Busy Busy Means Busy

Ahh, you know...
Once again another one of those mighty weeks..

Dinnerrrrrrr!!!!!!

A fucking amazing gnocchi plate, with  two a combination of two gnocchis (potatoes and spinach) and of course, the GF world famous stew.

149K and counting!

Yes, boy... It is getting close... So close...
150K just around the corner...

The current Lubuntu desktop

A little more on the whole Openboxing the Dell XPS M1330 thingy.
This is my actual wallpaper setup, and yes, the wallpaper is one of those Lubuntu stock (guess from 17.04 or so), I simply love it.

Together We'll Clean The Galaxy Like Water & Soap

An amazing and convenient surprise gift from the GF.
I love her!

Movies During The Weekend

Three movies during the weekend, a long, with an extra day for a holiday around here.
Incidentally, last weekend we watched no movie at all, it was a bizarre, short, election weekend, so no time for movies.

Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol 2
Well yeah, it looks fantastic, Ok, I give you that... But it is sort of boring and longish, compared to the previous one is dull.

Banking in Bitcoin
Interesting, we wanted to see this one for quite sometime.
A documentary on the money that will end up with all monies... ;)

Airport '77
Boy oh boy... It sure time flies!
Are-watch for me, and a first time for the GF.
It is hard to believe that the movie is 40 years old.

LXDE Woes

I've been using a bit of tiny Lubuntu install on the small Dell XPS M1330 for the last week or so.
Things have been pretty much Ok with it, but there are a couple of things, small annoyances really, but annoyances nevertheless...

1- Emacs keybindings:
You can't setup global Emacs keybindings on LXDE.
You can, however, add this:

gtk-key-theme-name=Emacs

To the "~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini" file.

2- Circle thru Desktop Pager on LXPanel:
I can't for the life of me, find a way to circle thru virtual desktops on the Desktop Pager, that is, when I reach the end of the desktops, I can't go back to the first one without going thru the previous ones.

No big deals, maybe... Maybe, yeah, but to me the lack of Emacs keybindings it is a major PITA, actually.

Debian 9 On The Thinkpad T43

Net installing Debian 9 Stretch on the old and trusty laptop, mainly because I want something a bit more responsive than Linux Mint XFCE, either the plain vanilla one or the Linux Mint Debian version.
Took a couple of hours and everything seems to be working A Ok, except for the WiFi card, that doesn't work out of the box.
Right after the install is over, it uses nearly 3 GB of HDD.

Installed on an encrypted LVM for security.

148K and counting!

That's right, another thousand up....
Also, as of today, I'm on 70 tracks a day average.
Like I've said, listening to music like a bat out of hell.

Dinner!!!!

A steamy and fantastic plate full'o ravioli for a late Saturday dinner after a might busy day.
Of course, with the world famous GF Bolognesa, as well as some vegetable toppings.
For the first time ever, a mix of ricotta and spinach raviolis.

The Farthest

Saw it last Thursday, amazing, by far, one of the best documentaries this year.
I have sort of an ongoing fascination with V'ger

147K and counting!

Another thousand up, no surprises there, right?
But, this time, after a looooooot of searching, I've been able to re-identify an old song that I was looking for quite some time, somehow lost it on one of the many exodus I had to do from a musical home to another, namely Grooveshark, Rdio, you name it...
The song was The Lightning Seeds' Pure, if you can believe it.

Dinner!!!!

An ongoing classic with the GF. our Sunday Night Pasta, this time a magnificent lasagna.
Taken, obviously, last Sunday.

VLC: vdpau_display errors

So, like I've already posted, installed a customized mini Lubuntu from an Ubuntu Mini CD the other on the Dell XPS M1330, after cleaning and de-gunking the hell out of its guts.

Pretty much everything went A Ok with the install, but I've had problems playing videos with VLC.

It refused to play any video (audio was OK) all videos went to a black screen, and generated this continuously onto the log:

vdpau_display error: output surface creation failure: A catch-all error, used when no other error code applies.

The solution?
Set VLC to use OpenGL video output.

Gotta See The Godzilla

The biggest download yet, at least, AFAIK and as far as I remember... All in name of love... The GF wanted her Godzilla and she has to have her daily Godzilla, what can I say?

Openboxing The Trusty Dell M1330 (II)

Made an upgrade to the "Openboxing The Trusty Dell M1330" project.
Installed Lubuntu's key components on the little lappie.

sudo apt-get install lubuntu-core

After that apt-get, downloaded 221 MB and once extracted, used 805 MB of HDD.
With the whole thing on (Chromium, VLC, etc, etc) I'm using about 5 GB of the disk.
After that, pretty muchs everything works on the lappie, and, BTW, it performs amazingly, but really amazingly well for the hardware it has, (I mean c'mon, it only has 2 GB of freakin' RAM!!!!!).
I had to fight a bit with VLC to get it to play videos, un-mute by hand the sound card, and edit the "/etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf" to get the WiFi card to work using the GUI, but things are golden so far...
Also, in order to customize themes easily, had to install this too:

sudo apt-get install lxappearance

Sans Internet

You see the Cable LED on? Me neither.
Shit started to go downfall yesterday morning, but I went to the GF's  house, but things got worse by today (back at home because of work), so I'll have to wait till Wednesday for someone from The Internet Company to come here and take a look...
I bet my ass this is the same problem I had (Damn! Six years ago!!) and they'll have to drop a replacement cable from the roof... Guess I'm gonna be w/o decent internet for a while...
Right now tethering my web access thru the glorious Moto G4 Plus.
Tried adding and removing the attenuator, but shit is still the same....

GenMon That CPU Temp

A little, really a very, very little script to get the CPU temp from my boxes (tested on my baby Thinkpads and on the Dell XPS M1330).
Used with the little known marvel of the XFCE Panel plugin called GenMon (lately a favorite of mine)  you end up getting something like the screenshot on the left.
So here is the script:

#!/bin/bash
cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp > /tmp/cpu_temp
echo $((`cat /tmp/cpu_temp`/1000))"°"

Apt Sexy Progressing

I don't recall seeing this progress bar before...
Think it looks rather sexy on this Xterm.
30 seconds of Googling and OMG Ubuntu tell me that apparently it has been enabled for quite some time now.

146K and counting!

Another thousand up!
A lot of joy to be able to use (and scrobble) like a monkey from and to Spotify once again.

Movies During The Weekend

• The Andromeda Strain

Yeah, I know, a re-watch from a re-watch of the re-watch to begin with...
But we used this one as background to start a much welcom nap last Saturday.

• Alien Covenant

Well... Another Alien flick.
Entertaining, it manage to keep both us up until the end, even tho we were dead tired, not as bad as I thought it might be,

• A Cure For Wellness

The GF picked this one, and just by looking at the poster (and not knowing a thing about it) I was sure the things was another horror flick...
Wrong!
It turned out to be a really cool horror movie, with amazing  visuals.

De-Gunking Wednesdays

Time for a good clean... The XPS M1330 was really needing it, will see if this helps a bit.
Also, a scrap of the old an a new coat of thermal paste was in order.

The Rig

The Apple Cinema Display still rocks after all these years...

The current Linux Mint desktop

Another take at my current XFCE theme.

145K and counting!

Also, scrobbling thru (web) Spotify is back!
I've noticed that on Chrome, running the Last.fm Scrobbler extension listened music does get scrrobbled, at last, Spotify joy is on once again.

Openboxing The Trusty Dell M1330

A little fun with the old and trusty Dell M1330, yes it returned home after Mother got her Chromebook.
Slapped and old SATA drive and installed an Ubuntu MIni, after that:

Filesystem                  Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vacui--vg-root  291G  1.1G  276G   1% /

Just a little bit over 1 GB of HDD was used.
Added X Window, Openbox, Emacs, Elinks, OpenVPN, Tint2, PCmanfm, after all that, HDD usage jumped to:

Filesystem                  Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/mapper/vacui--vg-root  291G  1.7G  275G   1% /

Now comes the fun part... Configuring Openbox, hell, the whole system to my likings...

Movies During The Weekend

So, the days of massive movie watching with the GF are back!

• Colossus: The Forbin Project

Well, the GF slept almost thru this one entirely.
It was a re-watch for me, in I don't remember how many years.

• Mechanic Resurrection

Time for to sleep this one through, almost completely, but the GF loved it.

• The Descendants

Another re-watch for me, a first time for the GF.
We both loved this one.

• The invasion of The Body Snatchers

The Kaufman version from 1978.
Pretty good, Chapman's cinematography on this one seems so bizarre nowadays.

The current Linux Mint desktop

A little something I'm working at the moment.
Flat, with some subdued greys, browns and greens.

Plain Login

A little picture of my dull, flat and simple MDM login theme on XFCE.
What can I say... At this moment its a work in progress.