictures of the contents of the box. Next weekend I'll put them on the roof and will take several pictures too.

Huge cardboard box.

Contents of the box, including some cables.

Kitchen garden summer 2014

Here's a selection of pictures of several of my kitchen garden plants I took at the weekend:

Tomato plants (greenhouse)

Sweet Cap (Paraguayan or Chinese flat peach)

Potato plants

Willow tree

Zucchini

More dual head

Another picture of my main desktop machine with its dual head. I have been exclusively using i3 for several days now and I think I have finished configuring it to my liking. I have changed the fonts, some of the colours, added several keybindings and what not. One of the things in the todo list was the background picture (which is hardly ever visible since i3 takes charge of the entire space). I spent quite some time until I found this one.

When all windows are closed, the left monitor screen background remains black. For the picture, I opened weechat, cmus and htop (which are some typical applications that I use all the time. Usually, I also have the mc or pcmanfm for file management) and the right screen shows this cute picture. I really like it, in fact I like it so much that I wanted to publish it on my blog right away. I hope you like it too.

pharc v.4.0 released

Today, even though I experienced some connectivity problems I managed to release pharc v.4.0. pharc is a very simple script that archives phlog posts on a yearly basis. The nice thing about it is that since a new version is released every year, it grows bigger, with more options, and hopefully, also better. Needless to say that the next release, unless there is a big bug to fix, is scheduled for 2015.

This year in particular, I did a lot of testing because there were many new options. And even so, I had to make a last minute change to make it work on NetBSD 6.1.2. I changed one echo call which contained a backlash escape character to printf because NetBSD's version of echo renders the backlash characters literally. So:

echo "1Archive $DIR\t$DIR" >> gophermap

Had to be re-written as:

printf "1Archive $DIR\t$DIR\n" >> gophermap

Not a big deal really, but last minute changes are sometimes annoying because you have to re-test and make sure that it remains posix compliant and that it works. Remember that I use two different platforms to test it: NetBSD + ksh and debian + bash

Below are some links that will lead you to more detailed information about pharc

The official release announcement, of course in my own phlog (which is archived by pharc):

gopher://sdf-eu.org:70/1/users/chals/phlog/./06-07-14

The downloads page (Includes the raw script and the .deb package):

gopher://sdf-eu.org:70/1/users/chals/downloads

The git repository, hosted at gitorious:

https://gitorious.org/pharc

and the wiki (important to consult, since in includes almost all possible use cases):

https://gitorious.org/pharc/pages/Home

I hope you like it and have fun with it! Happy phlogging :D

Screenshot of the week 11

Maybe the most awesome window manager I've ever used is i3 and believe me, I have tried many of them over the years. I must admit that I was not really fond of tiling window managers, but this one excels far beyond the other ones I know, such as awesome or spectrwm

Here is a screenshot of my dual head desktop machine:

Note: I have not prepared the window arrangement for the screenshot. I simply opened some of the windows I use on an everyday basis, such as weechat, cmus, htop, a web browser and some terminals. (On a regular desktop environment I would have also opened a file manager, such as pcmanfm). I launched scrot to perform a test screenshot. Much to my surprise, I liked it and I said to myself, well, this is as good as any other.

Almost every tiling window manager has its own long list of features. However...

There are several things that make i3 outstanding. The first one is that it supports multiple monitors out of the box. In my case, my main desktop is a dual head, so it is really great to take advantage of so much space to fill with windows. I just need to use xrandr as I usually do for example for xfce4:

 $ xrandr --output VGA-1 --left-of DVI-I-1

Secondly, the way i3 deals with workspaces is really nice. With one single monitor, there is only one initial workspace, but you can create as many workspaces as you want by simply changing into them. This is to say, if the workspace you change into does not exist it gets created at once. If you have two monitors, there will be two initial workspaces (one per monitor), but you will still be able to create new ones.

You can arrange windows in three different layouts: split, stacked or tabbed. I normally simply split them but the other two layouts are very handy to have your windows in fullscreen.

Another feature that makes i3 out of this world is that you can be productive with it from the very moment you install it. Yeah, sure there is an small learning curve until you learn all the keybindings, but you can also perform many operations with the mouse as if you were using a regular desktop environment. What is more, with just one stroke you can make the windows float and move them around with the mouse.

The fact that the window focus follows the mouse is a bit annoying, I'd rather do it with the keyboard because if you move your mouse involuntarily into a window, you might find yourself typing passwords on the irc channel. Such is life, I know... but still embarrassing :-p

But there is a configuration option for that (the config file can be found at either .i3/config or .config/i3/config)

#  focus_follows_mouse <yes|no>
focus_follows_mouse no

Want more? i3 is faster than fast. In my dual head desktop, an old P4 machine, i3 loads in just 3 seconds. Yeah i3 loads in 3s. Ain't that really impressive?

Another thing I like is that you can load any applications you want at startup. You only have to use the exec command in your config file like this:

exec chromium
exec i3-sensible-terminal
exec dropbox start
exec gmail-notify

The config file is the right place to create your own keybindings. The documentation gives an example of how to use a key combination to take a screenshot. Using the example as a reference I have added a shortcut for the sound mixer:

# Open sound mixer
bindsym --release $mod+m exec alsamixergui

Imagine that you would like to have the mixer in all the workspaces. That is easy to achieve. One of the nicest features of i3 is the scratchpad. It is a window that you can have in all the workspaces by simply pressing a key. From the documentation:

# Make the currently focused window a scratchpad
bindsym $mod+Shift+minus move scratchpad

# Show the first scratchpad window
bindsym $mod+minus scratchpad show

It could also be useful for your notes, your text editor, your irc program...

Then $mod+c reloads the config file. Or alternatively $mod+Shift+r restarts i3 inplace

I could certainly go on and on. I think I will continue adding some more info as I discover new tricks. By the way, just as a curiosity. I had installed i3 a while ago but I had never really got very much into it until now. However, I remember using wmii and enjoying it. I even wrote a blog post here

At this very moment I'm reading the i3 user's guide trying to find super "kewl" things to try. I have already learnt by heart most keybindings. I especially like the $mod+f to toggle fullscreen mode. One thing that I do not understand is why the heck (on my stable machines) $mod+h splits the window vertically and  $mod+v splits windows horizontally. Both the config file and the user's guide say that $mod+h should split horizontally and $mod+v should split vertically. However they work the other way round, unless I'm going out of my head and horizontal and vertical do not mean horizontal and vertical respectively ;)

Update: It seems to work correctly on my sid machine. It might have been a bug.

I have installed i3 on almost all my machines (even on my tiny eeepc 701) and of course I'm writing this post using it. I hope you like it   ;)

My Mia

The new kitty in the family.

The Route of Jubierre 2

I promised I'd upload some more pics of the last trip I made to the Monegros desert. I've chosen these two. I hope you like them.

What's up, doc?

On top of the world?

The Route of Jubierre

Yesterday, with my friend Andrés, I visited the Route of Jubierre in the Monegros desert area. Even though this is a touristic place you still get the feeling that you are visiting a wild area because it is really spectacular.

I'm uploading several pictures here, but I'll upload some more next week. Stay tuned :)

My sweeties

I have been a little bit away from the keyboard these days. You know, springtime, lots of things to do in the kitchen garden and so little time. Now Easter is just around the corner, I hope to have more time... ahem

This weekend, apart from many more things, I planted two trees. The first one is a variety called "Sweet cap" (Hence the tittle of the post) and the second one is a weeping willow (beautiful trees).

Mont-rebei gorge

I already published this on my phlog and you know that I do not usually crosspost stuff, unless I crosspost stuff.

This is to say that you really should visit my gopher site at:

gopher://sdf-eu.org/1/users/chals/phlog

If you cannot browse gopherspace try this link (direct gopher proxy link to the above-mentioned post)

Anyway, I'm also uploading some of the pictures that I took (with a slightly worse quality)

Screenshot of the week 10

Much to my surprise I discovered that SMPlayer does YouTube too (installing SMTube) and to be honest I must admit that very well. I took an screenshot of my sid laptop while watching one of my favourite talk shows.

Working in the garden

This year's work in the garden consists in building several wooden boxes to grow vegetables as usual, but using ecological plague control methods (the boxes allow you to isolate/monitor the plants growth better).

So far I have built two big boxes (even though they are still not filled with soil) but I hope to have, at least, five by the end of the month, depending on the amount of available time. In the picture you can see one of the boxes and behind it, there is a little plastic greenhouse (the big one I used to have was completely destroyed by the wind).

Ambition

Today I got one of the best rock albums in history. It is, at least, an all-time personal favourite. I had been looking for it for years but it was only resold second hand and at a very high price. Thank god I could get this remastered copy at a very affordable one.

Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for Tommy Shaw's Ambition

I would really like to explain how I feel, all the emotion that having this masterpiece produces in me (after so many years). I would really like to be able to express how happy I am, but I simply can't put it into words.

Screenshot of the week 9

I had forgotten an important feature of GetSimple CMS. The Website Health Check that tells you in detail about the status of your website:

Screenshot of the week 8

This is the 8th installment of my "Screenshot of the week" series. Why do I regularly publish screenshots? Because everybody loves screenshots. Don't they? Well, at least, I do love 'em ;)

This week I'm going to upload several images showing the internals of GetSimple CMS. Getsimple does not use a database, this is called a flat file cms. I was looking for one because I didn't want the complexity of joomla,drupal or wordpress. I tried several of them and I especially liked zimplit andpico. But above them all I preferred getsimple.

If you are looking for a simple and easy to use but however complete CMS do not look any further. Give getsimple a try. I hope you like it as much as I do. In fact all this site is built with it. And I also hope that these screenshots are useful. 

First, the login screen:

Second, the Pages tab:

Third, the uploaded files management:

Fourth, choosing the themes and adding the code to the components:

Fifth, the Plugins tab. You can activate or de-activate them with just one click:

Sixth, the Blog management (which is a plugin):

And last but not least, the calendar (which is another plugin) I think the calendar is cool. I added it to the footer: