I set the width of my side-windows to 80 since man pages expect that and it works well for help and shells as well. To be able to have a (wo)man page and a shell, an info node and a REPL, or a shell, REPL and help buffer at the same time, I use slots to divide up the side-window if more than one special buffer is open. I have not included ansi-term in the buffer-list for side-windows since I use it only occasionally when I want more than one terminal, in which case I need to be able to manage its windows in the normal way. Usually, there is no need for a full terminal emulator, but I use Eshell a lot.

At home, my laptops and my external screen are 16:9 or 16:10 wide screens. At my desk at work, I have a 16:9 screen, a 16:10 screen and another 16:9 screen flipped 90 degrees to the portrait orientation. I usually use the tall screen for Emacs to minimise scrolling. Since the tall screen is slim (9:16), I would rather have side-windows in the bottom instead of overlapping the main window on the right side when I use that screen. Even with the side-windows at the bottom, the screen is a lot taller than the wide screens which is nice.

However, I spend most of my time at work not at my desk, but in two classrooms where I either use my laptop only with its built-in screen, duplicated to a large screen in front of the class or only with an external screen when sitting in the back (for ergonomics). And there are also meetings where I use the laptop's internal screen only. All of these screens are wider than they are tall, so I want my side-windows on the right again.

So I made a function that checks whether the height of the frame is larger than the width and if so, side-windows are put on the bottom of the screen where they belong on tall screens, but if the opposite is true, then they are put on the right where they make more sense on wide screens. I call this function when Emacs starts in my configuration to adapt the side-windows to the screen in use, but I also have a keybinding (C-z w) for it so after moving from a classroom or meeting to my desk or vise versa, I can get the side-windows where I want them without having to end my Emacs session. I often prepare a file at my desk that I am going to present in class with inter-present-mode or jot something in a file during class that I work on at my desk later, so it is useful to keep the session going.

Here is my function for deciding which side side-windows should be on:

(defun emo-side-window-side ()
  "Evaluates which side side-windows should be on based on whether the frame is in portrait or landscape orientation."
  (interactive)
  (let* ((side-window-side (if (> (frame-outer-height) (frame-outer-width))
                          'bottom 'right))
       (disp-buf-alist `(("\\*\\(Python\\|ielm\\|compilation\\).*\\*"
          (display-buffer-reuse-window display-buffer-in-side-window)
          (side . ,side-window-side)
          (slot . -1)
          (post-command-select-window . t)
          (window-width . 80))
("\\*\\(shell\\|.*eshell\\).*\\*"
          (display-buffer-reuse-window display-buffer-in-side-window)
          (side . ,side-window-side)
          (slot . 0)
          (post-command-select-window . t)
          (window-width . 80))
("\\*\\(help\\|info\\|man\\|woman\\|Agenda Commands\\|Org Agenda\\|Occur\\|Buffer.\\|xref\\).*\\*"
          (display-buffer-reuse-window display-buffer-in-side-window)
          (side . ,side-window-side)
          (slot . 1)
          (post-command-select-window . t)
          (window-width . 80)))))
  (setq display-buffer-alist disp-buf-alist)))

There are various solutions floating around the internet to get around this problem, but most of them are unnecessarily complex. The RaspberryPi 5 can boot from a disk partitioned with a GPT partition table just fine. The problem is just to get the right partitions with the right data onto the disk since the installer insists on using 1980s technology which means that you cannot use it on large disks. In the early 80s, a large hard drive had 40 MB capacity, so 2TB seemed like science fiction. Who would need all that space when Macintosh System Software, a few programs like MacWrite and MacDraw and a dozen files could fit on a 800kB diskette? (The Double Density 3.5 inch floppy disks that gave 720kB space on MS-DOS delivered 800kB on a Mac.)

In addition to your NVME, you will also need a USB stick and an SD card. If you use a case like my Argon Neo, installing the NVME and SD-card demands a bit of disassembly. The reason we need two other devices is that we need to clone one of them to the NVME and to do that we need to boot from the other. Here is what you need to do to your NVME working:

1. Insert the SD-card and the NVME in your case or hat or whatever you use and insert an ethernet cable connected to your router.
2. Boot your RaspberryPi while repeatedly pressing down the shift key until you get to the Raspberry Pi screen that downloads the installer.
3. Install RaspberryPi OS (light) on the SD card.
4. Boot from the SD card. If the boot order is set to boot from NVME first, you may have to press Space when booting to get to the boot order screen first. Since RaspberryPi OS reboots once as part of the isntallation, you may have to go through the boot order screen twice, so be ready to press space again after the first boot. After the second boot, the SD card has got RaspberryPi OS and the root partition (/) has been expanded.
5. Insert your USB stick into one of the blue USB3 ports.
6. Boot your Raspberry Pi again and repeatedly press down shift until you get to the screen that downloads the installer.
7. Install RaspberryPi OS on your USB-stick.
8. When the Pi reboots, press space repeatedly to get to the boot order screen and select USB and boot.
9. Be ready to press space repeatedly again since the Pi reboots once as part of the installation process and choose USB again to boot the USB stick and let it expand the root partition.
10. When you have booted into the USB stick for the second time after the root partition has been expanded, open a terminal (or use the TTY if you used RPi light).
11. Write sudo fdisk /dev/nvme0n1 to partition the NVME with fdisk.
12. Press g to make a new GPT partition table. You may have to confirm that you want to remove an MS-DOS (MBR) partition table already there.
13. Press n to make a new partition.
14. Choose the default as the first sector by pressing return.
15. Write +512M to make the size of the partition half a Gigabyte.
16. Press t to change a partition.
17. Choose the default 1 as the partition you want to change.
18. Set its type to 1 (EFI System).
19. Make a new partition with n.
20. Accept the defaults since it will use the rest of the disk.
21. Press w to write your changes to the disk.
22. Write dd if=/dev/mmcblk0p1 of=/dev/nvme0n1p1 && sync and press return. This will clone the first partition, the EFI partiont, of the SD card onto the first partition of the NVME.
23. Write dd if=/dev/mmcblk0p2 of=/dev/nvme0n1p2 && sync and press return. This will clone the second partition, the root partition, of the SD card onto the second partition of the NVME.
24. Write sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /mnt to mount the EFI partition of the NVME to /mnt on your running system (from the USB stick).
25. Write lsblk -f to get the UUID of the root partition of the NVME (/dev/nvme0n1p2).
26. Open the file /mnt/cmdline.txt with sudo in a text editor. (I prefer to combine step 25 up to and including 33 since Emacs has a built in terminal multiplexer and tiling window manager, and it is easier to copy the UUID from one window in Emacs to another window than to try to remember a UUID from lsblk -f from before I opened Emacs. I also use tramp inside Emacs to open the files with sudo instead of opening emacs with sudo. If you use another text editor in a TTY, then you probably have to write the UUID down after running lsblk -f since your text editor will hide the output from that command when you launch it to edit the file, unless you use GNU screen or tmux.)
27. Change where it says root=PARTUUID=somenumber to root=UUID= and write or paste the UUID from lsblk -f for /dev/nvme0n1p2.
28. Save the file and exit the text editor if you use a TTY editor without a built in terminal multiplexer.
29. Write sudo umount /mnt and press return to unmount the first partition.
30. Write sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1p2 /mnt to mount the root partition from the NVME to /mnt on your running system (the USB stick). If it tells you the disk is busy, wait for it. It means that the disk is still writing even if it has tld the OS it has finished. If you fail to wait, then you cannot boot.
31. Write lsblk -f again and note down the UUID of both /dev/nvme0n1p1 (the EFI partition) and /dev/nvme0n1p2 if you did not already note it down. (Or use a terminal multiplexer or Emacs to copy it over when you need it.)
32. Open the file /mnt/etc/fstab in a text editor with sudo.
33. Replace the part of the line that says PARTUUID=somenumber on the line where it says /boot/firmware with UUID= and write or paste the UUID number for /dev/nvme0n1p1 (the EFI partition).
34. Do the same with line where it says /, but use the UUID for /dev/nvme0n1p2 (the root partition).
35. Save the file and exit your text editor.
36. Wait for a while to allow time for the nvme to write out the change. Turn off the RaspberryPi.
37. Remove the SD card and the USB stick.
38. Reboot the Raspberry Pi. It should now boot from the NVME. If the boot order is set to boot USB or SD Card first, you may have to press space when booting to boot from the NVME. In such a case, you should write sudo raspi-config in a terminal and go to Advanced Options, choose A4 Boot order, and choose B2 NVME/USB Boot … and then press OK and finish and reboot. It should now boot from the NVME. If something went wrong and you end up in an emergency shell, then reboot, insert the USB and SD card again, press space and try again.

I now have a 4TB NVME that boots my RaspberryPi 5. I also tried booting from SD card and using the NVME only as storage for a while, but it was slow and annoying, so it is really worth spending some time to get the Pi booting from the NVME. Hopefully, the RaspberryPi devs will change the imager and installer so they use the GPT partition scheme in the future. There is no reason to use MBR in the 21st century.

I made functions for starting the presentation, going forward, going backward and stopping the presentation, so turning it into a minor mode that is turned on and then have some functionality bound to a keymap, and which you then can turn off again was a very natural fit. I added the ability to customize a few things and have some ideas for more functionality to include and more things to customize.

Have a look at the Readme.org at Codeberg.org if you want to have a look or try it out. I might try to include it in a package archive in the future, but for now, you can install it with use-package's vc: keyword.

I have used org-present to present from Emacs Org files thus far. It has been good in many ways, but there have been a few annoyances as well. One thing that has bitten me many times is that it hides too many characters. This means that when I show things like == on screen (except in code blocks), it looks like =. This is very annoying when teaching programming. It also ruins org tables since it removes + which means that tables with vertical lines that are fully aligned normally show up misaligned. I have stopped using lines to separate headings and content in tables, but it is not ideal. I have used org-present for two years now, and there is no way to configure it to remove these annoyances, so I am ready to switch to something else.

Today, I found some time to look into this and made a few, simple functions that does exactly what I need and nothing more. It is just ten lines more than my previous configuration for org-present. And since it is part of my Emacs config, there is no need to install additional packages. I almost always start presentations from the the start with the title, so my emo-present-start function does that. There is a bit of a rough edge in that it shows metadata keywords like #+Title: and #+Options: toc: nil when I present the title. I might sandpaper that rough edge off in the future. Otherwise, it works better for me than org-present and with a lot fewer lines of code.

I lived with this seeming randomness for a while, but it annoyed me. Then I came across a video by David Wilson of SystemCrafters that showed me how I could use the concept of a side-window to not have popup windows take over my other windows. I also looked at his Emacs configuration and stole some of his settings. It solved the annoyance of popup windows taking over my other windows. He places his side-window in the bottom third of the screen. It makes sense when you want to pop up a shell or terminal, write a few commands and then close it again which you often see David do on his videos.

I also watched a video by Protesilaos Stavrou about side-windows where he explained the concept of slots. It solves the problem you have when you have more than one side-window from a popup buffer open at the same time. Maybe you have a help buffer and shell mode for instance. Prot also uses the lower part of his screen for his side-windows.

Since almost every screen is wider than it is tall, I think a better placement for user interface elements and extra information is on the left or right, not the top or bottom of the screen. Most content, except a few videos and pictures, are higher than they are tall. I want the content I am working on to take up as much as possible of the screen real estate to avoid unnecessary scrolling. This is why I always turn on the sidebar and off the toolbars in LibreOffice Writer and detest the Ribbon interface in MS365's Word.

Back to Emacs. I had a look at the Emacs manual which showed me how to tweak the settings David Wilson and Prot had taught me to get what I want. I think buffers with shells, for version control, REPLs, help, info etc should pop up on the side of the screen and leave the main buffer(s) alone. I want the content I am working on to always be the centre of attention. Since I read left to right, I like such windows to pop up on the right side of the screen where they disturb the other window(s) the least. (If I read right to left, I would have had them pop up on the left.) I set the width to 80 since man pages expect that and it works well for help and shells as well. (On smaller screens like the 1366 x 768 screen on the ThinkPad X230, this feels a bit large, but on larger screens like my 1440p external screen at home, it takes up less than a third of the screen. I could have used a ratio like 0.33 to have the side-window always take up one third of the screen, but that would mean it would be wider than necessary on large screens and too small for the content of [wo]man buffers on small screens, so after trying that for a while, I went with a fixed width in columns instead.)

To be able to have a man page and a shell, an info node and a REPL, or a shell, REPL and help buffer at the same time, I use slots to divide up the side-window if more than one special buffer is open. Slot -1 ends up at the top if there are more than one special window. Slot 0 ends up in the middle and slot 1 ends up at the bottom. I have REPLs at the top, shells in the middle and documentation in the bottom. I seldom use both a woman buffer and a help buffer at the same time, but I might use for example the Python REPL, Shell mode to launch and test out a python program and an info manual with Python documentation (yes, it is available in info format) at the same time, so it is useful to use different slots. If there is one buffer, the whole side of the screen is used and if there are two, the side is split in two if they occupy different slots.

Here is the code from my Emacs config for this:

(setq display-buffer-alist '(("\\*\\(Python\\|ielm\\|compilation\\).*\\*"
          (display-buffer-reuse-window display-buffer-in-side-window)
          (side . right)
          (slot . -1)
          (post-command-select-window . t)
          (window-width . 80))
("\\*\\(shell\\|.*eshell\\).*\\*"
          (display-buffer-reuse-window display-buffer-in-side-window)
          (side . right)
          (slot . 0)
          (post-command-select-window . t)
          (window-width . 80))
("\\*\\(help\\|info\\|man\\|woman\\|.*Ibuffer*\\|Agenda Commands\\|Org Agenda\\|Occur\\|xref\\).*\\*"
          (display-buffer-reuse-window display-buffer-in-side-window)
          (side . right)
          (slot . 1)
          (post-command-select-window . t)
          (window-width . 80))))

There is always M-x, so I could do everything I wanted to do, but without using my own keymap. The advantage of having a keymap that works everywhere is that it makes using commonly used functions a lot faster than using M-x. If the keymap isn't available everywhere, the advantage of having a keymap at all is severely limited and you have to think about in which situations it is usable and in which it isn't. Training oneself to remember the keychords through muscle memory also make little sense if it is only available some of the time.

I had a quick think about which possible prefix keys I could use that would work everywhere and in theory, every combo with ctrl or meta is usable except a few that has special meaning in a terminal like C-i and C-m. However, it is important not to remove a keychord I already use a lot for its original functionality to use it as the prefix for my own keymap instead, and I don't want a situation where a keychord both has its own functionality that I sometimes use and also is the prefix key for my keymap. That would be confusing and annoying to work with. I don't use C-z to iconify GUI Emacs or stop TTY Emacs, so I thought it was a keychord I could unbind and then use as my prefix.

Below is the code from my Emacs config for my keymap. It has just a few functions I use often that doesn't have a keybinding by default and a few of my own functions. Using it makes me faster than using M-x.

(global-unset-key (kbd "C-z"))
(define-prefix-command 'emo-map)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-z") 'emo-map)
(define-key emo-map (kbd "a") 'tempo-complete-tag)
(define-key emo-map (kbd "b") 'tempo-backward-mark)
(define-key emo-map (kbd "c") 'org-insert-structure-template)
(define-key emo-map (kbd "d") 'org-display-inline-images)
(define-key emo-map (kbd "e") 'elfeed)
(define-key emo-map (kbd "C-e") 'eshell)
(define-key emo-map (kbd "f") 'tempo-forward-mark)
(define-key emo-map (kbd "h") 'emo-hjemmeside)
(define-key emo-map (kbd "i") 'emo-ispell-toggle)
(define-key emo-map (kbd "l") 'org-toggle-link-display)
(define-key emo-map (kbd "m") 'mu4e)
(define-key emo-map (kbd "o") 'emo-dired-convert-to-org)
(define-key emo-map (kbd "C-s") '(lambda () (interactive) (emo-present 'toggle)))
(define-key emo-map (kbd "s") 'shell)
(define-key emo-map (kbd "t") '(lambda () (interactive) (ansi-term "bash")))
(define-key emo-map (kbd "y") 'emo-systemcrafters)

The definition of a podcast is an audio or video file shared through an RSS feed. An audio or video file only available through an app or a specific website isn't a podcast. The point of podcasts is that they use an open standard, RSS, for distribution. This makes it possible to listen to them on any device with any player. I use the RSS reader Elfeed inside Emacs with a few extra functions when I listen to podcasts at home via my computers, and AntennaPod which is available in F-droid on my Android phone. In the past, I used Newsboat and before that gPodder on GNU/Linux.

The idea is that the user can use whatever app or program they like on whatever device they like and get podcasts from a number of different media outlets in the same place and automatically get the new episodes whenever they are out. RSS is a great standard that has worked well for many decades and continues to be the best way to get not only podcasts, but also other web content from a lot of websites which has a feed (ie every good website) in stead of manually opening a number of sites to check if there is something new. RSS makes podcasts and other web content much easier to digest.

The infuriating thing is that I paid through my taxes for content that is now inaccessable to me unless I go to a number of different places to check manually. I get why the venture capital funded tech companies enshittify their users' experience if they can get more tracking data about their users to sell to advertisers, force subscriptions on people or force people into using their other services by exposing them inside their proprietary audio and video file distribution apps (even though it is very short term and makes me never want to ever use any of those companies' products or services ever again).

I don't get why public service broadcasters need to enshittify their offerings, though. NRK isn't going to sell tracking data to advertisers, sell subscriptions or other services any time soon. So why is it so important to them that I use their app or website instead of getting my audio through an open standard that is more convenient to use? Are they trying to do the same as the companies that offer worse services at terrible terms to seem more trendy and with it? Isn't the point of public service broadcasting to be publicly available? And isn't RSS the best way to do so when you have an audio or video show to distribute over the web? NRK and BBC probably lost many listeners since they no longer make podcasts. I won't listen to non-podcasts since I can't get them in my podcatchers of choice.

If you read the man pages for GNU programs, you will be underwhelmed if you want to read an actual manual, but if you read the info manual, you will find that most GNU programs are very well documented. I didn't know about info manuals before I started using GNU Emacs a couple of years ago, and I suspect many other newer GNU/Linux users don't know about the info manuals, so I thought it was a good idea to write about it. Maybe someone will discover the real manuals by reading this?

It is a good idea to start with "info info" to read the manual for the info reader to learn how to use it. On some distros, you have to install the info package before using it just like you have to install man-db to read man pages. If you use GNU Emacs, there is a better info reader with a nicer GUI built into Emacs which is used to read the Emacs manual, the Emacs Lisp reference, the Emacs Lisp introduction, manuals for all Emacs packages that supply one (which are most of them whether they are built-in or come in a package repository) and the info manual for every program on the GNU/Linux distro that supply one. There is a lot of good information in the manuals if know how to read them.

I have experienced the same need at work where most documents coming from others are .docx even if all my own documents are pure text files. I thought that I could convert any file format to org by using its extension as the from format for pandoc instead of having separate functions for different file formats. It seems to work. My function will either convert the file if pandoc can use it as input or give an error. I bound the function to C-z o to make it easy to convert and open a file from dired.

(defun emo-dired-convert-to-org ()
  "Converts files pandoc can convert to org files for easy editing. Use in dired."
  (interactive)
  (let ((endelse (file-name-extension (dired-get-file-for-visit)))
        (filnavn (dired-get-file-for-visit))
        (buffernavn (concat (file-name-nondirectory (dired-get-file-for-visit)) ".org")))
     (with-output-to-temp-buffer buffernavn
       (princ (shell-command-to-string (concat "pandoc -f " endelse " -t org --wrap=none \"" filnavn "\""))))
     (switch-to-buffer-other-window buffernavn)))

I have been thinking for a while that I would check out the snippet package Yasnippets which is recommended by a lot of Emacsers. I discovered tempo recently by stumbling upon Thomas Ingram's website. Tempo is a built-in template or snippets package in Emacs without any built-in documentation (unlike most Emacs packages). There is an info manual on David Kågedal's homepage and some examples of its use and if you follow the link to Ingram's site, there is also some information there. The documentation is very readable when you find it. I tend to prefer built-in packages unless there is functionality only available in external ones that I want or need, and tempo looked like it had many interesting features, so I tried it.

There are two main ways of using tempo. Either you insert a template into a buffer and it can ask you interactively in the minibuffer for things to fill in into the template, like for instance names of function, type annotation or variables and the like. To use it this way, set tempo-interactive to t. The default way of using it will instead insert the template into a buffer and then use the command tempo-forward-mark to go to the next place in the template where you should fill in some value. There is also a tempo-backwards-mark to go back if you change your mind about something you already filled in.

There is also a third way where you mark a region, and use the universal argument before calling the function with the name of your template. You can use this whether tempo-interactive is t or nil. This includes the region in the part of the template with the r keyword and then either prompts you in the minibuffer for things to fill in or you do it with tempo-forward-mark and tempo-backward-mark depending on your setting of tempo-interactive. This may be useful if you want to wrap some code in a function definition, a class definition, a loop or an if-statement etc.

To me, the default "non-interactive" way of using it seems the fastest, so I set tempo-interactive to nil. Since I do not anticipate that I will switch to doing it that way in the future, I wrote my templates without prompts for the minibuffer. Whenever there is a p or an r, you can wrap them in parenthesis and add a string which will become the minibuffer prompt if you use tempo with tempo-interactive set to t, but this is optional and not needed if you, like me, use it the default way.

There are also different ways to insert a template into a buffer. Every template becomes a function you can run interactively with M-x with the name "tempo-template-" and the name you have given your template. The other way of invoking it is to write a tag and then run the function tempo-complete-tag which replaces the tag with the template. Thomas Ingram also writes that you can use abbrev mode to insert a template with the help of its function name, but since I have yet to learn abbrev mode, I thought using tags and binding the function to replace them with templates would be fastest for me. It also avoids having to configure tempo templates another place in the config, so even if/when I learn abbrev mode, I may continue to use it this way.

I have my own keymap using the menu key which I have rebound my CapsLock to on my GNU/Linux machines, and which I have as a separate key next to Alt gr on my Windows 11 work laptop. I could have bound Caps to Hyper on GNU/Linux, but then I would not be able to use that keymap on Windows without a lot of setup. I have set menu-n to tempo-forward-mark, menu-p to tempo-backward-mark and menu-a to tempo-complete-tag. To get a template inserted, I write the tag and hit menu-a. Then I hit menu-n to go to where the next p or r is in the template and fill it in.

This way of using tempo seems very efficient so far, as long as the tag names are short enough. I thought it was a good idea to start tags related to Python with py, Elisp with el, JavaScript with js, C with c etc to keep them short. The challenge is probably to remember the tags, but as with keybindings, the ones I use often will become second nature. Since every template becomes a function with a name starting with "tempo-template-", finding templates if you cannot remember their tags is easy through M-x and completions.

The first template I made was a template to create tempo templates with the name "definition" so the function name would be "tempo-template-definition" and with the tag tempo. This template makes it easier for me to create future templates. So far I have only made two for function definitions in Python and Elisp, but I will make more and more complex ones over time. I think tempo will increase my tempo when I have written enough templates to speed up writing boilerplate. And since I use Emacs for a lot more than programming, I may use tempo for boilerplate in other text as well.

In the code block below, you can see how I have configured tempo thus far. To not slow down Emacs start-up I don't ensure that it is loaded, but load it on demand when the function tempo-complete-tag is run (which I do with the keypress menu-a after writing a tag for a template).

(use-package tempo
  :ensure nil
  :commands tempo-complete-tag
  :config
  (setq tempo-interactive 'nil)
  (tempo-define-template "definition"
                         '("(tempo-define-template \"" p "\" '(\"" r "\") \"" p "\" \"" p "\")")
                         "tempo" "A tempo template to define tempo templates.")
  (tempo-define-template "python-def"
                         '("def " p " (" p ": " p ") -> " p ":\n"
                           "    \"\"\"\n    " p "\n    \"\"\"\n    " r)
                         "pydef" "Create a Python function definition.")
  (tempo-define-template "elisp-defun"
                       '("(defun " p " (" p ")" n> "\"" p "\"" n> r ")")
                       "eldefun" "Create an Elisp function definition.")
  )

Large Languague Models ("AI") are making the lives of people hosting websites harder by scraping their content which add cost to the owners of the sites for data transfer or spinning up extra infrastructure to not go down with the extra load. The scrapers tend not to respect robots.txt files that tell them not to scrape the sites. The legality of this scraping under current copyright law is questionable. The LLMs' owners are especially interested in software source code since this is an area where companies and users are willing to pay serious money to use LLMs. Free software git forges like codeberg.org and sourcehut.org are scraped so hard that it almost constitutes DDOSing. One of the companies doing this is Microsoft, their market-leading, near monopoly competitor on git forges and owner of proprietary git forge GitHub, to improve their CoPilot LLM.

To combat LLM content scraping, many websites use a program called Anubis that runs some JavaScript in the browser of the user to check whether it is in fact a human with a browser and not an LLM scraper that has changed the user-agent string that identifies which browser is being used. This program demands that JavaScript is run before serving the content. This means that when I want to go to a site that uses Anubis with Eww, I get a message that I have to turn on Javascript, which I cannot do since I use a text based browser. So in effect, LLMs ruin text based browsing.

I use Emacs as my text editor. At work, I have a laptop with Windows 11. I use inter-present-mode for interactive presentations every day. Since I sometimes have pictures in my presentations and inter-present-mode changes face height, I need to use GUI Emacs. (Emacs is also available in the TTY and terminal emulators.) There are two ways to get GUI Emacs on Windows. The first is through WSL2 with the graphical features Microsoft calls WSLg.

Unfortunately, the Wayland stack is implemented in a non-standard way in WSLg that doesn't currently work properly. There are two bugs related to Wayland-native programs: the first bug makes Wayland native programs use XWayland instead of Wayland. The community found a fix for that bug in 2023 and told Microsoft about it in a GitHub Issues thread where a representative for Microsoft said they applied the fix to the codebase, but so far, Microsoft has not released that fix. You can fix it yourself if you like. However, there is another bug that makes Wayland windows unresponsive after locking the screen and unlocking it again. This is the show-stopper for WSLg for me. (There is also a similar bug for X windows where the windows disappear after screen locking, but if you open a new X window, you can alt-tab to the original window and use it.)

Since I need GUI Emacs and WSLg doesn't properly work, I have opted to use native Emacs on Windows. Unfortunately, all the free software tools that integrate with Emacs and that is just an easy install away on GNU/Linux (and its WSL2 lookalike) is hard to come by as native Windows programs. There are also some extra configuration needed in Emacs to get features that just work on POSIX to work on Windows. I gradually discovered how to get the necessary external packages and how to configure Emacs on Windows to get as similar an experience as possible to the one I have on GNU/Linux. I use the same literate configuration on both OSes to keep things as similar as possible.

People use Emacs in different ways, so you may find that you need something I don't, but I hope this blog post can give you a starting point. (It is also useful for me in case I need to set things up again.) Some other good starting points are Using Emacs on Windows 11: An Installation Guide by Dr. Peter Prevos and Properly Installing Emacs on Windows, Properly Setting up Emacsclient on Windows, Printing Directly from Emacs on Windows and Getting spelling to work in Emacs on Windows by Dr. Raoul Comninos on the EmacsElements website and YouTube channel. I have used their ideas in my setup, but tweaked things to my own liking.

Setup of environment variables

Emacs looks for a .emacs.d directory or a .config/emacs/ directory or a .emacs file in $HOME. To set $HOME, press the Windows key, write environment and you should see the Edit Environment Variables program (Rediger systemmiljøvariabler if you use Norwegian Bokmål). Set the User variables for HOME to wherever you want it. I also found that it was useful for git to set LANG and LC_ALL since git and other programs compiled with MSYS2 respects the text encoding from those. I did this as part of my trial and error process to find ways around git's default conversion of text encoding and line endings, but I am not certain it is necessary after setting the system locale to UTF-8 and/or setting Git Bash's text encoding in the GUI (see the dealing with text-encoding section for more on this).

(if (eq system-type 'windows-nt)
   (set-clipboard-coding-system 'iso-latin-1)
  (set-clipboard-coding-system 'utf-8))

(prefer-coding-system 'utf-8-unix)
(set-default-coding-systems 'utf-8-unix)
(set-language-environment 'utf-8)
(setq-default coding-system-for-write 'utf-8-unix)
(setq-default buffer-file-coding-system 'utf-8-unix)

(use-package flyspell
  :hook ((prog-mode . flyspell-prog-mode)
         (text-mode . flyspell-mode))
  :init
  (when (eq system-type 'windows-nt)
    (setq ispell-program-name "C:/Program Files/Hunspell/bin/hunspell.exe"))
  (setq ispell-dictionary "nb_NO")
  (setq ispell-dictionary-alist
    '(("nb_NO" ":alpha" "[^[:alpha:]]" "[']" nil ("-d" "nb_NO") nil utf-8)))
  (setq hunspell-default-dict "nb_NO"))

(use-package dictionary
   :if (eq system-type 'gnu/linux)
   :config
   (setq dictionary-server "localhost"))

(use-package shell
  :config
  (add-hook 'shell-mode-hook 'ansi-color-for-comint-mode-on)
  (add-to-list 'comint-output-filter-functions 'ansi-color-process-output)
  (add-hook 'comint-output-filter-functions 'comint-osc-process-output)
  (add-hook 'shell-mode-hook (lambda() (company-mode 0)))
  (when (eq system-type 'windows-nt)
    (setq explicit-shell-file-name "C:/Windows/System32/WindowsPowerShell/v1.0/powershell.exe")
    (setq explicit-powershell.exe-args '("")))
  (when (eq system-type 'gnu/linux)
     (setq explicit-shell-file-name "/bin/bash")
     (setq system-uses-terminfo t)
     (setq comint-terminfo-terminal "xterm")))

(use-package eglot
  :hook (prog-mode . eglot-ensure))  

(setq python-fill-docstring-style 'django)
(when (eq system-type 'windows-nt)
  (setq python-shell-interpreter "c:/Python313/python.exe"))

(when (eq system-type 'windows-nt)
  (custom-set-variables
 '(exec-path
   '("C:/Program Files/MiKTeX" "C:/Program Files/ImageMagick-7.1.2-Q16-HDRI" "C:/Python313/"
     "C:/ProgramData/chocolatey/lib/findutils/tools/install/bin/" "C:/WINDOWS/system32"
     "C:/WINDOWS" "C:/WINDOWS/System32/Wbem" "C:/WINDOWS/System32/WindowsPowerShell/v1.0/"
     "C:/WINDOWS/System32/OpenSSH/" "C:/Program Files/dotnet/" "C:/Program Files/Git/cmd"
     "C:/Program Files/nodejs/" "C:/ProgramData/chocolatey/bin" "C:/ProgramData/chocolatey/lib/mpv/"
     "C:/ProgramData/chocolatey/lib/mupdf" "C:/Users/AFK01217/AppData/Local/Microsoft/WindowsApps"
     "C:/texlive/2025/bin/windows" "C:/Users/AFK01217/AppData/Local/Programs/Microsoft VS Code/bin"
     "C:/Users/AFK01217/AppData/Roaming/npm" "C:/Users/AFK01217/AppData/Local/Pandoc/" "."
     "C:/Program Files/Hunspell/bin" "c:/Strawberry/perl/bin/" "C:/Program Files/LibreOffice/program"))
 '(image-load-path
   '("c:/Program Files/Emacs/emacs-30.1/share/emacs/30.1/etc/images/" data-directory load-path "c:/python313/")))
)

Gradually, Microsoft did numerous overhauls of the user interface and every time, it got worse. The amount of bots and scams also skyrocketed under Microsoft's ownership. Microsoft also used the Skype name for their incompatible Link product which became Skype for business. Over time, the superior technology from Skype was incorporated into Skype for business and Teams. My use of Skype decreased with the Microsoftification of the once brilliant Nordic instant messenger, phone and video chat program.

A few weeks ago, I found out Microsoft is going to kill Skype and instead try to get consumers to use Teams even if Teams is for internal business communication and not very well suited for individual users. Skype will stop working on May 5th 2025. My personal Microsoft account only exists because of Skype, so I am now in the process of exporting all my data from Skype and afterwards, I will delete my Microsoft account. If you have a Skype/Microsoft account, it might be a good idea to export your data before it is to late, and if you don't need that account for anything else, you may as well delete it.

I have been curious about the free software decentralised platform Matrix for a while, so I think I will see if I can find a Matrix server that is open for new users or set one up myself. I have tried the Matrix app Element in the past, and it was rather good. There is also an Emacs package called ement.el that seemed good when David Wilson of SystemCrafters had a look at it a while back in one of his live streams. Maybe this is the push I need to start seriously looking into Matrix again.

Another advantage of having useful functionality inside my Emacs config is that whatever window manager or maybe even operating system I use, I can still use my functions from inside Emacs. Bash Shell scripts only run on GNU/Linux and POSIX Shell scripts only run on POSIX systems. But Emacs functions can be run inside Emacs on every platform it is available for without any external configuration. I might have to change my settings for wallpaper-command and wallpaper-command-args if I use another window manger, desktop environment or operating system, but most things will just work no matter where I am. Having the functionality in Emacs makes it easier if I ever were to change window manager from Sway as well.

The scripts I was able to replace with Emacs functions this weekend was my radio stream script, my two tv scripts for watching the latest news or satire broadcast from NRK, and my two wallpaper setting scripts, one that goes to the next file in a folder and sets it as the wallpaper so I can cycle through (and also around again when I get to the end) and another one that picks a random wallpaper from within the same folder. During the weekdays I was able to make a script to update my homepage and copy a youtube RSS feed link from a yewtu.be URL in primary selection. It was a lot of fun to dive into Elisp even if it took a lot of time since I was constantly searching for functions I could use for my purposes, both within Emacs and online.

I can still launch my scripts with keyboard shortcuts from my Sway config with emacsclient -e '(functionname)'. I start an Emacs server when I launch Sway, so I can always rely on having Emacs running. For the scripts that need user interaction in an Emacs frame, I can add -r to either reuse an open frame or make a new one.

In the past, I would manually delete all files except robots.txt, style.css and my media folder from the folder I exported to with org-static-blog. The reason is that org-static-blog only creates html files from org files where the html file does not already exist and then updates index.html, archive.html and rss.xml to reflect the changes. However, I sometimes edit older blog posts or my about page or change the header or footer which applies to all html pages, so I want to generate all the files every time and to achieve this, I delete all the html files before generating the new ones with the function org-static-blog-publish from my posts folder full of org files. I would then either use scp or FileZilla to upload those to my web server.

What I do now is use Codeberg Pages to serve my website instead. I have forwarded https://mostad.eu/ to https://einar.codeberg.page/ so visitors to mostad.eu get to the URL where html files in my Codeberg repo called pages are served by Codeberg instead. I have also made a shell script (that I will replace with an Elisp function in the future) that removes the previously generated html files, generates the html files with Emacs, and once closed, adds, commits and pushes the files to the repository Codeberg Pages hosts my website from. This way, I can get out a new blog post a lot faster than I would in the past and most of the process is automated.

For a while, I have wondered why I only needed to write my password once when using sudo and then never again. It means that if you are logged in as your user, you have all the privileges of root if you just once wrote your password. It is convenient, but it is like logging in with the root user which is not a very good idea.

I had a look at visudo, the command to change the settings for sudo and everything looked quite normal. Except that in the end, the file sources any file in the directory /etc/sudoers.d/. So naturally, I had a look in that directory. There are some files there that cause problems. The first one is 010_pi-nopasswd which sets up sudo to never time out the sudo password typed by the first user created on the system.

Another is that sudo isn't per shell, terminal or tty, but global. This is in the file /etc/sudoers.d/010_global_tty. Usually, you would have to type your password to get sudo privileges in each terminal, shell or tty, but on RaspberryPi OS, sudo accepts the password I typed once in tty1 in every shell, terminal or tty.

Finally, there is a file called 010_proxy which accepts sudo from any proxy logged in as the first user, ie since I typed a password once in tty1, any proxy logged in as me doesn't have to type a password ever again to escalate privileges with sudo. Not the best setting either.

To mitigate the problem, you should make sure you are added to the sudo group by typing sudo usermod -aG sudo username in a terminal and press return, but replace username with your actual username. This is because we are going to delete the file that lets your users type your sudo password only once, but still want your user to be able to use sudo. The sudoers file on RaspberryPi OS is set up so users in the sudo group can use sudo.

Then you should write sudo rm /etc/sudoers.d/010_pi-nopasswd and return to delete the file that gives your user the ability to only type your password once. Continue with sudo rm /etc/sudoers.d/010_global-tty and return to remove the settings that doesn't ask for a new password in every tty, terminal or shell. Go on with sudo rm /etc/sudoers.d/010_proxy and return to avoid proxies not having to write a password. Finally, write sudo visudo and look for a line that says Defaults env_reset. Move your cursor to the end of that line with the cursor keys and hit return to get a new line. Write Defaults timestamp_timeout=5 to get a five minute timeout for sudo. Then press ctrl-o, return when it asks for a filename to save to and then ctrl-x to quit Nano. (RaspberryPi OS does not respect your settings for $EDITOR and will use Nano.)

My installscript for Debian checks if I am on RaspberryPi OS and does the things I have listed above, except add the timeout in the sudoers file. It is supposed to be edited only with visudo, so I tell the user to do this manually in the end of my script. (It also checks if the user is on Debian or RaspberryPi OS and installs Firefox on RaspberryPi OS and Firefox-ESR (Extended Support Releas) on Debian. (I tried installing Firefox from Debian Unstable first, but there were dpendency problems with that approach.) Emacs is installed from Backports to get then newest one backported to work with Debian Stable, whether you are on RaspberryPi OS or Debian. In the past, I used the Emacs snap, but Emacs from backports is faster and I trust the Debian maintainers more than the proprietary Snap Store. Since Debian has a stricter interpretation of what Free Software is than the FSF, I also have to install the non-free repos to install Emacs documentation.)

I echoed out $SDL_VIDEODRIVER and got wayland as my answer since I run the tiling window manager Sway. I checked to make certain I had xwayland installed and then tried launching DOSbox again with SDL_VIDEODRIVER=X11 dosbox in a terminal and it worked. It will probably work for other programs that use SDL that won't launch on Wayland as well.

My search for solutions found a lot of users of different programs that used SDL that had trouble with getting their programs to run and with no credible solution given in any of the forums I visited. I hope this blog post will help people in that situation. Since most of the major desktop environments use Wayland by default now and some of us tiling WM users also use it, these kinds of problems should hopefully be eliminated by developers of most FOSS projects in the not too distant future. X11 has not been under active development since 2012 except for security updates, and Wayland is no longer the future, but has been the present for a long time.

Emacs Org mode is a tool for outlining ideas (and a lot of other stuff like calendaring, todos and project planning) in a pure text markup format with support for inline images and code blocks in almost any programming language. You can run the code blocks when you want or tangle them out to a separate code file a la literate programming. Emacs is extendable and hackable enough that it can be made to work as presentation software. Ric Lister has made an Emacs package called org-present which I use. I make my presentation in org mode as an org file (org markup is similar to markdown), and add the images and code blocks directly within the text with the markup. When I am in class, I run the function org-present to start a presentation.

Each top level heading in my org document becomes a slide. I can write directly into the slides while I present them since they are just text files in org markup displayed with larger font sizes and nicer headlines etc, which makes it possible to do things like ask my students something and write down their answers. I can also run code blocks by hitting Ctrl-C Ctrl-C with the pointer above the code block and the results pop up underneath in a separate results block within the text of my presentation. Another advantage is that if I alt-tab into another program like Firefox or Thonny, my presentation within Emacs does not switch out of presentation mode like most presentation software like PowerPoint tends to do. I can come back to my presentation after showing a Youtube video with Firefox and continue where I left off.

After class, I export the presentation including code blocks, images and results of running the code to a PDF and put it on our learning platform to make it easy for students not present to see what was happening or for later review before a test or an exam. I have set up org-present to work the way I like with a bit of code in my Emacs config. I turn on display of inline images and set a standard width that usually works (that I can easily change with some metadata above an image if needed) and use org-present-big to make everything large. I then hook my configuration into the start of org-present and also have a function that resets my configuration that I hook in when org-present is quit. I highly recommend org-present if you want interactivity within your presentations, especially if you already use Emacs and Org mode. It lets me hold interactive presentations presentation software like PowerPoint, Prezi or Keynote cannot.

A few months ago I did the same type of discovery. I was looking for a way to interact with mpd, the music player daemon, possibly through the command line tool mpc from within Emacs. EMMS and Bongo are often mentioned by people in the Emacs community and I have tried both, but they are both unable to list albums with many artists and/or many recording years as one album. All other mpd players I have tried, both TUI and GUI-based have the same problem, so this is not a unique shortcoming in these packages. Until recently, I have relied on a shell script I wrote that lists all the albums in the mpd database with fzf and lets me select the one I want to play. However, sometimes I don't want to play a whole album, but I still want my music sorted by album since I have been carefully tagging my files so I can easily find music by album.

(I kind of had to make a system for album names since having 11 albums named "Bach cello suites" doesn't really help me find the one I like to listen to when I have six different recordings, they usually span two albums and two recordings are by the same artist at different times. Hence, I have made a system that is fine grained enough for me to find the right album without being too detailed to avoid too long album names. For instance, I don't include first name initials of the composer in the album name when I only have one composer with that last name in my database (even if more exist), and I don't list artist in the album name when I have only one recording of a work. Every time I ripped an album, I manually changed the tags to match my system even if MusicBraniz through Rhythmbox and earlier, iTunes, often gave me terrible album names for classical albums when I ripped them, otherwise I would not be able to find anything.)

A few months ago, I discovered a built-in mpc mode in Emacs that gave me exactly what I wanted. I could continue to use mpd and mpc to manage my music playback and use mpc mode which looks very much like Rhythmbox, but has the advantage of having all of Emacs' superior keyboard centricity and text handling. I can easily search with C-s for an album name, add it to the playlist and start playing it and then q to quit out of that mode with the music still playing and I am back at whatever I was doing in Emacs before, all without having to lift my hands from the keyboard. It is really convenient. In mpc mode, the albums are correctly listed even when there are many artist and/or years on the same album. Since I can sort my music by album, I can easily also find a single track if I am so inclined.

These kinds of discoveries make me love Emacs and the Emacs community. Emacs is hackable enough that if you want some functionality, you can get it. And since the project wasn't started yesterday, someone has often already thought of my use-cases and spent some of their spare time to code up that functionality and often also even gone to the trouble to include it in the editor itself. Thank you!

qt.qpa.plugin: Could not find the Qt platform plugin "wayland-egl" in "" This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

Available platform plugins are: eglfs, linuxfb, minimal, minimalegl, offscreen, vnc, xcb.

Fatal Python error: Aborted

Current thread 0x00007fa0cd669740 (most recent call first): File "/usr/lib/python3.11/site-packages/raphodo/ui/viewutils.py", line 975 in any_screen_scaled_qt File "/usr/lib/python3.11/site-packages/raphodo/ui/viewutils.py", line 991 in any_screen_scaled File "/usr/lib/python3.11/site-packages/raphodo/rapid.py", line 7489 in main File "/usr/bin/rapid-photo-downloader", line 33 in <module>

Extension modules: PyQt5.QtCore, gi._gi, zmq.backend.cython.context, zmq.backend.cython.message, zmq.backend.cython.socket, zmq.backend.cython._device, zmq.backend.cython._poll, zmq.backend.cython._proxy_steerable, zmq.backend.cython._version, zmq.backend.cython.error, zmq.backend.cython.utils, psutil._psutil_linux, psutil._psutil_posix, gphoto2._widget, gphoto2._version, gphoto2._result, gphoto2._port_log, gphoto2._port_info_list, gphoto2._list, gphoto2._filesys, gphoto2._file, gphoto2._context, gphoto2._camera, gphoto2._abilities_list, PyQt5.QtGui, PyQt5.QtWidgets, PyQt5.QtNetwork, tornado.speedups, PyQt5.QtXml, PyQt5.QtX11Extras, PyQt5.QtWebChannel, PyQt5.QtTest, PyQt5.QtSvg, PyQt5.QtSql, PyQt5.QtQml, PyQt5.QtQuick, PyQt5.QtQuickWidgets, PyQt5.QtPrintSupport, PyQt5.QtPositioning, PyQt5.QtLocation, PyQt5.QtOpenGL, PyQt5.QtDBus (total: 42) Avbrutt (SIGABRT) (kjerne lagret i fil)

Reinstalling the program does nothing. It turns out that there is a missing dependency. I have spent a lot of time trying to figure this out, but finding the information is hard, so I thought I would help my future self and maybe some others by supplying the fix I have found. It is not, as many suggest online, enough to install Python-PyQt5. It is already a dependency and installed. You need to install qt5-wayland to get it to work. On some distros, you also need to install egl-wayland, while on others, it comes as a dependency of qt5-wayland.

This is not just a problem with rapid-photo-downloader. There is a lot of discussion online about this error message with other Qt5 and Qt6 packages from different distros like Debian, Ubuntu and Arch. qt5-wayland is a dependency only if you run Wayland, so maybe that is why it does not come with the package as a dependency even if I think it should. Now that the larger desktop environments are all Wayland by default, I would guess X11 users are the minority of GNU/Linux users. Therefore, Wayland dependencies should come with all packages that need them. Legacy X11 users would probably not worry too much if a small extra package they do not need is installed. If they really worried about bloat, they would not have used X11 in the first place since it is a baroque collection of legacy cruft.

Update August 6th, 2023: I have experienced the same issue with Kdenlive on GNU Guix as well. It turns out that both Qt5-wayland (qtwayland@5.15.8 on Guix) and egl-wayland are missing dependencies for Kdenlive for Wayland users.

I achieve max pixel efficiency by using the tiling Window Manager Sway. Since it is a tiler, it automatically places windows in a tiled layout. Compared to working in a floating WM or Desktop Environment, I save a lot of mousing around to move my windows. I have a nice wallpaper, but no icons that clutter up my desktop. I have set up Sway to have 2 pixels of border around each window and no title bar on top to get as much space as possible for the programs I work in. The two pixels are needed to see where one window ends and another starts and also to distinguish between the active window with a red border and the inactive window(s) with a blue border. One pixel was hard to see, so I went for the somewhat wasteful setting of two pixels in stead.

I have also set smart_borders on which means that if I have only one window on a virtual desktop, it is without any border at all. This saves four pixels in both directions and looks nicer. I use a small 12 inch Thinkpad X230 with an internal 1366 x 768 pixel display as my main machine and usually just one program per virtual desktop, so the smart_borders make a difference. On my external 2560 x 1440 pixel 25 inch wall mounted screen behind my standing desk, I am more inclined to have two programs side by side if I am actively working on something in one window and just need to look something up or do a related task in another window. Humans are generally worse at multitasking than we think, so I like to separate different tasks on different virtual desktops even on large screens to not get distracted.

I do not use a panel on the top or bottom of my screen since this wastes pixels in the directions most screens have the fewest (height). I have set up the built-in Swaybar to autohide. I use scripts launched with keyboard shortcuts for the few things I need that most people keep in their bar or panel, like getting battery status in a notification or turning wifi or bluetooth on or off. A benefit of using scripts launched by the keyboard in stead of a bar with lots of information or system tray applets is that I save mousing around in submenus of my system tray or clicking on my panel to get things done. Since Sway implements the system tray of Swaybar in an xdg standards compliant way, but most programs still use a legacy Gnome implementation, most tray applets do not work anyway and this is what forced me to think closer at what functionality from the system tray I actually needed in the first place.

Over time, I have gradually switched out some of the larger GUI programs I used with smaller, simpler, more customizable and easily scriptable tools. Some of them are terminal programs, some are Emacs packages and some are small GUI programs. Many of the small GUI programs also have a minimal GUI that only present a few very useful elements and is otherwise controlled through keyboard shortcuts, like zathura or mpv. By having very few user interface elements, these programs give more room to the actual content you read or watch. The same applies to the TUI programs and Emacs packages I use.

Since switching from vim to Emacs, I have integrated some of the tasks I used to do in separate programs into it. Emacs is very efficient since it is so keyboard and text centric and by having fewer programs, I save the cycles my brain would use for context switching with different keyboard shortcuts for different programs. Emacs also has the ability to run both in a GUI which is what I normally use (since it adds support for different fonts in different contexts, pictures and PDFs), but can also be used in a terminal emulator or the tty with most of the same functionality. An example of how I gradually have integrated my workflows into Emacs is that I recently stopped using PCManFM as my file manager and instead now use Emacs' dired and the GNU coreutils in a terminal (inside or outside Emacs).

To save space in Emacs, I turn the menubar, toolbar and scrollbar off which saves some pixels on the top and right side of every window. I instead use F10 for the occasional dive into the menu and keyboard shortcuts like C-v and M-v to scroll down or up and M-< and M-> to go the the start or end of a document. I also turn on showing column and line numbers in the modeline and do not turn on line numbers on the start of every line since I can easily find the right line with the modeline if I am debugging something with an error on a specific line. It looks a bit cleaner and saves some space on the left of the screen. Usually, this does not matter much since screens are generally wider than they are tall, but when having three windows with code side by side on a small laptop screen, it can be the difference between having to scroll horizontally or not.

All in all, by saving some pixels here and there, I get more space for the content I work with, watch or read while also reaping the efficiency benefits of a more text and keyboard-centric workflow that came as a consequence of having fewer visual clues on screen and using the mouse less. A lot of functionality is not obvious at first sight, but since I have set this up myself and know my keybindings and the available functionality, it works well for me. Sometimes less really is more.

The solution is simply to install the dictd server and the dictionary packages you want on your computer. In Debian, these are available as dictd and a number of packages that supply dictd-dictionary for it. In Arch, dictd is an ordinary package in the community repo, but the dictionaries has to be added through the AUR. The dictd server and related dictionary files are however not available yet for GNU Guix. The Arch Wiki has an excellent page on dictd if you want more information on its usage. Once installed, you can just change the aforementioned dictionary-server variable from "dict.org" to "localhost" and Emacs will find your installed dictionaries. Depending on the distro, you may also have to systemctl enable dictd.service and systemctl start dictd.service to make certain dictd runs at every startup as well as immediately.

The selection of freely available Norwegian Bokmål dictionaries is rather slim. I only found an English - Norwegian dictionary that seemed slightly useful to me. I wish there was as Norwegian Bokmål - English dictionary as well since that would sometimes be useful for me even if I have a decent English vocabulary. There are some dictionaries from other European languages to Norwegian Bokmål, but I seldom use other languages than English these days. (I used to play opera, cantatas and masses and then those would have been useful to me.) There is also a Norwegian Nynorsk - Norwegian Bokmål dictionary by freedict. It could occasionally be useful when I read very old Nynorsk (Landsmaal). I wish there were a comprehensive Norwegian Bokmål dictionary with word definitions, synonyms, IPA pronunciation, example of usage and expressions. I would use it especially for synonyms and spelling. Since I have lived and worked some years in Denmark and Sweden, my Bokmål spelling isn't as good as it used to be, and ten years of using English as my working language after I returned to Norway did not really improve it either. I naturally blame the morons in the government of Denmark-Norway that decided to support Napoleon for all my current spelling troubles. Or maybe the Swedes that broke up the Kalmar Union should ultimately be to blame? Ok, maybe I need to take some responsibility myself as well…

American English is well covered by the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English (dict-gcide) that includes the full text of the 1913 Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, the 1906 Century Dictionary and some other additions. I also installed WordNet (dict-wn) for synonyms. There are also some good computer term dictionaries like the Jargon File (dict-jargon), Virtual Entity of Relevant Acronyms (dict-vera) and the Free On Line Dictionary of Computing (dict-foldoc) available. I miss a dictionary with both British and American spelling and also IPA pronunciation since I try to stick with British spelling and RP. It is a pity that Oxford University Press do not release the Oxford English Dictionary or my favourite, the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, under a free culture license so it could be included as well. I have the Advanced Learner's Dictionary as a paperback in my bookshelf, and there is a website with it available gratis, but leaving Emacs breaks my flow when writing, the internet is not always available and my paperback is only available in my home. In my opinion, a university should use free culture and software licenses for everything they produce since when public money is used, it is only fair that the tax-payers get access to the works they funded. Also, the freedom to use, study, modify and share information should be the core values of any school or university.

I use both M-x dictionary-search and M-x dictionary-lookup-definition. The former lets you write in a search term while the latter looks up the word at point. The latter is obviously very useful while reading while the former may be more useful when writing, except if you want to find a synonym while revising your text where the latter becomes useful again. There is no need to change dictionary language for dictionary-mode unless you have installed too many dictionaries or dictionaries of languages with a lot of collision of vocabulary and spelling. Norwegian and English share a lot of vocabulary, but seldom collide in spelling, so I see no need to exclude any of the relevant dictionaries in either language. If you are overwhelmed with hits, it is possible to change dictionary inside the dictionary-mode buffer to limit the number of entries you get.

Combined with recently setting up flyspell-prog-mode for prog-mode and flyspell-mode for text-mode and (setq ispell-dictionary "british") in my init.el, I now feel more confident than before when writing text in Emacs, whether in code or not. (Dictionaries for lookup with dictionary mode and dictionaries for spell checking are separate and aspell or hunspell has to be installed with relevant dictionaries on your distro for ispell-dictionary to be set to the language you want for spell checking.) It's nice with spell checking for variable names and comments. Maybe I should add a toggle function with a keybinding for ispell-local-dictionary between "british" and "nb" to avoid having to use ispell-change-dictionary.

Free Software is about freedom. In practical terms for a normal user, it is very obvious how the users' interests is important for free software projects while non-free software often is more about forcing the users into usage patterns that strengthen the corporate interests of their creators even if it makes for a worse user experience. An example is how Microsoft tries to force people to use Bing, Edge and MSN by not respecting the user's browser and search engine settings when doing a web search from the start button in Windows 11. It makes advertising money for Microsoft, but it is very user-hostile, especially since the users already paid for Windows as part of the cost of their machine. This is just one small example, but there are many more.

I also like how I can help improve free software by contributing to projects I like. I have contributed money, bug reports, translations, feature requests and a bit of very simple code, and hope to do more of this in the future. It is also possible to influence the direction of a free software project by contributing to it. This puts the most active users in the driving seat. In a worst case scenario where a project goes in a direction people dislike, it is possible to create a fork since free software licenses give the freedom to modify a program and distribute your changes. A famous example is how OpenOffice was forked to create LibreOffice which is now the default Offie suite on most GNU/Linux distributions. (OpenOffice is no longer actively maintained.)

I also like how Free Software empowers me as a user to customize it to my liking and learn how to programme in the process. With Free Software, my computer is personal again. Not only can I choose between a lot of desktop environments or window managers to match my preferred workflow, I can also customize these further to my liking. While I prefer a tiling window manager with a keyboard-centric workflow without any panel or bar for maximum screen real estate for my programmes and a minimum of mouse clicks and movement to get things done, other people prefer a full desktop environment either of the more traditional type or a reimagination with new user interfaces like Gnome. GNU/Linux is modular enough to give us those choices by design.

GNU Emacs is another piece of software that is very customizable and when you customize it, you also learn how the code of the program itself works since you customize it in the same language as it is made with by adding your own functions and modifying built-in variables. The documentation of the program is very helpful for learning how to do this. It was the first programme made by the GNU project and a prime example of the freedoms of free software put into practice.

All in all, free software has empowered me as a technology user and put me in control of my own use of technology. It has also freed me from giving up my privacy, which is usually the cost of "free" non-free software.

Happy I Love Free Software Day!

I don't know Elisp well enough to script this myself yet, so I looked online. I read up on the documentation for elfeed on GitHub and also found some inspiration on Reddit that I tweaked to make some elisp scripts to be able to hit m if I want to watch a video in mpv and M if I want to download it with yt-dlp to my "Nedlastinger" (Downloads in Norwegian) folder. I tried a couple of different solutions before I was able to get what I wanted. The suggestion from Reddit was to use start-process to launch an external process with the url from the entry as its argument. That worked well with mpv. For yt-dlp that was less successful and I also wanted to change directory to ~/Nedlastinger before launching the yt-dlp process so I read up on how to run shell-commands asyncronously and used that functionality instead. I also made certain that any shell command run asyncronously doesn't display a new window. (A "window" is a split within an Emacs "frame" (an X11 window) in Emacs parlance. Emacs is from before the Macintosh introduced the desktop metaphor's now common vocabulary (that Microsoft later copied in Windows), so it uses its own vocab for these concepts.) The reason why there are two scripts for each functionality is that I can use those keyboard shortucts both inside the view where you show the specific entry and in the view where you see all entries while one is selected.

;; Dette gjør at Async Shell Command ikke vises hver gang man kjører en shell kommando med & fra inne i Emacs 
(add-to-list 'display-buffer-alist
  (cons "\\*Async Shell Command\\*.*" (cons #'display-buffer-no-window nil)))
;; Gir meg muligheten til å bruke m i elfeed for å åpne en rss entry i mpv
(defun browse-url-mpv (url &optional single)
  (start-process "mpv" "*mpv*" "mpv" url))
(defun elfeed-show-mpv-open (&optional use-generic-p)
  "open with mpv"
  (interactive "P")
  (let ((browse-url-browser-function #'browse-url-mpv))
    (elfeed-show-visit use-generic-p)))
(defun elfeed-search-mpv-open (&optional use-generic-p)
  "open with mpv"
  (interactive "P")
  (let ((browse-url-browser-function #'browse-url-mpv))
    (elfeed-search-browse-url use-generic-p)))
(define-key elfeed-show-mode-map (kbd "m") 'elfeed-show-mpv-open)
(define-key elfeed-search-mode-map (kbd "m") 'elfeed-search-mpv-open)
;; Gir meg muligheten til å bruke M i elfeed for å åpne en rss entry i yt-dlp
(defun browse-url-ytdlp (url &optional single)
  (shell-command (concat "cd ~/Nedlastinger &&" "yt-dlp -f 'bestvideo[height<=720]+bestaudio/best' " url " &")))
(defun elfeed-show-ytdlp-open (&optional use-generic-p)
  "open with ytdlp"
  (interactive "P")
  (let ((browse-url-browser-function #'browse-url-ytdlp))
    (elfeed-show-visit use-generic-p)))
(defun elfeed-search-ytdlp-open (&optional use-generic-p)
  "open with ytdlp"
  (interactive "P")
  (let ((browse-url-browser-function #'browse-url-ytdlp))
    (elfeed-search-browse-url use-generic-p)))
(define-key elfeed-show-mode-map (kbd "M") 'elfeed-show-ytdlp-open)
(define-key elfeed-search-mode-map (kbd "M") 'elfeed-search-ytdlp-open)

Those scripts worked fine for video channels from LBRY and Youtube, but not for podcasts which use an enclosure url to give the url to the actual episode's video or audio while the general url field in the RSS entry is used for show notes. I tried searching for variables within elfeed with the built in self-documenting features of Emacs, but did not fully understand how to find the enclosure url. After some searching aorund the internet, I found a way to get the enclosure-url and recycled most of my previous code again with the new url to make two functions making it possible for me to listen/watch a podcast with mpv by hitting P and downloading it with yt-dlp with K. I only implemented this for one of the two views.

;; Gir meg muligheten til å bruke P i elfeed for å åpne en podcast (enclosure) i mpv
(defun elfeed-show-play-enclosure (enclosure-index)
  (interactive (list (elfeed--enclosure-maybe-prompt-index elfeed-show-entry)))
  (let ((url (car
              (elt
               (elfeed-entry-enclosures elfeed-show-entry)
               (- enclosure-index 1)))))
    (start-process "mpv" "*mpv*" "mpv" url)))
(define-key elfeed-show-mode-map (kbd "P") 'elfeed-show-play-enclosure)
;; Gir meg muligheten til å bruke K i elfeed for å laste ned en podcast (enclosure) med yt-dlp
(defun elfeed-show-dl-enclosure (enclosure-index)
  (interactive (list (elfeed--enclosure-maybe-prompt-index elfeed-show-entry)))
  (let ((url (car
              (elt
               (elfeed-entry-enclosures elfeed-show-entry)
               (- enclosure-index 1)))))
    (shell-command (concat "cd ~/Nedlastinger &&" "yt-dlp -f 'bestvideo[height<=720]+bestaudio/best' " url " &"))))
(define-key elfeed-show-mode-map (kbd "K") 'elfeed-show-dl-enclosure)

I have set my default browser with my environment variables to Firefox and even though I like Emacs' built in browser eww a lot for text-based content with the occasional picture, I want to keep Firefox as my default browser for now. However, when I read an RSS entry in elfeed and it does not supply the full blog post, it is nice to stay within Emacs and read the linked blog post with eww instead of launching a heavy external browser. So I had to make two functions for the two view modes for that as well. So for those RSS feeds that do not supply the full content, I just hit B and the content opens up in eww. There is built in functionality to open the linked content in the default browser by hitting b in elfeed, so whenever I want or need to open the content in Firefox, I just hit b. For some content that is dependent on JavaScript or is full of media, I sometimes use that built in function, but usually, I use B instead.

;; Gir meg muligheten til å bruk B i elfeed for å åpne en rss entry i eww
(defun elfeed-show-eww-open (&optional use-generic-p)
  "open with eww"
  (interactive "P")
  (let ((browse-url-browser-function #'eww-browse-url))
    (elfeed-show-visit use-generic-p)))
(defun elfeed-search-eww-open (&optional use-generic-p)
  "open with eww"
  (interactive "P")
  (let ((browse-url-browser-function #'eww-browse-url))
    (elfeed-search-browse-url use-generic-p)))
(define-key elfeed-show-mode-map (kbd "B") 'elfeed-show-eww-open)
(define-key elfeed-search-mode-map (kbd "B") 'elfeed-search-eww-open)

Comparing my present elfeed setup with my former Newsboat setup, one thing that is much nicer with these scripts and elfeed is that I don't have to use an external program for podcasts. Newsboat comes with podboat which is intended for use as a podcatcher after you have qued up the content within Newsboat. That process always felt cumbersome and I actually didn't use it because of that. With elfeed and a few scripts, I have all kinds of feeds within the one reader and use a few different keyboard shortcuts to get everything done that I want. Another nice thing with elfeed is its search functionality which is very powerful.

My Emacs journey is still in its infancy, but the more I delve into Emacs, the more I like it. It's powerful, personal and pleasant. Emacs extends the hackability of GNU/Linux further by allowing you to tweak not only your DE or WM through configuration and shell scripts, but also the program you do most of your tasks inside. Integrating more functionality into Emacs means less friction and context switching between different tasks. Thus far, I have only integrated RSS reader, email, pdf document creation (org mode with latex export to pdf), blogging (org mode and org-static-blog), some web browsing (Firefox is still my default browser, but I use eww more and more), note-taking in org mode (I used to use vim and markdown) and of course general text-editing.

It's interesting how much faster for instance navigating around my emails is in mu4e within Emacs than in Thunderbird which was my previous email program. I think the reason is that Emacs is both text and keybord-centric (while also allowing for mouse use if you are so inclined). Elfeed has also become more useful than Newsboat used to be for me since I now also use it for podcasts. The hackability of Emacs means you can add functionality you want or customize things to your own preferences easily. Emacs also uses less system resources than other programs while doing more. Fewer resources means less power use and longer battery life on laptops. You can save money and possibly also CO2 emissions if your electicity is produced in environmentally unfriendly ways.

I see Emacs as the ultimate step in my gradual move towards less resource usage for my computing that started when I switched from Mac OS X to GNU/Linux in 2011, moved to a light-weight desktop environment (LXDE and later LXQt), then to even lighter weight window managers, gradually switched some GUI programs with terminal programs and scripts and then in the end the gradual integration of many tasks into Emacs. (I did this mainly out of curiosity, but I have reaped other rewards like less resource usage and more freedom as well.) If you see Emacs as only a text editor, then it is more resource hungry than vim (but less than VSCode), but if you see it as what it is: an integrated, hackable computing environment, then it is less resource hungry than the combination of programs you would use to do the same tasks. It is also the ultimate expression of the FSF's ideal of empowering users through the use of free software. I am definitively going to delve deeper into Emacs in the months to come.

I soon realised the power of Org Mode and that it could replace my former markdown workflow with practical features like automatic tables, lots of easy to use keyboard shortcuts for creating the .org markup syntax and very easy exporting to all the aforementioned formats plus many more. Not to mention that it is also a calendaring and todo-system, that you can use for literate programming, that it can also be used for journaling, a personal note taking system with reverse-linking etc. Naturally, I have been looking for a way to write my blog posts in Org Mode as well. Many people use Hugo and just convert their .org files to .md files with the emacs package ox-hugo. To me, this seems to be one step more than what I would actually like to do and what is actually necessary. After the war in Ukraine started, I left my website with just a static HTML page, but I have recently wanted to get back into blogging. I had started to work on making a program to make a static site from a bunch of .org files when I discovered the Emacs package org-static-blog that did the same. My plan with my program was to make it first in Bash Shell since I am more familiar with that language and then move it to Elisp for easy integration with Emacs later. Org-static-blog made all that work unneccessary.

Org-static-blog makes a nice index page with a blog-roll of the newest pages, an archive page and an RSS feed. You may also add links to other static pages you would like to include. If you use the tags feature, you can also get RSS feeds for each tag. Personally, I want to just keep things simple for now and have opted out of that feature. To make a new post, you just write an .org file with a title and date and optionally also a description and file tags metadata on the top and then just write your content. Each .org-file becomes a blog post. You can also use org-static-blog-create-new-post to automatically make that document with the correct tags for you which is nice for people like me that have yet to start using metadata heavily in Org files and would enjoy a helping hand with that.

When you are ready to publish your blog, you just run org-static-blog-publish in Emacs, and org-static-blog spits out all the HTML-files you need in your chosen export folder. To make the site look nice, you should make a style.css file that you put into your export folder and link to it in your header as described in the README. There are no themes, but the author links to his own website's Git repo where you can grab his style.css and tweak it to your own liking. As a dark mode lover that also likes to keep things simple, I have opted for a simple black and white look with the occasional light blue for links. The CSS styling is set it and forget it, so after the initial tweak, you are good to go. Just org-static-blog-publish and upload your static files to your website and there you go.

The advantage of using a static site generator over something dynamic is faster load times and easier access to content for non-JavaScript enabled users. Not having unecessary JavaScript running just to show some content that is easily accessible without it also saves power for the site visitors which is good both for the environment and their economy and especially important when Europe is going through an energy crisis caused by Putin's invasion of Ukraine and energy war with Europe.

There are however a few negative sides of using WordPress as well. Since a lot of sites around the web use WordPress, the login for any WordPress site gets constantly hammered by bots trying to break in. The security of plugins might vary. I get a constant flow of spam from my contact form. Since WordPress is quite complex and dynamically fetches content from its database as you view the site, sites using it are a bit slower to load than static sites where all content is stored in files on the server. Usually, this doesn't matter, but for people on slow connections or using text based browsers, it can make a difference. It can also matter if a site gets lots of traffic.

Hugo is a static site generator. I first heard of it in a video by Bryan Lunduke on LBRY. What Hugo does is that it makes it easy to write content in Markdown, pick a theme for the website and generate the files for a static site from it. You just upload those files to your web host and then you have your site. You get the speed of a static site, but the advantage of not having to make all the cod manually. It is sort of a best of both worlds approach where you get the conveniance of a CMS (Content Management System) with the speed and security of a static site. Hugo can even make an RSS feed out of your static site so people can follow you without having to visit your site all the time.

Making the content with markdown is smart because markdown is pure text that you can edit in any text editor on any device. It also appeals to me that I can make the content locally on my machine, spit out the static site, have a look at it with Hugo's built in web server and do any necessary changes before uploading it to my web host. I often revise things after seeing the end result, and maybe I can improve my content before uploading by having the ability to see the end result before it is online. I know I can do this with drafts in WordPress, but drafts are also online when using WordPress and they are included in RSS feeds before actually being posted (which I think many news sites around the internet is not fully aware of).

In this video, I show a script I have made to play radio channels through mpv after having selected which channel to listen to through bemenu.

In the video, I don't go into the rc.xml since the default is quite good and I have only added a few things to get volume keys and brightness keys to work in addition to a few keyboard shortcuts, but I show how you can use synapse for launching apps through the keyboard and stalonetray for a systemtray in the built in "dock" feature of Openbox.

Link to video here.

There are lots of different advice out there and not all of it actually works, so I thought I would write a blog post to remember how to do it and possibly help others with the same problem. This worked for me in Ubuntu 19.10 and Ubuntu 18.04 and it will probably work in future versions like Ubuntu 20.04 as well.

For any of this to work, you have to have enabled repositories from Cannonical partners in your Software Sources control panel since Steam is in those.

Then open a terminal and execute the following:

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo apt update
sudo apt install steam-installer

The first command adds the i386 architecture to your repositories. This is important because most Steam games are i386, not AMD64, so you need to get the i386 versions of libraries for things to work properly. Notice that before add, there are two dashes (they just look like a long dash here.=

The second command updates apt's list of packages available. You should always do this after adding an architecture or a repository.

The third command installs the steam-installer. When you run this later on, it downloads the newest update to the Steam runtime and installs Steam properly.

Since Steam uses the Microsoft Arial font a lot, you might also want to install the Microsoft fonts with this command:

sudo apt install ttf-mscorefonts-installer

You may also just use the Liberation Fonts since those are free software and are made to match the Microsoft Fonts without any of the license restrictions of the MS Fonts.

Another option is to not just install the Microsoft fonts, but all of the Ubuntu restricted extras while you are at it for better DVD-reading/ripping support and such:

sudo apt install ubuntu-restricted-extras

1. Facebook is a law-breaking "digital gangster," UK government report says.
2. Facebook may face multi-billion dollar fine by the US Federal Trade Commision for Cambridge Analytica scandal
3. Facebook is told by American lawmakers to stop spreading Anti-Vaccination propaganda that has led to US outbreak of measles
4. Facebook has misused a developer certificate for iOS to get data from underage children's mobile phones even if it violates Apple's terms of service.
5. And the list goes on and on and on about how this company has no morals and a lot of greed and treats their users as garbage for the sake of earning money.

I would suggest not just deleting your account, but also actively blocking any Javascript from Facebook through browser extensions to avoid them building a shadow profile on you. They are known to build profiles on anyone visiting any site with a Facebook "like"-button or Facebook "Share this on Facebook"-button, even for people that are not Facebook users. Ie, even if you are not a user, you are contributing your data to Facebook if you do not actively block their Javascript on all sites on the internet.

(Blocking all Javascript that is unnecessary for the sites you actually use to function is a good way to make the web experience faster and more secure (since a lot of malware comes in the form of advertising, or malwaretising, that runs Javascript on your machine through your browser) and generally a good idea. A good way to do this is to use Firefox with NoScripts. I also add uBlock Origin and https everywhere for added security against man-in-the-middle attacks and malwaretising.)

I have run LXDE up to now and have just switched to LXQt. Neither of these lighter and smaller desktop environments have a built in screen calibrator, so I needed to find another solution. The solution I found will work in any desktop environment or window manager as long as you use X11.

On the Arch Wiki I found a good solution called xcalib. This is a command line tool that takes an .icc colour profile and calibrates the screen with it. I tried with the .icm profile I had extracted from a Windows executable supplied by Lenovo on their site and it didn't work. I then DuckDuckWent and found on a Thinkpad forum that there was a colour profile for the X230 available in the Display section of a review of the X230 on notebookcheck.net. The profile is hidden on the bottom of a table with technical info on the right of a picture with the text "distribution of brightness" underneath. (If it should ever disappear, contact me through my contact page and I will happily email you a copy.)

I downloaded the .icc profile file and fed it to xcalib and the colours changed. I also have a Thinkpad W520 with a calibrated screen and know how my pictures on Flickr should look from seeing them on that screen, so I took a look at the same pictures on the X230 screen and they looked as they should as far as I was able to ascertain. It was really obvious that they did not look right before the calibration, but after the calibration, they looked alright.

To make this change permanent, all you need to do is to execute the xcalib command with the .icc profile file that fits the screen at the start up of your desktop environment or window manager. In LXQt, you can use the Session Settings to autostart xcalib thenameoftheprofile.icc. In LXDE, you can use the LXsession session manager to do the same. I put the .icc profile file in my home folder to be certain I back it up properly.

To me, getting the screen calibrated was the one missing piece to make the Thinkpad X230 an excellent ultraportable machine that can replace my Thinkpad W520 as my main machine. I like the small and light 12 inch form factor, the IPS screen, the excellent keyboard, the relatively powerful i7 M-class processor, the long battery life and the generous selection of ports.

Lately, many Mac users have been disappointed in the hardware and to a lesser degree also the software that Apple makes. It seems like Apple is focused mainly on iOS since their earnings mainly stem from it. Some of the core Mac users in creative industries that have used Macs since the 80s are now leaving or thinking about leaving since it seems like Apple no longer makes the best hardware for these use-cases. For video editors that need the ultimate in processing power, graphics processors, RAM and storage space, there hasn't been a good Mac since 2013. Therefore, some companies like Pixar that traditionally used Macs have been using System76 machines with Ubuntu for some years now.

For long time Mac users, Windows 10 doesn't necessarily look like a good alternative to macOS. Linux is the lesser known alternative, but it is in many ways more similar to macOS than Windows, although there are of course a lot of differences as well. Since I have gradually switched from Macs to Linux over the last few years, I thought it would make sense for me to share some of my thoughts about the main advantages of Linux seen from a Mac user's perspective.

Choose the desktop environment you like

On macOS and Windows, you either have to use the graphical user interface your operating system (OS) delivers or use another OS. On Linux, most distributions (distros) have lots of desktop environments and window managers (lower weight and simpler desktop environments) to choose from. If you like the core technologies of a distro, but dislike its desktop environment (DE), then you can install another DE instead. Some distros come with only one desktop environment by default (elementaryOS with the Pantheon DE). Other distros ship more than one desktop environment that the user can choose at install time (Antergos, Debian, Arch…) while others have different editions with different DEs (Manjaro, Linux Mint). Yet again other distros come with one official desktop environment, such as Ubuntu (with Unity), but with official and/or unofficial community projects, flavours or respins that deliver other desktop environments like Lubuntu (with LXDE), Xubuntu (with XFCE), Ubuntu MATE (with MATE), Ubuntu Gnome (with Gnome), Kubuntu (With KDE), Ubuntu Budgie (with Budgie).

Even where only one desktop environment is available in a distro, other desktop environments and window managers are usually available in the software repositories, and it is trivial to install your favourite. This also means that if a family shares a desktop computer, the mother might like to use KDE, the father might prefer Unity, the oldest daughter might like LXQt while the youngest son enjoys Joe's Window Manager. These different desktop environments and window managers will happily live on the same system and with multiple users logging into their favourite. It is also possible to use Gnu/Linux without a user interface at all and just log into the command line interface. Most servers (whether on real hardware or in virtual machines) are setup this way.

Use familiar Unix command line tools

Just like macOS and the BSDs, Linux has its roots in Unix. Unix had multi-user environments, networkability and stability as some of its strengths. The Linux kernel itself was originally made by Linus Torvalds to make a usable Unix system out of a desktop PC, even if it is now used on a vast range of devices and hardware architectures. Many of the command line tools used in Mac OS X are the same or have the same name as the GNU utilities used in Linux. That is why Linux distros are also called GNU/Linux or GNU+Linux. This means that if you used Unix back in the day, or if you have become familiar with the Mac OS X terminal, most of that knowledge is usable on Linux as well. So, for macOS power users, the Linux terminal will be a cosy and familiar place.

Economic advantages

Depending on what you use your computer(s) for, the use of Linux instead of Windows or macOS may save you some money. Most distros include a lot of free and open source software both preinstalled or in their software repositories. Much of this software can handle tasks you might have had to buy software to do on a Mac or Windows PC just fine. Most free and open source software is initially free of cost, but if you use the software, you are encouraged to contribute back either monetarily or by helping develop the software further through coding, design, translations or documentation or by simply spreading the word about it. This means that you can evaluate software without buying it, and when you decide which software you will continue using, you are free to postpone contributing back until you have the money, knowledge or time to do so. You are also in a position where you can influence the direction of a project by taking part in it.

Even if you primarily use paid for software (whether open source or closed source) and are a decent person contributing to your distro of choice, you may end up saving some money by getting hardware that is more future-proof or suited to your needs than what a Mac might deliver. With Apple going in the direction of non-upgradable hardware with built in forced obsolesensce and a focus on thinness over functionality, especially users which need high-end GPUs, CPUs, lots of storage and RAM or writers depending on good keyboards, will probably be better off economically by buying more upgradable hardware from other vendors. And you can choose the hardware you want, not the hardware Apple thinks you should want.

Macs have traditionally been more expensive, but you used to get a longer life-span out of the machines than their PC counterparts, but now, they are more expensive, but with the same standard PC parts as other X86 PCs, but with less future-proof designs. A high end laptop from Entroware, System76 or Dell beats a MacBook Pro both on price, raw performance, customisability and longevity, and thus delivers lower cost of ownership per year. Apple is also notorious for charging a lot for built to order options, even if these options are the only way to future proof a machine that is not user upgradable. If you use Linux, you can choose whatever hardware you like, and many vendors cater for both high end, mid-range and low end use cases.

If you do not need high-end hardware, the choice in low-end hardware for reasonable prices for Linux use is much greater than on macOS. Older Macs that no longer get security updates to their installed Mac OS X version and that are unable to be upgraded to later versions of Mac OS X can run many Linux distros just fine. (I used to run Ubuntu side by side with Snow Leopard on my late 2006 white MacBook.) For really low-end needs like thin clients, any used netbook, desktop or laptop from the last ten years will work fine. Just use a lightweight Linux distro like Lubuntu, Peppermint OS, Puppy Linux or AntiX. Even PowerPC Macs are still usable with Linux. And for digital signs, media centres, routers, firewalls, DNS servers and other low power needs, a Raspberry Pi or Intel Compute Stick works well. I use a Raspberry Pi3 with LibreElec for my entertainment system. It cost less than half of an Apple TV and does everything the Apple TV does and more.

I have found that by simply choosing “Options…” from the “Tools” menu and selecting the “View” tab, it is possible to choose scaling of the whole programme. As with Firefox, I have found that 180% works well. This makes LibreOffice the same size it would be on a 1067 x 667 screen of 10 inches and that works fine. Everything is large enough to be easily viewed, but at the same time there is enough space for content.

I also like to remove the toolbars by deselecting “Formatting” and “Standard” in View > Toolbars and in stead drag the Sidebar out from the right to show more options and be more useful. With the tablet in landscape orientation, this gives me the most space for contents on the page as long as the document is in portrait orientation (which almost all LibreOffice Writer documents are). It gives the least amount of scrolling and the largest possible view of the page. Especially on smaller screens, making the most of the available space is really nice (but I also do this on my 24 inch desktop screen).

In the first video, I show how you can install Debian 7 on the iBook. In the second video I show you how I maxed the RAM and exchanged the ancient and clicking hard drive in my Blueberry iBook with a CF-card and CF-to ATA board. In the third video, I show how the iBook runs after the upgrades from the second video.

Update 2020 This method no longer works, but it is possible to find and RSS feed from a youtube-channel at yewtu.be and copy that link into your RSS reader.

I happen to have a white Apple remote that I got with my white MacBook in 2006. It’s a really minimalist infrared remote control that originally was meant for use with FrontRow before Apple discontinued it when they launched the Apple TV and Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion”. It is literally made for controlling media playback.

I found an excellent guide on how to set it up that worked very well for me, so I wanted to share it and write it down here to remember where I found it for later reference. It’s not too hard to follow and after setting it up with the correct addresses for each key, I am now able to remote control KODI. 🙂

2 Comments on How to use an Apple remote with KODI on Ubuntu on an Intel NUC

Carlos Santos 3rd August 2016 at 12:35 pm

Thanks for the reference 😉

Reply Einar 3rd August 2016 at 2:21 pm

Thank you for finding the information in the first place! It’s easy to follow your guide, but it must have taken a lot of time to figure it all out. 🙂

The most important fix in OTA 12 for me was that alt gr now works on external keyboards. This means that with an external keyboard, I can write just like on the desktop in LibreOffice and Firefox. However, there is still a bug with accented characters in native apps (but not the traditional X apps) and this is a bummer, especially for people using languages like French, Spanish, Portugese, etc that use accented characters a lot. Special glyphs that you get to with alt gr work fine, but accented characters do not in the native apps. Hopefully, this will be fixed soon.

As I have used the tablet more recently, I have noticed some more bugs and missing features. In the music player app, I found some minor annoyances such as albums with more than one artist showing up as more than one album in the album view, that there is too little space for album and artist names in album view and artist view and that I would like to have a list view for easier navigation with a lot of music.

After OTA 12 shipped, I also noticed that traditional X apps disappear from the launcher after a restart. This is a bit annoying, as it is easier to get to the launcher than to go to the Xapps scope to launch a traditional app like Firefox.

There are probably a number of small changes in OTA 12 that I have not noticed or tried yet. For instance, I know that it is now possible to use Aethercast to connect to an external screen from my M10, but since I don’t have an Aethercast-compliant Miracast dongle, I haven’t tried it. I haven’t used the tablet much with external screens this far (I have a desktop computer at home), but I have tried it and it worked fine. For presentations, lectures or just watching films at a hotel room, the Aethercast support is cool, but if you really want to be certain that you will be able to connect, an HDMI cable seems a safer bet, since not all Miracast devices support Aethercast.

Another missing feature in Ubuntu touch at the moment is the ability to choose default browser. I would like to be able to set Firefox as my default browser on Ubuntu touch, since I use some add ons and syncing in Firefox that I would rather not be without. With no such setting, any links from any app will open in the Ubuntu touch browser.

Another small annoyance is that it is presently impossible to copy and paste between traditional X apps and the native Ubuntu touch apps. Especially since Firefox is not the default browser and clicking a link opens it in the Ubuntu touch browser, I would like to be able to copy it from there and paste it into Firefox, but there seems to be no way of doing this presently. A bug is open, and it seems to be fixed for the libertine sandbox X apps run inside, but not in all the other projects needed for it to work. So, this will probably be fixed soon.

Some of the other important bugs for everyday use, such as calendar syncing and contacts syncing have not been fixed yet. This is disappointing, but given time, I am certain someone will fix it. Syncing through Google works, but standards compliant ways of syncing or importing/exporting to other services do not. Since Google is not exactly the FOSS enthusiasts’ most obvious choice of syncing service, as their business model is to use all your private data for advertising purposes, it seems strange that the Ubuntu touch developers found time to implement Google syncing, but not syncing to other more privacy respecting services through standards like iCal and CalDAV, since most Ubuntu touch users at this point is Linux enthusiasts.

All in all, Ubuntu touch is really impressive when bearing in mind that it is only a few years old and that it is developed by quite few people compared to Android or iOS. It is already a viable alternative for tablets and phones (unless you speak a language reliant on accented characters and want to use an external keyboard, but this will be solved soon) and in not too long, the Unity 8 interface used on the tablets and phones when in desktop mode will also come to the regular Ubuntu distro on laptops and desktops. This means that all the work going into the tablets and phones will also benefit the desktop in the long run.

I really like the M10, and even if the software is still a bit rougher around the edges than an iPad or Android tablet of the same size would be, I find it exciting to take part in the Ubuntu touch journey as it is maturing. The hardware itself is very good with its high DPI 1920 x 1200 screen, quad core 1.5 GHz processor and I particularly like the well sounding speakers. LibreOffice and Firefox are quite heavy programs, but they run decently on the M10 FHD with a bit of time to start up. They might not be as usable on the slightly slower white M10 HD tablet (1280 x 800 screen and 1.3 GHz processor with slightly slower GPU as well), so I am glad I bought the more expensive and slightly faster and higher DPI black FHD version. The Ubuntu touch experience on the M10 FHD is nice, and gradually improving to become even better. With OTA 12 it is a bit closer to being ready for everyman, but there are still quite important bugs that need fixing and some features missing.

If you have a low resolution screen this is even more important. If you only watch films on your computer, then the “traditional” Gnome 2 and Windows layouts work fine. The traditional layouts also make more sense on “traditional” a 4:3 screen since the screen has more space in the height compared to the width than modern wider screens (16:9 or 16:10).

In addition to scrolling less and seeing more content, I also find this layout functional and a bit more beautiful than the «traditional» layout. It is possible to use a more fancy dock like docky or plank in stead of the LX panel that comes with Lubuntu, but then you also need compositing and that makes the machine a bit less energy efficient, even if it looks beautiful, so I prefer to just use LX panel. It is possible to use translusency without compositing and it looks quite nice in my opinion. My tweaked Lubuntu with LibreOffice Writer open My tweaked Lubuntu with LibreOffice Writer open

The advantages of using Lubuntu with the LXDE desktop environment in stead of standard Ubuntu with Unity is mainly that it is faster, runs better on older hardware, uses less RAM and CPU and GPU cycles, uses less energy (= longer battery life on laptops) and is more tweakable. Even if I like Unity, Lubuntu lures me back time and again and I enjoy using it a lot. At present, I use it on my laptop after a period of Manjaro Gnome. I am probably more of an LTS kind of guy even if I like the idea of a (slow) rolling distro.

I have made a video showing how to tweak LXDE to be more pixel efficient than it is out of the box on Lubuntu. I also change some other aspects of the look and feel more to my liking. The goal is to get something like what you see on the screenshot above. (There is no sound in the video.)

Here is a step by step guide if you didn’t get all of it from the video.

Openbox configuration manager

1. Choose “Lubuntu-small” theme in “Theme” tab
2. Make font sizes 10 in “Appearance” tab
3. Make 4 desktops and name them in “Desktop” tab in Openbox configuration manager
4. Set left margin to 33 in “Margins” tab

Customize look and feel

1. Set icon theme to “Ubuntu-Mono-Light” in “Icon theme” tab
2. Check / set that theme is “Lubuntu-small” in “Window border” tab
3. Check / set font size to 10 in “Title bar tab”
4. Check /set font sizes to 10 in “Misc” tab
5. Choose “Small toolbar icon” as “Toolbar icon size” in “Other” tab

Desktop preferences (right-click desktop)

1. Set font size to 10 for “Font of label text”
2. Deselect “Use desktop as a folder (show icons on it) by path:” in “Advanced” tab

LXpanel (right-click it and choose “Panel settings”)

1. Set “Edge” to “Left” in “Geometri” tab
2. Set height to 100 percent
3. Set width to 32
4. Set Icon size to 30
5. Select “Solid color (with opacity)
6. Click color field and choose a nice light grey and set opacity to 128 and click “OK”
7. Set Size to 7 under Font.
8. Remove everything except “Menu”, “Spacer”, “Volume control”,”System tray” and “Digital clock” in “Panel Applets” tab
9. Move “Digital clock” to before “Volume control” by selecting it and clicking “up”
10. Select “Stretch” for the spacer
11. Add new “Spacer” between “Menu” and “Application launch bar”.
12. Set width of new “Spacer” to 4 pixels by double clicking it.
13. Add programs to “Application launch bar” by double clicking it

(14. Set Tux image as menu icon by double clicking “Menu” in the “Application launch bar” tab and selecting the Tux image in the open dialog.)

A special thanks go to Leszeck Lesner for the Lubuntu screencasts from some years ago that taught me how to tweak Lubuntu! 🙂

Different people have different needs for different tasks. Fore some, an ultrabook is perfect, for others a tablet, for some a laptop, for some a chromebook and for some a netbook. There are different considerations, such as which operating system(s) you want to use, what form factor(s) you like to use, how much money you are willing to spend, whether mobility or screen real estate is more important to you, how much storage space you need, how long battery life you need, if you want a keyboard or not, if you like touchpads or touch screens or both…

I am touch typist, so I really want a keyboard on my device, but I also want a small and ultraportable devices that is easier to bring with me than my 13,3 inch MacBook Pro. It is just too big and heavy. The 10 inch form factor of most netbooks is very portable, but big enough that the screen, keyboard and trackpad are useable even for adults. There are also netbooks with 11 and 12 inch screens if you prefer a slightly larger size and some people get along fine with 7 and 9 inch netbooks as well. I have got thick fingers, so smaller keyboards than the one on my 10 inch Asus EeePC would be too hard to write on for me.

Netbook keyboards are of varying build quality and size, but I find that the Asus EeePC 1015 PEM I have got is ok to type on, even if it has taken some time to get used to the 93% keyboard size. People often use tablets with bluetooth keyboards, but then you have to carry two devices and you are back to the clamshell form factor of traditional laptops anyway. For me, the price of a tablet combined with apps for it and a keyboard is just overkill when I can get a netbook much cheaper that suits my needs better. I also prefer a full desktop operating system and a full set of ports. For others, a tablet with iOS, Android or Tizen might be perfect. And for the people that want more processor power in a light and portable package, an ultrabook might be right. Personally, I really like the good old-fashioned clamshell laptop form factor.

One advantage of netbooks is that they have all the usual ports like USB, Ethernet, VGA and/or HDMI, sound in and out and SD card reader. If you ever use a USB stick or mobile broadband or want to plug your device into a projector, this might be important to you. Combined with a full desktop operating system, you get all the flexibility of the traditional desktop computer in a light, compact and mobile package. You can run any version of Windows or any Linux distro you want. You can even hackintosh it if you are so inclined. And if you prefer a simpler interface, you might try running Android, MeeGo, Tizen, JolliCloud or any tablet/phone operating system in stead. Choice is good!

Battery life is a reason many people state as their main reason to use a tablet in stead of a laptop. Since netbooks are now getting really cheap on the used market, you could buy a netbook and a high-capacity battery for half the price of a tablet and get more or less the same battery life (some Asus Eee with dual core processors can get up to 13 hours of claimed battery life, which is probably more like 8 to 10 hours in real life). Of course, netbooks with GPUs have shorter battery life, while netbooks with integrated graphics have longer battery life. On my netbook, I am getting around 4 and a half hours of normal use with Wifi on and the screen brightness set to maximum with the three year old low capacity battery that came with the netbook. So far I haven’t bought a high capacity battery, but I am thinking about it. Might be smart to do so before they become too scarce.

With a netbook you have more upgradability than on a tablet or ultrabook. RAM is usually easily upgradable. It is also so cheap now that there is no reason not to max the RAM. Most older netbooks came with 1 GB of RAM and maxed out at 2 GB, but some of the newer ones max out at 4 GB. More RAM will usually increase speed, specially if you are multitasking a lot. A tip if you are running a Linux distro is to maximise the RAM and set the swappiness to 0, so that the netbook will use the faster RAM in stead of using the swap partition on your hard disc as long as there is still RAM available. Since disc writes and reads are draining the battery more than RAM writes and reads, this will also increase battery life as well as make the overall experience faster.

If you buy one of the newer netbooks, they usually come with 160 GB or 250 GB hard disc drives. Compared to tablets which often have 16, 32 or 64 GB SSDs, there is a lot more room for movies and music and whatever you might want to bring with you on most of the newer netbooks. On some netbooks, the hard drive is easily swapped out for another disc if you need more space by just opening a hatch on the back of the computer. On my Asus EeePC, the hard drive is harder to get to, but there are tutorials on youtube and blogs for upgrading it, so it is still user upgradable. Be aware that 2,5 inch SATA drives come in different heights and that your netbook might use a 7 or 9 mm high drive and taller drives might not fit. With hard disc drives up to a Terabyte being quite cheap now, it is not very expensive to get more storage space or a faster hard drive if you want or need to. SSDs bring silent computing since the fans don’t have to remove excess heat produced by a spinning disc. They also bring longer battery life, since there are no moving parts and motors, but the price is high per GigaByte. It is probably overkill to invest in an expensive SSD for an inexpensive netbook. On the other hand, a SATA SSD might be brought over to a newer device or put in a USB, eSATA or FireWire enclosure at a later time, so if you really want one, you might be able to justify it somehow. Personally, I am thinking they are still too expensive and for now, the 250 GB hard disc that came with the netbook is large enough. I keep my ripped DVDs on my MacBook Pro.

Another upgrade choice I mentioned in an earlier paragraph is the battery. Unlike many new ultrabooks and tablets, the battery is usually user replaceable in a netbook. This means that you will be able to use the device for a longer time, since you do not need to pay an authorized serviceperson to open your device to change your battery and you don’t get the dilemma of buying new or a high price for a repairsperson to fix the machine when it is getting old. More user-upgradability means that the device will stay in service longer, which is good for the environment.

There are many things to love about netbooks, but there are also some drawbacks. The main drawbacks are usually the processor, GPU or lack thereof, screen resolution and keyboard. Most netbooks have a screen with a resolution of 1024 x 600, which is useable, but somewhat limiting, specially the 600 pixels of height. Some netbooks have GPUs and higher definition screens, usually 1366 x 768. Even if my Asus has an integrated Intel graphic chip, I have had no trouble utilising projectors or external screens in addition to the internal screen when using Lubuntu. Video playback is fluid. Usually this is not a problem with the newer netbooks.

Keyboards on netbooks are usually smaller than 100%. Some are mushy and very small, while others are quite ok, once you get used to the smaller size and the placement of the keys. I think the keyboard of an Asus EeePC 1015 PEM compares quite well to the chicklet keyboard on the Macbook and Macbook Pro. The main difference is the size and that the keys have slightly more resistance on the Asus. Asus actually used to produce Macs for Apple in the past, so they certainly know how to produce well designed computers.

The processor is usually the main drawback of netbooks. Earlier netbooks had single core Intel Atom processor and later have AMD fusion or dual core Intel Atoms. Even the later netbooks are quite slow compared to full-fledged laptops with Core 2 Duo, i3, i5 or i7 or AMD processors. The ultrabooks, which usually have a slightly bigger screen and a slimmer body beneath the keyboard, have more processing power, but they usually lack the upgradability of netbooks and cost much more.

For most daily tasks like email, websurfing, watching movies, listening to music, podcasts and internet radio, watching online videos and streams, writing documents, making spreadsheets, instant messaging, video conferencing, VOIP &c a netbook is really all you need, but it might take some seconds more to boot the operating system and launch programs than an ultrabook would have used. That is the main trade off for the small size and the quite long battery life. For the low prices of netbooks on the used market, getting a quite new, high-end netbook is a no-brainer if you want a very portable computer and do not need a lot of processor power or a high resolution screen.

After I got my netbook, my huge and heavy 13,3 inch MacBook Pro has become my desktop computer. I still use it a lot at home and when I am away for longer periods at the same place, but for mobile computing, the 10 inch Asus is much more practical. Of course, if you are not a touch typist or don’t want to or need to write on a traditional keyboard, then maybe a tablet might be just as good, but for me, the freedom to install whatever operating system I want and the ability to connect with VGA to a projector or an external screen or use USB to connect to my camera or phone or a mobile broadband USB stick is invaluable. It is much lighter in my backpack than my MacBook Pro. Of course, I might as well have used a small 11 or 12 inch ultrabook, but it would have cost at least triple what I payed. Since I don’t really need the extra processing power, a netbook is perfect for me.

I initially ran Ubuntu 12.04, the previous long term support (LTS) version, but Ubuntu 14.04 is faster and leaner and comes with more up-to-date programs. If you are thinking of using Ubuntu on your MacBook, use the newest LTS. There is a new version of Ubuntu every six months, but personally, I prefer staying on the long term support version that comes out every two years. This gives me stability and security and I don't need to upgrade or reinstall that often. The LTS release is supported for five years, so even after the next LTS is out, you have some time before needing to upgrade.

Ubuntu 14.04 comes with all the newest programs and everything "just works". All the hardware on the MacBook works fine out of the box, except the internal iSight camera, the internal microphone and the fans. Apple doesn't supply drivers for their fans for Linux or Windows, which means that although you can run Windows or Linux on the machine, the fans are either off or on at full speed. This makes the machine more noisy when not running Mac OS X and also shortens the battery life. The solution is to install macfanctl. You can find it in the Ubuntu software centre or by using apt install macfanctl.

To get the webcam working, I found some tips in an old how-to on the Ubuntu MacTel support wiki,but the page was somewhat hard to understand and I had to do some additional thinking and experimenting to get it working. So I thought I'd share the solution here:

1. Step one was to get the iSight firmware from a machine/disk with Mac OS 10.6.8 Snow Leopard installed. You have to go to system/Library/Extensions and find IOUSBFamily.kext. Then ctrl-click (or right-click) on it and select "Show contents". Then navigate to the

Contents folder within it, and to the PlugIns folder within it and ctrl-click on AppleUSBVideoSupport.kext and select "Show contents" again. Then navigate into the Contents folder and into the MacOS folder and copy the file "AppleUSBVideoSupport" to a USB memory stick.

1. Open a Terminal and write sudo apt-get install isight-firmware-tools and hit enter and write your password and hit enter again. You need to install this program to extract the parts of the firmware file that Ubuntu will use and place it where it should be. Don't close the Terminal window yet, you will need it later.
2. Insert your USB memory stick and copy the "AppleUSBVideoSupport" to your home folder. 4. In the Terminal, write

sudo ift-extract -a /home/yourusername/AppleUSBVideoSupport (with the name of your user instead of "yourusername") and hit enter. (You might have to write your password again.) If everything works fine, you will get notified that isight.fw have been added to /lib/firmware. Now restart, and you can enjoy using your iSight webcam and internal microphone with Skype or Cheese or whatever program you like.

There is also another minor annoyance in Ubuntu for me: the Norwegian Macintosh keyboard layout does not correspond to the physical Norwegian Macintosh keyboards on one key, which makes it impossible to write apostrophes. All other glyphs and modifiers work fine. My solution is to use the Norwegian [PC] keyboard layout and remap the right command key (called the right Win key) to Alt-Gr with the Keyboard system settings panel (as shown above).

Update as of 28th August 2019: I got a message through my contact page that the above procedure to get iSight working also works with Debian. Since Ubuntu is downstream from Debian, that seems natural, but it was nice to hear from someone that has actually done it with success.

It turns out that the Rhythmbox radio stations are stored in the same database file that the whole music library database is stored in. Unfortunately, I could not just copy the database file, since the links in the file are hard links and the user names (and home folder names) are different on the two machines. Changing all the song entries would have been tedious, but I found another way.

What I did was open the file ~/.local/share/rhythmbox/rhythmdb.xml in gedit. (Open a terminal and write gedit ~/.local/share/rhythmbox/rhythmdb.xml and press return.) Then I searched for "iradio" by clicking on the magnifying glass and scrolled down until I found the radio stations I had added. I then selected everything from <entry type="iradio"… until entry> after the last of my added radio streams and copied it (press ctrl-c). Next, I opened a new file in gedit and pasted my text (ctrl-v) and saved the new file to a USB thumbdrive. On the other machine, I inserted the thumb drive, opened my saved file in gedit (right-click the file name in Nautilus and select "Open with" and "Text editor") and copied everything in the file (press cttrl-a and ctrl-c). Then I opened the ~.local/share/rhythmbox/rhythmdb.xml file in gedit (open a terminal and type gedit ~/.local/share/rhythmbox/rhythmdb.xml and press return), searched for "iradio", scrolled down to the last radio station, set the marker after the last "/entry>", hit return, pasted my radio station entries (ctrl-v), checked that there were no extra empty lines before or after my radio entries and then I saved the file. When I opened up Rhythmbox, my radio stations were there and streaming radio was working fine.

The 30th anniversary of the Macintosh

I start up that old Quadra 700 in System 7, and I am back at the personal computer that lets me put whatever I want in the Apple-menu, a truely Wozniakian machine. I’m back at the desktop where I ResEdited all the desktop patterns and changed those STR# resources so my Mac would tell me «Welcome to Einar’s Mac» at start-up, back at the computer where I could put a picture in a special StartUpScreen format in the system folder, and see my picture as the background when the machine booted. I am back at that operating system that lets me choose which control panels and extensions should run, the system that lets me allocate the amount of RAM I want for my programs, the amount of virtual memory used and whether I would like a RAM-disk or not.

These were the days of System 7: The IBM-compatibles were the machines of the corporate office drones, opening their 3,11 Windows so their 1,6 children could Excel in Word with 4 colours. On my Mac, I could publish «newspapers» with the kids in my neighbourhood using ClarisWorks, while others were struggling with config.sys, autoexec.bat and extended memory. I could write orchestral scores in Finale at the age of learning my first words of English at school. I could program my own games in HyperTalk, make a contact database in ClarisWorks or chill with Prince of Persia or Maelstrom. I could draw superbly in SuperPaint even if not on paper. I could MacDraw, MacPaint, MacLISP and MacWrite II. These were the days of PowerBook 140s, the days when PCs didn’t have norwegian characters in the fonts used by MS-DOS while Macs had whatever keyboard layout I would like and the fonts to match them. These were the days of WriteNow, PageMaker, GraphicConverter, Netscape, iCab, WordPerfect and PhotoShop.

Alas, it had to end. Steve Jobs’ second coming at Apple brought a revolution. Bill Gates from MICROSOFT! was presented as Apple’s saviour at MacWorld. Hell had frozen over and Steve Jobs held a funeral for Mac OS 9. Our corporate overlords decided that everything on screen should be grey from now on and that the Apple logo should loose its colours. Resistance was futile and the brushed aluminium age of Apple Inc. had commenced. All the colour, charm, humour and personality of the good old Macintosh System Software was gone. Forever lost to retro-computing was Clarus the dog-cow, the view of the Cupertino campus hidden in «About Finder», the program menu from the days of ye olde MultiFinder, the customisable and colourful Apple-menu, and the illogical charm of logging into a network server over AppleTalk with the Chooser DA.

It was a new jungle of Panthers, Tigers, Snow Leopards and Mountain Lions. It was a Quartz Extreme time of Carbonised Aqua and imprisonment in brushed metal interfaces. It was a time of confusion of keyboard shortcuts, and a time of mousing into the menu after not having had to do so since System 6 in the late 80s. It was a time of every program having a menu called the name of the program, but not containing much other than «Settings..» and «Quit», in stead of the File menu being next to the Apple menu, as Atkinson intended and sense predicted. It was mayham and confusion. It was a time of accepting being a user, not a poweruser. It was brutal, but I adapted.

Macs are more popular than ever, with the Mac-hating sheep of the MS-DOS days now flocking to the glass-walled, consumerist temples that are the Apple stores. For the new converts, the Mac delivers the friendly interface Windows users never knew they could have. (Try out the control panel on a Mac and compare with Windows, and you get what I mean.) But for me, the magic has faded with the six colours. I still use Macs, and in many ways, they are greater than ever, but I don’t like that Apple’s designs are forcing obsolesence while Cook is talking green on stage. I find myself drawn towards the open source world, where lots of the exciting new technological developments are happening. Maybe it is just a matter of wanting to think different(ly)?

This is the legacy of the Macintosh: the idea that a computing device needs a user-friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) to be efficient and compelling. It’s everywhere today, not necessarily greatly executed, but everywhere. I love my iBook, Macintosh Server G3, MacBook, MacBook Pro and EeePC, but nothing gets me moofing like starting System 7.6.1 on the Quadra, hearing the major chord chime, seeing the happy Mac, and booting into the good old Finder. I get the warm feeling of coming home to my personal computer.