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22 October 2017

Greenhouse 2017

My little greenhouse is ready for the winter to come.


28 July 2017

Dillo: like a bat out of hell

I love text browsers. My favourite ones are lynx and elinks.
I love graphical browsers. My favourite ones are chromium and firefox.
I love browsers that somehow are in the middle like w3m-img or links2.

This is to say that I spend a lot of time surfing the web in different ways depending on what I need to achieve or the hardware I am using at the moment. It is not the same being connected to a powerful remote server or connected using an eeepc of 512mb of ram.

So instead of saying that I love them, it would be more accurate to say that I make an extensive use of all kinds of web browsers.

Among the graphical browsers I used to like was midori, it allowed me to do almost anything I could do with chromium but it needed less resources which was fine. The problem I have always had with midori is that I have often have to face one or other bug. In my eeepc everytime I scrolled down it opened a new tab and switched to it (oh man so annoying).

But thank god I discovered dillo. It is an incredibly fast graphical web browser that works like a charm in all my machines, especially in my less powerful ones, like the eeepc or any other old laptop/desktop machines.

Dillo has a certain number of limitations, that is true. It does not interpret javascript and therefore you lose a bit of some sites functionality. But this is a trade-off I am willing to accept.

Dillo has a number of configuration files under ~/.dillo that once tweaked will make your life way better. This is a list of the files you need to have in there:

* dillorc This is the actual config file. You can set many options here like the homepage, the colours you like...

* domainrc Dillo cross-domain request rules file. In this file you can configure which sites are allowed to retrieve data from third party domains.

* bm.txt The bookmarks file. You can add any bookmarks from the browser using its graphical interface, however the syntax is very easy and it is quicker to add your bookmarks directly to this file. For example:

:s1: Super cool sites
s1 http://www.chalsattack.com chalsattack
s1 http://blog.chalsattack.com/ chals' blog


* cookiesrc How to handle cookies. The syntax is also plain easy.
DEFAULT DENY
chalsattack.com ACCEPT
blog.chalsattack.com ACCEPT_SESSION

Note: Accepting cookies will create an additional cookies.txt file in ~/.dillo

Once everything is in place prepare to surf at full speed, be careful, you might get a ticket for speeding ;)

Now you can visit most sites on the web, check your mail and do almost anything you can do with other browsers. But you will not be able to for example watch videos or visit sites that exclusively depend on javascript.

Conclusion: The chalsattack.com version which was active from 2015 and 2016 made an extensive use of javascript, since I couldn't visit it with dillo, I re-wrote the site from scratch as you can read here

Next installment: a screenshot of dillo in action.

24 July 2017

Screenshot of the week 13

Today I have spent some time re-writing my personal homepage using html and css. As you can see in the screenshot, it is very similar looking to its previous version. I would say it is almost identical once the page is fully loaded, but there are some important differences.

The previous version made extensive use of javascript to display the text. I cannot lie here, the effects were great and really cool, but there was a huge downside to it. You could not navigate the site using text browsers or simply put using any kind of browser which does not suport javascript (such as dillo). 

Now it is 99% pure html and 1% javascript since I could not resist including a small script to update the site's date. I think that keeping up to date unattendedly is a nice feature.


Apart from that small inclusion of the javascript snippet, I am very proud of my work because I achieved what a really wanted to achieve, a simple site with no bloat at all. For the first time in my life I have created a website which is fully compliant with w3c standards.

 Besides, and even though the css file is relatively simple, I have had a lot of fun playing with it.

You can see the sources (both html and css) usually pressing Ctrl + U in your browser.

01 July 2017

China

Welcome China (born March 19th)


28 May 2017

raspi 3.5 inch touch screen

I got a 3.5 inch touch screen for my raspi. Loading the driver is pretty straightforward if you use raspbian:

git clone https://github.com/goodtft/LCD-show.git
chmod -R 755 LCD-show
cd LCD-show/
sudo ./LCD35-show

Awesome!!!


Alien Covenant

This week I went to the movies to see Alien Covenant, it is a sequel of Prometheus. The thing I liked the most about it is that it has the philosophical insights that somehow began in Alien Resurrection.


07 May 2017

Faemino y Cansado

Today I went to see Faemino y Cansado's show in Lleida, it was really really fun, as usual.





11 March 2017

hi-fi tuner

After so so many years I decided to get a radio tuner to complete my hi-fi equipment. I had always meant to buy one but I had never actually done it until today. I am really really happy. The quality of sound cannot be compared.



02 February 2017

smplayer bar

Smplayer's default bar only has two buttons: Play/Pause and Stop. I like simplicity and the two minimal button approach is just fine because I do most "other" operations using the keyboard. However, there are occasions in which I am in need of using the mouse, that is why I had to personalize it to include my favourite buttons: Previous Next Loop and Zoom + Zoom -





 Smplayer's zoom is probably one of the best damn things ever!!!

28 January 2017

pharc v.6.0 released

Well, this is certainly unusual in 2017...

I used to release pharc once a year, so:
v.1.0 --> 2011
v.2.0 --> 2012
v.3.0 --> 2013
v.4.0 --> 2014
v.5.0 --> 2015

But like the wiki says:

Is pharc still actively developed?
pharc has now all the features and options I envisioned through all these years of development. From now on I only intend to make bug fixes and minor changes.

Well, this year one of the visitors said that the sorting of the archives was upside down, so I decided to change it to order archives in a more logical way.

Added to the changelog:

pharc (6.0-1)
v.6.0
Sort Archives in reverse mode.

You can read more in detail in the phlog post at: gopher://sdf-eu.org:70/1/users/chals/phlog
And get the software (all available versions) at: gopher://sdf-eu.org:70/1/users/chals/downloads/software

Have fun!

07 January 2017

raspi 3 and usb hard drive

Using a 16GB sd card for a basic cli raspbian system (no desktop environment whatsoever) is more than enough. However, it is very limited to really enjoy the awesome minidlna software I installed. So I ended up attaching a 1TB usb hard drive to my raspi 3.

The first thing to notice is that the power supply works fine supporting both devices (raspi and hard drive).

The second thing is that I can now finally enjoy the UPnP service for hours and hours during these cold winter afternoons.


Note: I've been watching SG Atlantis all afternoon. What a great Saturday :)