Screenshot of the week 18

 Maybe the greatest female rock vocalist of all time, Ann Wilson performing Barracuda with her sister Nancy and their band Heart.

 

 

Screenshot of the week 17

 From "The Chronicles of Riddick" when Riddick and Jack/Kyra escape from prison.

Screenshot of the week 16

 The Spanish performance at the Eurovision festival 2022 was simply extraordinary...

Screenshot of the week 15

 

I am currently watching for a second time a tv series called Sky Rojo. I didn't like it too much the first time I watched it but after ending the second season I came back to the first one to understand it better. 

Today is a rainy day and it is a great day to watch shows.

Screenshot of the week 14

And to think that the movie starts with Mulan chasing a hen... and ends up with the Phoenix backing her up is so super

.

 This is a screenshot of Mulan (the movie) taken with smplayer. 

Screenshot of the week 13

Last night I finished watching one of the tv shows I enjoyed the most in my life. That is Terminator. The Sarah Connor Chronicles  The plot is great, the script is awesome and the actors are extraordinary.

I laughed so much with this one dialog between John and Derek (copied from wikiquote):

Derek Reese: Remind me again, why are the boys out here and the girls in there?

John Connor: Because one of the boys is still wanted for murder, and one of the girls is harder than nuclear nails...

Derek Reese: And the other one's a cyborg.

I know it was first aired a long time ago but I didn't have the chance to watch it until recently. Every afternoon I arrived home waiting to watch the next chapter.

I am a huge fan of the film franchise and I must admit that it helped me understand the events in the series much better. And guess what, the series finale is just awesome. I wasn't expecting anything like that, but it is a fantastic ending.

I took a great screenshot with smplayer (by pressing "s") of the final part of chapter 2x19 (there are 22 chapters in the second season) in which you can see the three main characters in a row. WOW what a great picture: Sarah Connor, John Connor and Cameron. I hope you like it.

And remember: "Come with me if you want to live" :)

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 :)

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.

Screenshot of the week 12

Screenshots are a great way of showing the world how cool your computer setup is, but at the same time they are also a reminder of what you were doing at a certain moment in time or a way of tracing how your likes and dislikes have changed over the years. I have been taking screenshots for years, but I started publishing them on a regular basis on 10 June 2011 (See screenshots label). That was when I started my "Screenshot of the week" series. And here I am again with its 12th installment.

In the series you were usually presented with the applications I used or the wallpapers I liked for some reason. Only very rarely did I show you any insight of what I was doing on my spare time. This has to change! Last weekend I watched again last year's (2014) Victoria's Secret fashion show. Each year it is getting better and better, more spectacular, entertaining and fun.

I took several screenshots at different intervals of the show. Notice that I use i3 as window manager and SMPlayer to watch these videos. (I normally use vlc but it constantly pixelates .mkv videos, so sad) 

The first one shows gorgeous Behati opening the show. (It was stunning, with a medley of Bob Seger's Hollywood Nights):

The second one is a great picture of Candice and Doutzen (in the line-up), two of the most beautiful girls in the world:

And last but not least, Adriana and Alessandra, the best models in the history of the world, talking about the impressive outfits they were going to wear in the "Exotic traveller" section. The two of them are out of this world, I love them so much...

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.

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   ;)

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.

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:

Screenshot of the week 7

A few days ago I wrote a tutorial on how to configure weechat's relay plugin through a single port for all servers. I published it on my phlog, so I'm not unnecessarily going to repeat the information here. The link is here in case you are interested: (Warning: gopher link!)

gopher://sdf-eu.org:70/1/users/chals/phlog/2013/./12-15-13

Since the relay is working so fine, I decided to take a screenshot of the weechat instance running 24/7 with the configured relay running in a remote server and the other one of my local instance running in my raspi.

Just in case somebody is wondering why I run two instances of the same program both locally and remotely, the answer is plain simple. In my local instance I can configure and use as many plugins and scripts as I like whereas things are not so easy on the remote server. For example the aspell plugin which is really handy when typing fast or the buffersscript, just to name a few.

Screenshot of the week 6

This is a tiny screenshot of a corner of my sid desktop. It was taken with scrot -s to select a region.

The story behind these "weird" icons is as follows:

1. I never use desktop icons. I love clean desktops and I get rid of any default icons. So this exception is a remarkable thing.
2. These icons are a quick, dirty hack to halt and/or reboot the laptop. The reason being that the logout button does not allow me to perform those actions. I haven't been able to fix it so I added those icons which execute/sbin/halt and /sbin/reboot respectively.

In order to create those icons I browsed to the Desktop directory with pcmanfm then right click on the mouse and select Create New/Shortcut.

Screenshot of the week 5

This is how my sid desktop looks like after I installed this nice wallpaper of the interior of a toyota celica.

Now while I'm working at the computer I can imagine that I'm driving my car, oh so lovely :p

Debian GNU/Hurd successfully installed

I have successfully installed the 2013 version of the debian GNU/Hurd port. So far it is only inside a virtual machine but I may install it in a partition once I get more used to how it works.

A default installation does not include a lot of software. That's where the power of debian comes in handy. You know the drill apt-get install...

(Credits go to MrFrood for finding the gnu ascii art below, and showing me how to include it.)

  ,           , 
 /             \ 
((__-^^-,-^^-__)) 
 `-_---' `---_-' 
  `--|o` 'o|--' 
     \  `  / 
      ): :( 
      :o_o: 
       "-" 

Debian GNU/Hurd

The Debian GNU/Hurd team announced the release of Debian GNU/Hurd 2013.

I downloaded the image last night. I need to remember to login as root without a password. This is a screenshot of the OS in action.

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.