An internet internet radio

When I was younger I spent many many hours listening to the BBC World service and Absolute radio. The problem was that it was very difficult to tune in stations due to the distance. 

Now almost all the content is broadcast on the internet which makes it easier to listen to stations from all over the world. 

Using a regular receiver is becoming very impractical, so I got an internet radio that uses wifi to connect to the world. It is absolutely fantastic. My life has changed a little bit to the better.

I bought it through the internet, that is why I call it an internet internet radio. 

UPDATE (11-01-21): I still think the radio set is fantastic but every one or two weeks it fails to connect to the wifi, So I have to turn it off and on and everything works just fine again. I know that turning it off and on is a fairly poor debugging strategy but it just works. 

Screenshot of the week 14

It seems we all have to use ssl in our websites from now on, therefore, I have updated chalsattack.com and blog.chalsattack.com to use https.

At the same time I had to tweak the html code a little bit as well as the the css of the site. It is not a big change, but I love how it looks like in elinks.

Note: The window manager is i3

Enjoy the screenshot of the week :)

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.

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.

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.

Scrobbling to libre.fm as seen by elinks

In my .bashrc you can find (among many others):

 # Export browser && homepage

 export BROWSER="elinks"
 export WWW_HOME="http://chalsattack.com"

Elinks is the heck of a console browser for many reasons: It is a full featured browser with few limitations, it has mouse support for following links and scrolling up and down and it has tabs like so many other graphical counterparts. And the best thing of it all is that it is so easy to use them that once you get used to them you just cannot do without.

t opens a new tab.

<> move between tabs.

c closes tabs.

Ctrl + r reloads a tab/page.

Nevertheless I must admit that I also use w3m on the tty if I need to see the pics andlynx for browsing gopherspace. One curious thing is that elinks does not support the gopher protocol out of the box. You have to compile it with gopher support in case you want to take advantage of it, but if you type a gopher url in elinks it automatically opens a lynx instance to display the gopher hole. Awesome 

In this screenshot you can see my libre.fm page while I'm scrobbling with cmus as seen by elinks.

raspi at work

I must admit that I am really, really excited about my raspi (raspberry pi). I ordered it three months ago and during all this time I have spent a lot of time thinking about the endless possibilities that such an amazing piece of machinery could offer.

I have installed a lot of applications from the debian archive, perhaps the most outstanding ones are the servers: ssh, ftp, http and gopher.

In the screenshot you can see the result of:

 $ lynx gopher://localhost

and the moment of writing this post.

Gitorious

Today I opened an account at gitorious.org For the time being it is just a mirror of one of my two git repositories at branchable. No big plans for the one at Gitorious yet, but only time will tell.


So far it is a very nice and handy thing to have.

www.branchable.com

Awesome discovery!!!

Debian-user mailing list (and irc channel) was often overcrowded. When someone wanted to introduce an "unusual" or "different" topic they sent messages with the header [OT] meaning off-topic. So Debian guys created a new mailing list and also a new irc channel called #debian-offtopic.

Socializing is great, but it is so much the better if people can share experiences or ideas apart from just technical matters. I recently moved to blogger because if you search for information on blog hosts you always hear the same song: Wordpress-Blogger or Blogger-Wordpress. I asked about blog hosting on #debian-offtopic.


One of the guys there wisely advised me to host it myself (the best option, I know) or alternatively give www.branchable.com a try. I did. I liked it at first but I was a bit disappointed because it seemed much too simple. The first day (Wednesday) I created a blog. But on the second day I got a bit more into the site and I suddenly realized how wonderful it was. Or I'd rather say out of this world. Then I created a wiki (=homepage) It's is true, it may look simple, but I can assure you it is as complete as you can imagine. Again: It's awesome!!!

Let me tell you what is there behind branchable (it's a combination of):

-First the powerful ikiwiki
-Second the popular version control system git
-Last but not least these two guys behind the invention. They are nice people ;)


My sites are temporarily here:

chals.branchable.com
chalsattack.branchable.com

From caveman to Middle Ages

It goes without saying...

BEFORE:

AFTER:

On why did Facebook kill the msn star

It has been happening for years now but surprisingly enough I had not paid attention to it until last week. There are less and less people connected to the msn (or call it windows live im) service.

I have 83 contacts on amsn but only between 10-15 are online on a daily basis. That was a bit weird but somehow understandable, over the years some people abandon their accounts, some may block you or even delete you. That's life. But so many? No, there had to be a better reason for that.

I began my quest for knowledge on the subject. I asked some people about their msn address but surprisingly enough they told me they didn't have a msn account. However they had  other social networking accounts such as facebook. Then I asked some of my contacts who I met on the street and they told me that since they signed up for facebook or other similar services (like tuenti) they never or hardly ever connected their msn clients. 

How come? Well, I think the reason is easy to understand. Facebook offers you people you may know based on the friends you have and having mutual friends invites you to add more people. You can add a hundred people overnight without any effort. In order to have a contact in msn you have to ask people personally if they want to have you as a friend. Sometimes it is a bit embarrassing.

usb modem speed test

Two months ago I bought an Alcatel X060 usb modem from Simyo. Unfortunately I haven't got any 3G network available so the usual speed in my village is 45 mbps. It's hilarious!!! But yesterday I tried it in the capital city and the results were pretty good. Here you can see the speed test. Its 1 Gb approximately, not bad at all to check mail in an unusual situation like this when you are not home.

There is just one thing. I still haven't been able to make the modem work with linux but it's just a matter of time.

Using my credit card (A little bit)

Today I've upgraded to weebly pro. So far I only intend to use the favicon.ico pro feature because it's a really nice thing. Maybe I'll take advantage of some other features some time later  but I have upgraded because this site has a real good vibe. I like the way they treat you, I love the fact that they don't put limitations to your free account. Well to cut it short they do really deserve it (and much more).

I have also made a small donation to the debian multimedia team. They also deserve it. They do a great job maintaining the greatest multimedia repository there is out there. I use many of their packages and they work great. I know this small quantity does not make a great difference because they devote a huge amount of time and effort to keep the site up. But I hope to keep contributing in the future.

Using a proxy

I was familiar with the concept of proxy servers. I knew what they were and I had a slight idea of what they were used for. But I had never connected to any. I had tried once but to no avail. You only need to look for their addresses and configure your web browser to use them. Be warned that proxies provide many advantages but they also have some disadvantages. On the positive side, they are anonymous but on the negative side they are less secure.

This same week I have learnt an amazing internet trick. There are some free online services which operate in certain countries but which are not allowed or restricted in some other countries due to legal reasons or special conditions or whatsoever...But you still can access those services connecting to a proxy operating it the countries where the services are available. As simple as that.

I did the trick with a famous steaming radio station which used to be for free until recently (And still is in some parts of the world). In my country they require you to subscribe and pay a small quantity for the service. I connected to a public proxy and now I can listen to the radio as if I was living in that country. Fantastic isn't it?

chalsattack experimental

If anyone is wondering what I have been up to for the fortnight, the answer is: I have been working on an experimental webpage that I have called "chalsattack experimental". It is in my list of mirror sites, but it is far from any similarity to this page. It is more similar to a blog or something like that. Anyway it is only an experiment not meant to last long. And since it is a very small thing I quote it all here. I hope you like it:
(I insist. This is the complete webpage so far.)

"chalsattack experimental

*This document is a back to bare essentials experiment.
*It was created using a little script, and it is edited with the powerful mc "The midnight commander".
*There is no markup language, no links and no graphics.
*It is written in a stream of consciousness style.
*It may include a bit of html editing though. Nobody's perfect, not even I.
*It is also intended to be optimised for text-mode browsers such as lynx or w3m. I'll check it as the work progresses.

I have wanted to compose a text-only page for years. I got the idea from Debian's homepage. I like their site a lot, especially because it provides the information that visitors are looking for. That's it!!! Useful information. Visitors are not looking for eye candy. Although I'm not against it. When I design something I try to do it as beautiful as possible. But true inspiration came from Slackware's site. It has a little artwork but essentially it is text. Just text. Useful text.

***
One of the first sites I visited when I started using linux was linuxcommand.org and this week I came back to that site looking for a script and I discovered that the man also has a blog. "

gmailfs

Having more than 7 GB in a mail account is an extraordinary waste of space. Who can really store such a huge amount of "not-junk" mail? Well, if you agree with me you must necessarily be interested in gmailfs. A Python program to mount your gmail account as a local directory. 

I installed it yesterday and I believe that it is a good alternative to store data by sending mail with attachements. I'm still trying it but so far it is working perfectly. The only requisite is a little practice at the command line for it works with the typical Unix commands.

EyeOS in the sky

I learnt about eyeOS on a TV programme long ago, maybe two years from now. I had tried several times to download their software but I suppose that back then their servers were far too busy after appearing on TV.

Yesterday as I was playing with Google docs and wondering how many more features they were going to implement I thought that Google is almost a hidden OS or let's call it a light OS. I suddenly remembered eyeOS. I had retained the name I supposed due to so many times trying to unsuccessfully download it.

And I finally could!!! eyeOS is a wonderful piece of software, it is an open source web based operating system. A real destop on a web browser which can be accessed from any computer. You can have your data safely stored on the servers. Although it is not complex, it has got many programs, including word processors, spreadsheets...an ftp client and even games. The site administrator can install more applications from their repositories.

First I opened an account on their server. Which is extremely easy since you only need a name and a password. I liked it so much that I installed an eyeOS server on my apache web server straightaway. I only had to install PHP 5. And it works perfectly. I have installed several applications including serveral available languages.

It's definitely worth trying. Imagine having your desktop anytime anywhere over the net. Sounds nice!!! and anyway I think that is going to be the rule for the future. In this respect I sincerely think they are making history.

Nvu/Kompozer/Sourceforge

Today I've made a small donation to the Kompozer project. It's a small amount but, it's my grain of sand.

I started building my site back in 2006 using Mozilla composer. Later when the Mozilla project stopped supporting the Mozilla Suite, I switched to Nvu. And when the project stopped being active I started using Kompozer. Well, Nvu/Kompozer is a great piece of software. I use it almost everyday to update my personal page and the more I use it the more new features I discover and find extremely useful. I really like its integrated CSS editor and its site manager.

If I had programming skills I would like to join the project but unfortunatelly I can't so I thought donating would be a good way of contributing. I hesitated though.  But when I discovered that the project is hosted by Sourceforge, then I had no doubt at all. To me Sourceforge is the Great Cathedral of some of the best pieces of software I know. I will always give my support to them. I've been a sourceforge user for years.

Surprising LXDE

Among all the new software packages that come with Debian  5.0 codenamed "Lenny" I discovered a fantastic desktop environment for my eee pc. It's called LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment). I discovered it as a matter of chance surfing the net. And I must say that it fascinates me. I really love it!!!

It is very easy to install since it comes with the distribution. (apt-get install lxde) It is a download size of  20 MB more or less. Even this is fast!!!. After installation you have to restart the X server or reboot your machine. And simply select lxde at the gdm display.

Saying that it is fast is not enough, it is incredibly fast. Gnome works fine on eee but lxde goes at the speed of light, it can open and close windows in the wink of an eye. My special recommendation: DO TRY IT!!!

Apart from being fast it has many configuration options and it integrates well  typical applications of other desktops.

The default layout reminds me of Windows Vista, start menu down left, black colour... but of course it has nothing to do with it. There is this powerful Debian GNU/Linux behind!!!

I think this new desktop beats XFCE. I must confess that I personally don't like XFCE. Besides I read that LXDE is even faster. I believe it!.


If you are running GNOME or any file manager (I sometimes use mc; The midnight commander) on your eee pc and you are satisfied with it, that's ok, but if you believe that it is too bloated for your limited disk space then you can give LXDE a try.

There is a special project to install debian with lxde on eee pc and I quote from: http://wiki.lxde.org/en/Debian

eee PC

• CD image to install Debian with LXDE on to a eee PC
  • Copy the CD-image on to a USB drive with dd

dd if=debian-eeepc.img of=/dev/<USB-DEVICE>


Note: <USB-DEVICE> = the device, not a partition. (/dev/sdX NOT /dev/sdX1)

(And then boot the installer from the usb)

* * *

Now I quote from the Debian Project News newsletter:

Bits from the Debian CD team

Frans Pop sent Bits from the Debian CD team, summarizing various
changes affecting the installation media for the upcoming release of
Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 "Lenny".
The most notable change is the replacement of the Xfce installation
disc with a "light desktop" installation disc for installing Xfce or
LXDE. Furthermore, all four major desktop environments (GNOME, KDE,
Xfce and LXDE) are directly installable from the first DVD image; the
desktop environment to be installed can now be chosen via the boot
menu.

OpenID

This is the first post of the year. Well, let me start by introducing the new features of the renewed chalsattack.com

1st I've changed the background colour from light grey to white. Both are ok for reading but I think white makes a better contrast with dark fonts.
2nd I've included a new section called class Notes. I've eliminated Virtual classes though.
3rd I've rearranged the blog including my personal profile. I intend to write a post once a week (on a wing and a prayer...) and update the site once a month as I usually do.

And now the good news: I've signed up for an OpenID at openid.org I was curious to know about it since I saw the option at the login prompt of sourceforge.net

An openid is very useful to log into different sites with the same username and password. It's kind of a master key for all your accounts. It's supposed to be secure and spread over the internet in a short period of time.

My OpenID is http://chals.openid.org