This year I added several strawberry plants.
17 April 2016
Kitchen garden April 2016
It's April again and the kitchen garden is becoming greener and greener. It is lovely to see plants grow so well. I sowed lima beans, tomato plants, spinach, green and yellow chard, artichokes, carrots, onions, zucchini, lettuce and I'm not done yet ...
Personna blades
I wanted to try personna blades for some time but I couldn't find them anywhere (except online). This week I found them in a supermarket.
I must admit they are pretty good. They are really sharp but at the same time, soft with your skin. Added to my collection of favourites...
I must admit they are pretty good. They are really sharp but at the same time, soft with your skin. Added to my collection of favourites...
04 February 2016
The Force Awakens, twice...
I just couldn't help it, I liked the film so much that I had to see it again...
08 December 2015
ES file explorer (Android)
My bq Aquaris 4.5 phone included a file manager called ES. At first I didn't pay attention to it because I simply didn't really care about it.
One day, after a system upgrade I was drawn to the renewed interface and icons of the application and started delving into the program's options and menu. It can do tons of things. The list is endless but...
Much to my surprise I discovered that it includes a built-in ftp server with which you can share files with your computer. Oh my!!! What an awesome discovery!!!
When you turn on the ES ftp server (called "Remote manager") you are given an address you can connect to using any ftp client. This way you can move your files, copy or delete them easily without the need of a usb cable or extracting the sd card.
Today I made a backup of all my photos using this feature and I can assure you this is not the only time I am going to use it. Love it!!!
One day, after a system upgrade I was drawn to the renewed interface and icons of the application and started delving into the program's options and menu. It can do tons of things. The list is endless but...
Much to my surprise I discovered that it includes a built-in ftp server with which you can share files with your computer. Oh my!!! What an awesome discovery!!!
When you turn on the ES ftp server (called "Remote manager") you are given an address you can connect to using any ftp client. This way you can move your files, copy or delete them easily without the need of a usb cable or extracting the sd card.
Today I made a backup of all my photos using this feature and I can assure you this is not the only time I am going to use it. Love it!!!
gui vs cli
When I started using linux 10 years ago, I desperately needed graphical programs to configure the system and do most of my daily tasks, no matter how simple they were. Even though I had some basic experience typing commands at the terminal I felt clumsy when it came to surviving at the command line.
However, over the years and very little by little, I discovered that most cli programs are faster, more powerful and strikingly way easier to use than their gui counterparts.
I know this is easier said than done, but in order to prove that, I needed to make an exhaustive list of all the programs I use at the gui and their cli counterparts. Let me insist that this list is exclusively a list of software I use on a daily basis. It is far from being exhaustive in terms of covering all the software I install on my computers.
The first two examples that come to mind are synaptic and d4x. At first I always used synaptic to manage software and d4x to download files. After some time I started using aptitude and wget. I never looked back.
Then the music player. I started using cmus and I never installed rhythmbox again.
As torrent client I used several gui programs. Now I exclusively use rtorrent.
Of course the usual and most basic applications you use on a daily basis are your file manager and your text editor. On the gui I use pcmanfm and medit but on the cli I use the mc and nano.
On a daily basis you also need a window manager. I use i3 on the gui and very rarely dvtm on the cli, I tend to use tmux as a window manager instead of a proper window manager.
Perhaps the toughest program to get rid of is the web browser, we are so used to graphical browsers that it is sometimes hard to browse the web in a text only browser. I mostly use chromium on the gui and a wide variety of text browsers like elinks, which has tab support (with vp for images), lynx and lately, I have started using w3m more and more for its ability to display images inline.
I also ditched gitk in favour of tig, because it is more handy.
There is also a number of applications that I do not use on a daily basis, but almost always on the cli, such as scrot for my screenshots.
However, over the years and very little by little, I discovered that most cli programs are faster, more powerful and strikingly way easier to use than their gui counterparts.
I know this is easier said than done, but in order to prove that, I needed to make an exhaustive list of all the programs I use at the gui and their cli counterparts. Let me insist that this list is exclusively a list of software I use on a daily basis. It is far from being exhaustive in terms of covering all the software I install on my computers.
The first two examples that come to mind are synaptic and d4x. At first I always used synaptic to manage software and d4x to download files. After some time I started using aptitude and wget. I never looked back.
Then the music player. I started using cmus and I never installed rhythmbox again.
As torrent client I used several gui programs. Now I exclusively use rtorrent.
Of course the usual and most basic applications you use on a daily basis are your file manager and your text editor. On the gui I use pcmanfm and medit but on the cli I use the mc and nano.
On a daily basis you also need a window manager. I use i3 on the gui and very rarely dvtm on the cli, I tend to use tmux as a window manager instead of a proper window manager.
Perhaps the toughest program to get rid of is the web browser, we are so used to graphical browsers that it is sometimes hard to browse the web in a text only browser. I mostly use chromium on the gui and a wide variety of text browsers like elinks, which has tab support (with vp for images), lynx and lately, I have started using w3m more and more for its ability to display images inline.
I also ditched gitk in favour of tig, because it is more handy.
There is also a number of applications that I do not use on a daily basis, but almost always on the cli, such as scrot for my screenshots.
16 November 2015
debian live
Someone on irc summarized the story in just one single sentence better than I could even if I tried:
"Just another project the cabal didn't like"
It is a shame on debian https://lists.debian.org/debian-live/2015/11/msg00024.html
"Just another project the cabal didn't like"
It is a shame on debian https://lists.debian.org/debian-live/2015/11/msg00024.html
07 October 2015
torrents galore
This very week I switched to a new ISP. Having a connection of your own for the first time in your life makes a huge difference in terms of how you handle your own ports to play nicely with your software.
One of the things that I had always wanted to do was installing a torrent client which could run unattended. I have a lot of experience with mldonkey, which is a client for several networks, bittorrent among them. However, I was looking for a lighter client for my raspberry pi. I tried several clients: rtorrent, ctorrent, and I finally settled for transmission, or more accurately transmission-cli.
Many, or most clients, have both a GUI and a CLI, some of them have a web interface which is great for managing your downloads from a remote location. But I somehow prefer logging into the machine using ssh, opening a multiplexer instance (usually screen) and fire up the bittorrent client. This is damn simple for all of us who spend most of our free time logged into remote machines, for work or play.
Using transmission-cli is easy peasy:
$ transmission cli *.torrent
Awesome!!!
Update 11-10-2015: A friend of mine suggested trying transmission-daemon and its web interface. I did. It is great, even though it needs a little tweaking since it uses a different user by default (debian-transmission) and you have to give that user write permissions to the directory you want to store your files.
Update 24-11-2015: Even though I use transmission-daemon and transmission-cli on my raspi. I exclusively use rtorrent in my laptops and servers. rtorrent is a really powerful and handy bittorrent client.
One of the things that I had always wanted to do was installing a torrent client which could run unattended. I have a lot of experience with mldonkey, which is a client for several networks, bittorrent among them. However, I was looking for a lighter client for my raspberry pi. I tried several clients: rtorrent, ctorrent, and I finally settled for transmission, or more accurately transmission-cli.
Many, or most clients, have both a GUI and a CLI, some of them have a web interface which is great for managing your downloads from a remote location. But I somehow prefer logging into the machine using ssh, opening a multiplexer instance (usually screen) and fire up the bittorrent client. This is damn simple for all of us who spend most of our free time logged into remote machines, for work or play.
Using transmission-cli is easy peasy:
$ transmission cli *.torrent
Awesome!!!
Update 11-10-2015: A friend of mine suggested trying transmission-daemon and its web interface. I did. It is great, even though it needs a little tweaking since it uses a different user by default (debian-transmission) and you have to give that user write permissions to the directory you want to store your files.
Update 24-11-2015: Even though I use transmission-daemon and transmission-cli on my raspi. I exclusively use rtorrent in my laptops and servers. rtorrent is a really powerful and handy bittorrent client.
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