Planet Larry

A neat feature with the tiling window manager dwm is the fact that it can swallow clients. This means that when you, for an example open a video with mpv in the terminal (or via Ranger), you can automatically replace that client with the video. This helps you save a lot of valuable space on your desktop.

This feature is not available in i3 by default, but thanks to an addon called i3-swallow and the Python library i3ipc-python, it’s possible to have this in i3 as well.

Installation

i3-swallow

The installation is pretty easy, you just have to download the source code for i3-swallow, preferably using git:

$ git clone https://github.com/jamesofarrell/i3-swallow

Then place the script in your $PATH. I use the folder ~/local/bin/ myself:

$ ln -s ~/src/git/i3-swallow/swallow.py ~/.local/bin/

i3ipc-python

This package is availbable via pip:

$ pip install --user i3ipc

I prefer to keep as much packages as possible via Gentoo’s own package manager, so I made an ebuild for it called dev-python/i3ipc:

EAPI=7

PYTHON_COMPAT=( python3_{7..9} )

inherit distutils-r1

DESCRIPTION="An improved Python library to control i3wm and sway."
HOMEPAGE="https://github.com/altdesktop/i3ipc-python"
SRC_URI="mirror://pypi/${PN:0:1}/${PN}/${P}.tar.gz"

LICENSE="BSD"
SLOT="0"
KEYWORDS="amd64"

RDEPEND="dev-python/python-xlib"
DEPEND="${DEPEND}"

Usage

You can now use the script like this:

$ swallow.py mpv <file>

I just found out about a new Twitch client called wtwitch. It’s written in Bash and it uses the Twitch API and the streamlink package to provide Twitch browsing, subscription, and playback functionality without signing up for a Twitch account and without loading or executing Twitch’s proprietary JavaScript.

Here’s how it looks when you list the online channels you have subscribed to:

wtwitch has the following commands available:

[w]atch [name]      - Watch [name] streamer.
[s]ub [name(s)]     - Subscribe to [name] streamer.
                      You can subscribe to multiple streamers in one command.
[u]nsub [name(s)]   - Unsubscribe from [name] streamer.
                      You can unsubscribe from multiple streamers in one command.
[c]heck             - View your settings and the status of streamers you are
                      subscribed to.
[e] [search-term]   - Search games/categories for [search-term].
[n] [search-term]   - Search streamers/channels for [search-term].
[g]ame [name]       - View the top streamers for [name] game/category.
[t]op               - View the top games and streamers on Twitch.
[f]                 - Toggle the printing of offline subscriptions with [c]heck.
[l]                 - Toggle the usage of colors in wtwitch output.
[p]layer [program]  - Change the player program that gets passed to streamlink.
[q]uality [quality] - Change the video quality that gets passed to streamlink.
[b]lock [name(s)]   - Block [name] streamer, preventing them from appearing in any
                      output. You can block multiple streamers in one command.
[v]ersion           - Print the current version of wtwitch.
[h]elp              - Print this help.

You can install the manual page yourself (see below) or just have a look at the online manual if you need any help.

Installation

This is a Bash script, so the ‘installation’ is rather simple; you can just put the script in your $PATH and then run it, but I do recommend creating a symbolic link from the source directory to your $PATH instead. This makes updating the source a lot easier.

This is what I did to create a symbolic link:

$ ln -s ~/src/git/wtwitch/src/wtwitch ~/.local/bin

Do note that wtwitch requires streamlink and jq, both packages should be available in the repositories for any common Linux based operating systems. In Gentoo, they’re available as net-misc/streamlink and app-misc/jq.

Manual page

If, you want to install an offline copy of the manual you need to install the tool scdoc. It’s available in Gentoo as app-text/scdoc.

Make sure that you’re in the src directory and then run scdoc:

$ scdoc < wtwitch.1.scd > wtwitch.1

You can then view the manual page with the command:

$ man -l wtwitch.1

It all started a couple of years ago when I started to feel that my phone was becoming too distracting for me. I began to go through my installed applications and I found a few that I could uninstall right away, but I quickly realised that was never the issue as I don’t have that many applications to begin with.

The only applications that actually send me daily notifications is my XMPP-client Conversations and my e-mail client K-9 Mail. And removing those two applications was never an option. XMPP and e-mail are my two primary (and basically only) way of communicating with my family, friends and the world.

Because e-mail is not used for real-time conversations, I decided to disable the notifications to see if that made any difference for me. Well. It didn’t. I really don’t get that many e-mail messages per day to begin with, it only made me spend more time checking my inbox to see if I haven’t missed anything.

Then one morning, everything changed. I was sitting in my kitchen, eating my breakfast and listening to some netcast show before getting ready for work when my phone all of a sudden just went silent. I poked at the phone trying to wake it up, but nothing happened. It was dead.

It turned out that my phone had been affected by the notorious “bootloop of death” issue, which seems to be a common issue for both my Nexus 5X and the Nexus 6P. To my knowledge, it’s something that eventually happens to every phone? It seems that I was just lucky that it took me more than 4 years for my phone to turn into an expensive brick.

I was suddenly forced to buy a new phone, something that I wasn’t really thrilled about. I didn’t want to spend either money or time on a new phone. The one I had was perfectly fine, and I’m not even interested in phones anymore. After much hesitation, I ended up ordering the Google Pixel 3a. I know—it’s no secret that I strongly dislike Google—but I want a decently affordable phone with a good camera.

I think I was without a phone for about four or five days. While it was a bit scary to not be able to call anyone in case of an emergency (I was living alone at the time), it also felt rather nice taking a break from my otherwise distracting phone. When I eventually received my new phone, I found out about a new (new for me) feature called “flip to shhh”. It’s a feature that turns off both the sound and the vibration when you flip the phone upside down flat on any surface. A feature that I instantly fell in love with.

I used it all the time and it didn’t take long before I started to forget about my phone more and more. I just flipped it upside down and I often forgot about it the rest of the day, until it was time to go to sleep. It eventually came to the point where I had gotten so used to having a completely silent phone, that when it did make a sound, it annoyed me!

Then one day I decided to just put it in the “do not disturb” mode, which also turns of all the sound and the vibrations. I could then use phone while it was still completely silent.

Fast-forward a year or so and it’s still in the “do not disturb” mode. It wasn’t my plan, but it was actually really nice to have a silent phone that’s never poking at me for attention. I still flip the phone upside down to not see the display, as that would still be a distraction for me.

It’s sometimes easy to forget that the perfect solutions often are the simplest ones.

Adding an automatic dark mode for your website using plain CSS is simple. Dark mode is not something that I use myself—it’s actually worse for your eyes—but it was requested by multiple readers, so I decided to add it to my website. It’s only a few lines of CSS anyway.

This is what you need to add to your style sheet:

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
}

You then add any CSS-rule in there for the things you want to change when the dark mode is enabled. For an example, let’s say you want a black background with white ext instead of the regular white background with black text:

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
    html {
        background: #111;
        color: #fff;
    }
}

That’s it!

With the help of Playerctl it’s possible to control various media players like mpv, VLC, cmus, mpd, Spotify and even web browsers using the shell. Because I’m only using mpv myself, that’s what I’m going to talk about here.

For this to work you need a plugin called mpv-mpris. It adds support for controlling mpv using the standard media keys by implementing support for the MPRIS D-Bus Interface Specification.

Installation of mpv-mpris

You can either download the latest stable release or clone the latest code using git:

$ git clone https://github.com/hoyon/mpv-mpris         

You can then compile the code:

$ make  

$ make install 

It’s important to not use root with make install, if you do that, it will then copy the plugin to the wrong folder /root/.config/mpv/scritps/ and not to your own folder ~/.config/mpv/scripts/.

Installation of playerctl

The package playerctl should be available in mosts repositories. In Gentoo, it’s called media-sound/playerctl.

Usage

You can now control mpv with Playerctl using the command playerctl <function>. You can list all available commands and features by just executing the command playerctl without any arguments.