Notes: Revisiting Geany

It’s been a while (at least 4 years) since I considered using Geany as my text editor. https://github.com/geany/geany Unfortunately for me I’m rather stuck in my ways, trusting UltraEdit to my editing needs for over 20 years. It’s where I’ve felt most comfortable and home. Double unfortunately, the Linux version of UltraEdit is buggy at times, and limited in what its syntax highlighting can do. Modern languages with sub-languages like JavaScript+JSX are not supported....

Notes: Window manager testing workflow

This seems to be surprisingly difficult information to find. Be warned, this post is scatterbrained. startx Until now, the only way I knew to start a window manager from scratch was to run startx: # run X startx Then running the manager explicitly: # run Gnome gnome-session # run Unity unity # run i3wm i3 which caused the session to change. Historically you would run gnome-session --replace or unity --replace to actually replace the stock X session (or any other that was running), but this seems to be a thing of the past (Unity’s mentions the --replace command is included for compatibility)....

Design: WiFi widget requirements

This is my criticism of Budgie (from Ubuntu Budgie Remix). Out-of-the-box, there’s no WiFi status widget. There’s a Bluetooth widget, but there’s no obvious way to check WiFi. Just a popup once a connection is established. Things a WiFi widget must do Show disconnected (possibly in an extra negative way to catch the users attention) Show connected (this can be neutral, but you should always be aware of a connection for activity or privacy reasons) Show connecting If an attempt to make a connection is happening, this needs to mentioned....

I don't like Ubuntu's Gnome

I’ve been using Ubuntu as my main OS since 13.10 (i.e. October 2013 version). I’ve used Ubuntu 17.10 for several months now (i.e. the first version that doesn’t ship with the Unity window manager), and frankly, I don’t like it. Unity, the window manager that has shipped with Ubuntu for a very long time, I’m not going to say it’s better than 17.10’s Gnome, but IMO it’s not worse. I’ve used other Window Managers too, from Cinamon (Gnome 2 fork), XFCE, KDE, and just today I tried Budgie (based on Gnome 3)....

Notes: i3 Window Manager

I’m toying with a new Window Manager named i3. It’s unusual, and only runs on X11. NOTE: There is a Wayland version of i3 named Sway. Setup sudo apt install i3 Now logout and select i3 as the Window Manager. Hotkeys The MOD key is a key you configure after initial setup. Typically this is either the WINDOWS key or the ALT key. MOD+Enter: Open Terminal MOD+D: Open DMenu, i....

Notes: Vulkan begins now

Vulkan was released 2 years ago right around the Game Developers Conference (usually in March). Unfortunately Windows 10 with DirectX 12 did beat them to the punch by a few months, so growth hasn’t been as quick as it could have been. Vulkan will eventually become the dominant API, though it will likely be its availablity on Mobile and Consoles that ultimately pushes it there, not PC. It’s taken a bit, but as of Ubuntu 17....

Tracking Jekyll to Wordpress (Markdownify) issues

Digging a little deeper, it looks like things here haven’t exactly converted over exactly as I wanted them. Also, in the future we are going to need a means of converting WordPress posts to Ludum Dare data, and this is a good place to start. i.e. Use Markdownify. YouTube videos are missing Interestingly, YouTube support on GitHub is handled by <iframe> tags, which are allowed. I managed to fix this problem myself, by introducing a small hack to Markdownify....

Notes: Jekyll

Jekyll is a tool static website generation, similar to a blog or CMS. It’s notable because it is built in to GitHub. Setup To run a local instance, do the following setup: # Install Ruby sudo apt install ruby gem ruby-dev # Install Jekyll sudo gem install jekyll bundler You’re also going to want to install your theme and any plugins. sudo gem install minima sudo gem install jekyll-admin To view the website locally, run the Jekyll server:...

Now running Jekyll

Okay! I’ve migrated my blog to Jekyll (and GitHub). I followed this tutorial: https://girliemac.com/blog/2013/12/27/wordpress-to-jekyll/ Notably since I ran a very old WordPress blog, I had to manually copy over all the images and things NOT found in the /assets/ folder. This has made my tree a bit less organized (/assets/wp/, /wp-includes/) but at least it’s all there. Repo is here: https://github.com/mikekasprzak/blog (not that anyone other than me cares) Other Setup issues The default layout Jekyll doesn’t show any post content, just a list of posts....

Notes: Professional Audio/Broadcasting with OBS Studio

OBS Studio 21 is awesome! Other than the obvious (open source, cross platform), I’d say it’s finally at the point where it’s ready to be taken seriously by professional broadcasters. On my list, the big thing that OBS Studio 21 brought that it was missing was Audio Ducking to the Compressor. Pair that with the Noise Gate, and you configure a clean auto-mix on any platform. Here’s a quick look at my current audio configuration that ducks the audio whenever I speak:...