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Episode: 44
Title: HPR0044: My desktop, and the apps I use everyday
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0044/hpr0044.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 10:41:30
---
Music
This is Hacker Public Radio and my name is Dave and in today's episode I am going to
be talking about something near and dear to my heart and that is my desktop, my computer
desktop specifically, my everyday computer, my laptop, the one that gets 95 to 99 percent
of my away from work, computer usage, and I want to talk about the applications, the
desktop applications that I use every day, the ones I cannot live without, the ones that
are there when I need them, or there when I am not even thinking about them, the ones
I use all the time I guess I should say, and these will be in no certain order and they
will also be very short on the how to part of it and how to make these things work,
there will be more what they do, some of these you have probably heard of maybe hopefully
a lot of something you have or some of them you have it, they are all relatively common.
I will talk about the most common one first and most briefly and that is Mozilla Firefox.
Almost everybody uses this browser now, everybody that knows anything about browsers will
use Firefox, and I guess specifically I am a heavy Firefox browser user, I have had
up to well over 150 tabs up at one time, there are better ways to surf the web than that
I am sure, but so I make heavy use of the tab mix plus extension and also heavy use
of the Google Notebook extension, those are the two I seem to use the most, that is all
I will say about web browsers, well except this as far as email goes, I am relying more
and more on Gmail for domains, it is like having your, letting Google host your email server
not for the paranoid I am sure, but either way I find myself using Mozilla Thunderbird less
and less every day, I guess my desktop is what I am talking about next, I use FluxBox,
I use FluxBox because FluxBox is everything I need in a window manager, it is not a desktop
environment, FluxBox does not come with any applications that do anything, but desktop
manager kind of stuff, window manager kind of stuff I should say excuse me, comes with
iconbar, it comes with a root menu and it comes with a desktop slit which is an invisible
invisible portion of the desktop where you can put dock apps or you can dock GKRILM which
is a system monitor tool that I will talk about briefly, so that is my desktop I use FluxBox
and I can't, I have used just about every window manager or desktop environment there
is over the last 13 or 14 years for Linux, I will not get into that history but FluxBox
is where I have landed and have stayed probably the longest, like I said it does exactly
what I need, it manages my windows, it has an iconbar or it has got a clock, that is about
all I need, the best part to me about FluxBox, as good as it being lightweight, right there
with that is the root menu, it is a simple text file and it is zero earning curve, if you
can read you can edit this thing and make your root menu be exactly what you want it to
be, it is heavily themeable, there are lots and lots of themes for FluxBox and keyboard
shortcuts are also very easily done, again with this a text configuration file, Blossom
BLOSXOM is the blogging software I use, I have not talked about Blossom in a long time
on any kind of recorded, or even really think about it much because I use it every day
and I set it up a long time ago and I just don't think about it anymore, Blossom is a
pro script that is also blogging software and Blossom will allow you to do almost everything
you can do with a traditional blog application and a little bit more, it does not limit
you really, but it is a simple blog and you blog using your favorite text editor, you
can blog over SSH Connection, I use VIM and SSH to blog remotely and it is really customizable
and really lean and it is just a text editor's lovers blog application I guess you would
say, if you don't want to use the web application to blog, if you are going to be able to blog
anywhere you are, this is for VIM and blog away, I really, really like Blossom, it is easy
to set up, there are lots of modules you can add, it is a simple application that does one
thing and does it really well, so if you are looking for some blog software that is pretty
lightweight and very lightweight and beautiful in this application, check out Blossom.
I mentioned SSH, SSH is the secure shell and most of you know what it is, but this is one of those
applications that I cannot live without if I go on vacation or if I am at work or if I am away
from my laptop or other computers at home, I begin to miss them, I have been known to carry photos
of my computers with me, I have been known to hang them in my cubicle, I am not really that attached
to them as much as it is, I like to look at them some, but I don't know what I would do without
SSH, being able to log into my computers remotely is, brings me great joy, so SSH is really
cool too, I host my web server off a home DSL connection, a computer in my five year old
daughter's bedroom, used to be my computer room, Mr. Bedroom now, that is why I left the server,
the rest of the computer to move those stairs, but when it goes down which DSL is like to do sometimes,
I want to do, I often times, well it is a DSL down I can't, but if there is something I need to do,
if there is something I need to get, there is something I need to tweak, SSH allows me to do this,
and SSH is good for port forwarding and getting around firewalls too, occasionally,
along with SSH, I should mention SSHFS, Secure Shell file system and the Fuse module, Fuse package,
I guess it is a Fuse kernel module, file system and user space, and the fish protocol,
I use all three of these things together, SSHFS specifically to mount my music directory,
my music server upstairs, I can mount this remotely via SSHFS anywhere in the world if I wanted to,
I can mount it on from any of the computers, so I have access to that music wherever I'm at,
there is another way to do that which I will talk about shortly as well, Fuse is used along with SSHFS,
it allows you to mount locally those file system over SSH, which is pretty cool, so if I am using my
favorite file manager, email FM2, I can use SSHFS to mount a file system on another computer
in my own network via SSHFS, and fish is a protocol that is built into the conqueror web browser
that allows you to do the same thing, I am not going to get into how to use Fuse and Fuse and SSHFS,
it is not that hard, but fish and conqueror allows you drag and drop access across file systems
over SSHFS, which is really cool, lots of times you can just do this stuff and I do this stuff
over the command lines, sometimes I use email FM2, but if I am managing files, actually moving stuff
around like when I do a podcast and I want to archive or move the current project folder that I
just, the episode folder I just worked on to another machine, it's easy to drag and drop and
and move media files around specifically using fish, let's see, other problems that I use on a
database is storm siring, now you may not have heard of this one, this is a Python script I think,
and there's no one of those problems that I want you to set up, you will forget about,
but you will be glad it's there, if you live in an area of the country similar to the one I live in,
I live in an area of the country that is prone to thunderstorms and occasional tornadoes,
and storm siring is a program, it's just a little script that runs, you can figure it by telling it,
what county you live in, what state you live in, what counties you want to keep up with as far
as weather alerts go, and storm siring will send you an email or a SMS message via your cell phone
whenever there is a national weather service, weather warning, I'm a bit of a weather geek and I like
having a phone call whenever there is a storm warning, I just like knowing that stuff, so storm
siring is really cool, let me go back to fluxbox real quick, one thing I forgot to mention is I've
been using the same fluxbox theme probably for at least two years maybe three years, now I found
when I really like a lot and it's called, it's hard to pronounce, new wave attack, and the E
in tech is a, is it the number three dash glacier, so it's a new wave attack, dash glacier,
and you can find this, if you just Google Clowner wallpapers, you will find, I think it's
it dugnet.org or something like that, but you'll find Clowner's website and he has some fluxbox
themes there, and that is when I really like a lot, and if you'll sit the alpha transparency around
145, for everything you can, menus, icon bar stuff like that, it looks really nice, it's a black and
blue thing, like I said if you sit the transparency, about 145, and you have like a blue desktop
background, this thing is this sharp looking, I've not grown tired of it after two and a half years,
I like it a lot, it's beautiful, I think I was talking about screen, screen is sort of a console
based, window manager, most of you probably already use screen, but screen with SSHFS
allows me to, from worker, from wherever I am, simultaneously log into all eight of my computers,
remotely, and that is just cool, I don't care who you are, that's cool, if you can log into
eight computers simultaneously, that's cool, and theoretically you can compile and start a
kernel compile on all eight of them, and then detach the screen and come back later,
that's just like power, I like that, GK-R-E-L-L-E-M2, I don't know, I can't remember there's a
two behind it, this probably has been around a while too, and it is a desktop system monitor,
and I do not use it in a traditional sense, I put it, this is not so novel or non-traditional,
but I put it in the bucket in the fluxbox slit, most people do that if they run fluxbox,
but I don't run any of the system monitor tools that come with GK-R-E-L-L-M, none of
all, the only thing I use it for is I use a plug-in called Garellacam GK-R-E-L-M-K-A-N,
K-A-E-M, Garellacam, I may be spending it wrong, that's house pronounce, and it is a webcam plug-in,
and it will monitor and update up to five and make an air quotes, webcams, and these,
I use it not to monitor webcams, but I use it to monitor images that change on a periodic
basis, and you can set the pole period, the pole time, how often you want it to update these images,
so I have it set, for instance, to grab the Doppler radar image from my local television station,
some radar images or satellite images from National Weather Service,
front maps, stuff like all weather-related images, and I have this plug-in update the image,
I think like every five minutes or something, and you can like middle-click on it to do an automatic
update, so if you like having something like that at your mouse-click fingertips, that's nice,
and I used to use, I forget the name of the other plug-in I used, so I won't talk about it,
I forget about it, but I don't use it anymore, I mentioned E-M-E-L-F-M-2 and conquerer both briefly,
E-M-L-F-M-2 is my favorite file manager, it is a two-paint GTK-2-based file manager that is based,
I'll roughly based off of E-M-L-F-M, the first iteration of this, the GTK-1 version of the
file manager has been around a long time, E-M-L-F-M-2 is GTK-2-based, and it's a two-paint file manager,
I think Mid-Night Commanders have GTK-2-based, and much, much more configurable, it's really nice,
it does just about everything you need, there's some things that doesn't do very well, but it's nice,
I've been using it a long time, and for a quick and dirty moving of files around, it's nice,
I like Mid-Night Commanders 2, I use it occasionally, but E-M-L-F-M-2 is one of those applications that's
almost always open on my desktop, it is always open, and the other is Cochra, Cochra, I use only
as a web browser, excuse me, I do not use it as a web browser, I use only as a file manager,
and specifically only for the fish protocol to move files and directories across different
computers on my network, and Cochra is, this works wonderfully for that, for that,
VIM, I've mentioned also briefly, VIM, if you use Linux at all, I mean for any length of time,
you're going to have to get familiar with the text editor, the first one I ever used with E-Max,
I used it for a couple of years, and I used XE-Max, and but a long time ago, I don't know when it was,
probably 9 or 10 years ago, I switched to VR or VIM, and haven't gone back since, it's good to know
all of them, or be basically familiar with all of them, because you don't know where you're going to
get, VIM is probably on all of them, E-Max seems to be sort of less common these days, but
you know it's Pico and Nano, but VIM is just the best, it's a wonderful program, and I'm
preaching to the choir because most of you have already heard of it as well. Another program I use,
almost every day, well not almost, I use at least once or twice a week seems like is List
Garden, and I use this to edit and create RSS feeds, or XML files for RSS feeds for the podcast,
for my podcast, for the E-Club podcast, for HPR, and it is a Java-based RSS feed generator,
and it does it very well, I forget the guy who developed it, I forget the name of the website,
and I forget some of the other applications he's done, but you can Google List Garden,
and when I first started doing my podcast in December 2005, I've never seen XML files, but I've
never created one, and it's not something that I really wanted to do by hand, as you do add
episode, you can become tedious, and List Garden was the first program I used, and it's the only
one I've ever used since then, it's really nice and allows you to create RSS feeds from a number of
things, I mean you can create RSS feeds, there's a lot of options, like I said it's web-based,
it's Java-based, it's cross-platform, it's portable, you can put this on a thumb drive,
it's just really nice, and you have to use it and see it to appreciate it, but there are
lots of options in here to tailor make the RSS feed to your needs or liking, and it's not just
far podcast, you can turn static HTML pages into RSS feeds if you want to, check out List Garden
if you need something like that, Easy Tag is one I use some, because I'm not taking the time to
find out, another way to do tagging of MP3 and org files, but there are lots of different ways
to do this, including command line ways, audacity is the other one that I probably couldn't live without
being a podcaster, and one last one I want to talk about is MPD, the music player name,
the music player name is a program that allows you to access music files remotely using a client,
and it's also a really good desktop or local music player, what it does, I'm not going to get into
the how-tos and why-tos and all that, but it runs as a Damon, you put it on your music server,
on a computer where all your music files are, then you create a database, and then it's going to
load the database, you're going to issue a command, MPD, space, dash, create, DB, and it's going to
load the database into memory, and it takes up very little memory, this thing's very lightweight,
you won't even know it's running, I mean it may take up one or two megabytes of your memory,
and then you need a client to connect to it, and there's lots of clients, there's command line
clients, there's window-based clients, OSX-based clients, there's GTK and KDE-based clients,
I use mainly MPC, it's a music player-damer client for the command line, and I use Sonata,
which is a desktop GTK-based application, and configuring MPD isn't hard, it's not,
dropped it simple, I mean it seems like you always find foreign posts about people that have
gotten stuck, but it's not hard at all, there's a small less one configuration file,
and it's in your home directory is .mpd.conf, I think, or if you want to say it globally,
it's in atcmpd.conf, and it's pretty easy to say, it goes up a port, it normally runs on port,
6600, you need to set up your music directory, and you need to tell it where to put,
any music director's wherever it is, but you need to tell it also where to put the playlist
directory, the database file, the log file and error file, those are normally capped in your
home directory in a hidden .mpd directory, and once you've got that set up,
and you fire up your client, whether it's console-based or not, and you just connect to the server,
you'll have to configure the client to tell it your server settings, but this is a really
neat program, I like it, I mainly, I use Sonata when I want to search for music, Sonata is a
GNOME-based graphical front-end client for .mpd, and it's really elegant, and it also plays streams.
Oh, .mpd will also allow you to stream your music to an oscast server, by the way, that's just
something you can figure in the config file, but mainly I use .mpc, and I have, in my Fluxbox
root menu, I have some custom launchers built in there, just a little bash grips, telling .mpc
what to do, I can load the playlist, I can skip to the next one, I can stop it, I can go forwards,
backwards, that pauls, that kind of thing, all from the Fluxbox root menu, I've assigned hot keys
in the Fluxbox keys file, and I use Conkey, mainly for just some kind of visual clue as to what
song is being played, so you know, it keeps Conkey running, but really the only thing I pay attention
to is what song is being played, if even that, so there in a nutshell is my Linux desktop,
I know a desktop screenshot would have probably been, just a little bit easier, but I like to talk
about Linux, and I like to talk about stuff on my desktop, and you know, desktops are labors
and I love my desktop, so, I hope you love it too, until tomorrow's HPR says they've signed it off,
at endim, right after Dave recorded this HPR episode, he realized that he forgot to mention a
couple of apps that he uses almost every day, not wanting to leave them out, I'll mention them here,
gftp, the ftp client, and xchat, the irc client, he was also wrong about the next HPR episode,
being tomorrow, it's not until monday, that is all, have a happy leap day!