My gopher:// Pages

Finally I have managed to make a very simple gophermap (a very simple one…) for my Gopher pages at the SDF. The address is:

gopher://sdf.org/1/users/jirka/

What to do with all these reminders?

As you may know, I like to use the Remind program as my calendar. Is pretty nice, it works nearly everywhere but it is not well supported in the GUI of modern smartphones. This is obvious: the command-line program it does not fit well the typical UI of a smartphone. And it is really not comfortable to use a command-line application on a touchscreen-only device. So I have to use the build-in calendar on my Ubuntu phone. It is not bat but it stores data on the Google calendar (no other backend is supported at the moment).

OK, there is nothing really secret in my calendar so I probably can have it at Google. But what to get and use these data on real operating systems?

It’s quite easy – even the Big Evil provides a private link for every calendar so one can download it with whget or curl. It is in the ics format so you can use the ical2rem tool co convert it to a proper form. And that’s all!

P.S. You might want to send your calendar to a Palm device. There is no tool for that but it should be easy to make something. At the moment I have a simple tool to send remind stuff to my Palm as a (sort of) untimed events. So precise times are ignored at the moment. I have this very simple AWK script:


#! /usr/bin/awk -f
BEGIN { }
{ a = $1 ; $1=$2=$3=$4=$5="" ; b = $0 ;
print a," 8:00:00 GMT+0 \t", a, "16:00:00 GMT+0 \t \t" b}
END { }


The use of the script is:


remind -p .reminders |grep -v "\#" | ./rem2palm |iconv -f latin2 -t cp1250 |tee my-events ; install-datebook /dev/ttyf2 my-events ; rm -f my-events


It’s not nice but it can be used as a temporary solution.

Summer stuff

I haven’t do too much computer related things during the summer. I have a new Aquaris M10 tabled for playing (there was an OTA-12 system update which improved many thinks), and a Pocket C.H.I.P. computer (which is not much used, yet). But most time I have used my SGI O2 desktop (even for a most of WWW browsing) and my Intel Compute Stick (just for modern WWW browsing and for connectin of my GPS and cameras because the O2 has no USB ports).

Retrocomputing

I still use the SGI O2 as a primary desktop. It’s nice for my programming (C, Tcl/Tk), for writting and typesetting (Vim/LaTeX) and so. I also often use it to get stuff from WWW to my Palm III for off-line reading (via the Plucker). I don’t work with graphics too much, most of my images is made by the XFig and the Gnuplot. Recently I have started to use weather forecast from the graph.no. There is a nice finger interface to the yr.no as you may know. I use a finger ostrava@graph.no command for this.

A bit more modern computing

I finaly have managed to use the FVWM window manager on my modern desktop. This modern desktop is an Intel Compute Stick with a pre-installed Ubuntu. It has a quite small storage space (8 GB) and only 1 GB of RAM. So using something ligther than the Unity desktop can be usefull. Actually the difference is not very noticeable as the stock Unity is surprisingly snappy. But the FVWM has much better customisation possibilities and I use in on the O2 for ages so now I have a consistent user interface on both of my desktops. I didn’t use the FVWM on modern Linuxes because there is no dock for notification icons. I have found one but then I realised that I don’ need it. So there were just two problems to solve:

• Czech keyboard and keyboard switching (/etc/config/keyboard was to be edited),
• Czech fonts support in the FVWM (well, it was easier to rewrite menus to English).

To use external disks I just run nautilus --no-desktop when I need it. And that’s all.

Cutting-edge computing

My most modern and up-to-date computer is the Aquaris M10 tablet with the Ubuntu Touch. It feels a bit experimental as it was initially availably with half-baken operating system and some things are still being finalised (or developed). At the moment the most of important things work: one can use LibreOffice (with a hardware or an on-screen keyboard), install other X11 aplications and use them quite easily (without on-screen keyboard for these apps – one must connect a hardware one to be able to enter text). The integrated WWW browser has the most of needed features (and it even goes fullscreen with the F11 key… and it works with the Technomorous site) and the Evernote client (the Notes) finally supports clipboard. The hardware keyboard layouts can be easily configured (one just has to select them in Preferences) and can be switched by pressing of Win+Space. That’s excellent – I never realised how to do something like this on an Android or Maemo handheld (I’ m not sure how these things work on the Apple stuff). The only missing thing is a keyboard status indicator (it is prepared by developers for the next update). I also installed the TeXlive and the gcc with many libraries and compiled some of my pieces of software (uFEM and MicroDef). Both ot htem works as expected (the uFEM shows some bugs on all modern ARM computers and I still have to fix them). After some testing I can conclude that the M10 is waaaaay slooower than the Comtute stick (which is has also a quad-core processor but an Intel Atom one). It’s much faster than my 16-year old SGI O2, though. 😉

This text was written on the Sharp Zaurus (SL-C760), of course.