June 10, 2020

I installed Devuan on my Desktop computer yesterday with Openbox, and I must say, its a pretty comfy experience.

I was trying to get some game emulators working, but sound isn’t working on the Scarlett Solo audio interface I have.

I got sound to work in the past, but maybe its an issue with alsa. I’m also thinking that I probably might have given up and installed Pulseaudio as a result.

Will keep researching that another time but I’m making it a mission to not give up and install Pulseaudio since I’d prefer just straight Alsa audio instead.

Openbox on the same note is a really cool and great lightweight window manager: http://openbox.org/wiki/Main_Page

The idea is that if you like Windoze, just use Openbox on a Linux distribution, and kiss Microsoft goodbye. Openbox offers the same type of window experience in terms of dragging windows around manually.

Plus you can customize the window themes, and config files easily as well, so there’s really no reason to keep Windoze, other than maybe for “muh games”. Even that reason is dumb given that Steam Proton is getting pretty good for keeping up with Steam games.

More and more, if I wanted to play games, I’d prefer just emulating things, and would rather even get PC centered ports on Switch if I really wanted to play any new gen games.

Games in general are fun from time to time, but PC gaming as an industry and as a hardware market have really gone downhill in my opinion on a lot of factors.

Why keep up with hardware cost constraints when you’ve got cryptocurrency miners just completely ruining the hardware market in terms of video card costs. If you’ve ever shopped for a somewhat OK video card, you’ll see how ridiculous its become. Now its to the point where you should just build an OK desktop, run Linux on it, or even just get an old Thinkpad to run some minimial Linux distro on it. Better yet, even take an old computer, run some stable Debian based minimal distribution (without Systemd :)) and you’re golden.

Either way, pretty happy at the moment as I’ve conquered a few tasks this year so far that were really bothering me which included getting rid of my GitHub, and getting a FastMail email account to move away from evil proprietary Microsoft Outlook.

Richard Stallman was right in that if the product is free (MS Outlook), YOU are the product. So, why give Microsoft free money from the obvious telemetry that they’re doing on my account when I could just be on a more secure and freer platform. I’ll try out FastMail for a year, and if it sucks, I’ll find a different solution (or maybe host my own on a VPS instead).

Looking forward to possibly improving the design of this site’s images section, maybe the styling on this Blog portion of the site with a sample Bootstrap theme by modifying the “org-twbs-export-to-html” function’s “org-twbs-head” function: https://github.com/marsmining/ox-twbs/blob/d5ae9c3fb224d081d59d3686d619edf152523f09/ox-twbs.el#L987-L1002

On another note, for better work productivity, I figured out how to rip a current ZenDesk ticket tab’s information so that I can copy the entire ticket information into a ZenDesk TODO list item onto my clipboard.

I’m trying to figure out how to use the “GreaseMonkey” extension so that I can just run this on the fly as well, so that’s been a new good challenge for work.

Other than that, I’ve been learning more C from the related second edition of the book, “The C Programming Language”. C is definitely interesting, and I can see portions of it were used for Python as some of the syntax carries over.

I’ll be interested in what projects I can create with C later on, but I’m positive that the possibilities are really endless as C is basically on most platforms anyway. Combined with the ’ncurses’ interface library, I’ll be making terminal apps in no time, so I’m curious on how far I’ll be able to create some pet project C based apps this year.

I’m debating using either Neomutt in tmux for terminal based e-mail or give into using Emacs based email with ‘mu4e’. Both options are cool but have their advantages and disadvantages. Mostly, both routes are pretty hard, but I’m leaning towards Neomutt, as I’ve liked using it before using Luke Smith’s “Mutt Wizard” scripts. However, the last time I used his installation scripts, the GPG keys weren’t working correctly.

Basically, terminal based email involves the following items as far as what I’ve researched:

I’m definitely curious on how to do this process myself, but know that it will probably take a good majority of a weekend day to figure it out to get it up and running based on the Neomutt manual alone or something.

We’ll see what I pick soon I guess :)

Stay safe, God Bless.