Music lover and English teacher with an interest in slightly geeky things

mastodon / blog / listenbrainz

  • 16 Posts
  • 259 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 8th, 2023

help-circle
  • Strawberry if I had to have something visual with buttons.

    cmus right now because it loads my rather large library in a split second. mpd works great as well.

    More important than the player for me is sorting, though. Beets is my saviour. I could never sort the 5 or 6 albums I get by hand and tag them by hand.

    I used to like deadbeef as well, quod libet is great. There really is something for everyone when it comes to something for music. If only there were as many great email clients.


  • You can achieve this through graphical utilities.

    Self-updating apps aren’t a big thing on Linux, so the Windows way isn’t an option…

    The signing key is important for security reasons, so you definitely need to add that. After adding the repo you can just use Synaptic or whatever app store thingy Ubuntu uses.

    Most of the time you shouldn’t need to fiddle with the command line and the apps you will need are available through the Software Centre and the entire process will work like on Windows.

    For me, Linux was the first operating system I used that had an app store or software centre and I was pretty glad to not need to…

    • open a browser,
    • navigate to a site,
    • (hope it is the right site…)
    • download a binary executable,
    • open a file explorer,
    • launch the binary,
    • click through a list of options and agreements,
    • and finally delete the binary.







  • I have a friend / colleague who was a bit like this. It is a “see it to believe” situation. For her it was when she was at work and she watched her mouse stat moving on its own.

    When she thought about how she never did anything bad on her work computer, but sometimes accessed her personal email… She got it.

    And now she pays closer attention to things. Like in our city you’re pinged via WiFi when you get on a bus, but you can opt-out or jut turn of your WiFi, so she does that. And she makes email aliases now too. Nothing too serious, mind you, but she is 50 and figuring this out on her own and then teaching her friends and colleagues about it which is way better than going down the rabbit hole. Now there’s a bunch of boomers refusing to use Teams or access work email on their personal devices because she explained that they do have things to hide: the names and ages of their children and grandchildren, where they go for drinks after work, what they watch on YT, etc.

    I don’t get into it with people though. People just write me off as some nerd, which is not the case.







  • Just a window manager? Not a DE?

    Under X11 there is Openbox, bspwm, herbstluftwm, dwm, i3, Awesome, Ratpoison, spectrwm, Qtile, …

    Under Wayland: Weston, LabWC, Wayfire, Sway, River, Cagebreak, dwl, …

    I keep things pretty dull and use Openbox + LXQt. It is a stacking WM that is stable, and LXQt is snappy.

    If you are looking for a light DE LXQt is very light, Plasma is lighter than it used to be, but it also has loads of features. Xfce has more options for configuration than LXQt and I think it isn’t quite ready for Wayland.

    Maybe Sway would be up your alley?

    (Note to self: check https://arewewaylandyet.com)





  • Of all the privacy-related changes I’ve made, Signal is the only thing I’ve managed to get anyone else to use.

    It was a matter of saying “I don’t use WhatsApp anymore” and that was that. Some friends didn’t make the switch, but they know where to find me.

    Quitting Facebook lead people to believe that I was in need of help, though. They thought I was crazy. Still, today, people ask me why they can’t tag me on FB or why I unfriended them. When I tell them I stopped using FB they’re shocked and say things like, “but you’re such a techy computer nerd guy.”

    Quitting Google was confusing for others too.