Episode: 1707
Title: HPR1707: A tour round my desktop
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1707/hpr1707.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 08:06:21

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This is HPR episode 1,707 entitled A Tour Round My Desktop.
It is hosted by Visa and is about 47 minutes long.
The summary is a look at the applications I use,
why I use them and the alternatives I've tried.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by AnanasToast.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
That's HPR15.
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Hi, I'm Visa and this is my third podcast for HPR.
In my first I talked about how I came to be a Linux user.
In my second episode I was making the point that one of the main features of Linux is that of choice.
But a lot of us still tend to choose our applications from a relatively small subset of the many that are available to us.
My plea was that we owe it to the developers who go out with their time on our behalf
to give their applications a try rather than simply opting straight away for what everybody else is using.
The subject of this episode in a way sits between the other two.
I'm going to do a tour of my desktop and highlight some of the applications I use and explain why I use them.
I accept that this does have the potential to bore people rigid,
but on the other hand it might just give a few tips that somebody is not entirely happy with what they're using at the moment.
I'll put the start by telling what computer I'm using.
Well, I've got four altogether.
The one I use mostly is a Dell laptop that's got I think a 17-inch monitor.
Whatever size it is, it's certainly the biggest laptop screen I could find.
As well as the Dell, I've got an HP laptop which strictly speaking belongs to my daughter,
but she's sort of lost interest in it now she's got an iPad so I use it if my Mrs is using the Dell.
I've got an ASA laptop with about a 12-inch screen which I only really use if I'm travelling.
These days I work mainly from home so it doesn't seem like the day very often,
but in the past it's been with me all over Europe and America and got some rough treatment along the way,
but it's never let me down.
Finally there's the ASA netbook which is just used as a media centre in my living room.
With a 10-inch screen it's not much used for productive work,
but for playing music and video it's fantastic.
If I want to watch a DVD I generally rip it to a video file on the Dell
and then copy it across the netbook.
If it's a spur-of-the-moment thing though I can always just connect an external DVD drive to it.
The quality of audio that comes out the headphone jack is incredible.
I just feed that into my iFi amplifier and I've got an audio system that sounds
everybody as good as anything I've ever had.
I feed the video signal from the netbook into my TV using the VGA cable.
The netbook does have an HDMI output as well, but in all honesty I think that the
image quality through VGA is better.
The only limiting factor of using the netbook as a media player instead of something with
a bit more power is that a graphics card won't support anything with a resolution above 720p.
What I do on the few occasions that I've had a bit of 1080 video to watch is I just run it
from my Raspberry Pi. I've found that if you play video on the Pi using a desktop style distro light
raspberry and a higher resolution to get it a bit jerky or if you use a dedicated media distro
light open-illek which is a single task distro designed to run XBMC. The video playback is
perfect even at 1080. Another thing I could do with the netbook is use it to play internet
radio through my amplifier and in my view the stand of commercial radio in the UK is generally
abysmal. We have one or two exceptions but in the main may have pitiful playlists and they seem
to employ morons as presenters who've got nothing worth saying but they still insist on saying it.
In my road game utopia the DJs would all be like Clint Eastwood was in the film Play Misty for me.
I speak a bit of German or French and I find the choice of music stations those countries offer
as a considerable improvement. But the still though will be some of the American classic rock stations
but unfortunately a lot of their live streams block off shore IP addresses. I've tried using
proxies but with my slow ball band connection they spend most of the time buffering.
Overall using the netbook as a media player I reckon I'll get most of the functionality of a
sonar system plus video for a fraction of the cost. Until November 2014 I used to run point
Linux and all these machines. It's a Russian Debian derivative and I found absolutely unbreakable
but unfortunately my printer gave up the ghost around end of October and the one I bought
to replace it just wouldn't work with a kernel which comes to point Linux. I tried updating
HPLIP to the latest version which supposedly will support my new printer but it still made no
difference. I'm not lost faith in point Linux and I'm sure the next version will use a kernel which
enables me to use my printer but for now I've replaced it on three of my computers with Linux
Mint 17 which has since been updated 17.1 but my travelling laptop is never used for printing
or scanning so I've left that one alone. So what about desktop managers? Well when I first
moved to Linux I just had a compact desktop machine that had 256 megs of memory but my first
distro is Ubuntu which used known too. It worked ok but as I got more into Linux I heard about
XFCE which will supposedly better suited to lower powered kit. As a result I gave Ubuntu a
try and it certainly wasn't a bit quicker to load and overall a bit more responsive than known
and in that respect it was a definite improvement but the default appearance of XFCE out the box
at that time is bloody awful. It's better now but I still think there's a way to go. When you see
what some distros managed to achieve with XFCE you realise how conservative the developers seem to be.
I really think they undersell what is actually a very good desktop manager.
Fortunately XFCE comes with quite a lot of alternative themes so I found one that I could live with
and stayed with it. Since then I've tried other desktop managers but I keep coming back to XFCE.
When Unity came out I ran it through a live Ubuntu CD and stayed with it for all of 15 minutes.
I really couldn't see how anybody could consider it an improvement over known too.
Unity has supposedly improved a lot over the last year or two and I have given it another try
but it doesn't look any better to me so that's it as far as I'm concerned.
I've tried known three but that's Scott Matsusame issues as Unity from my point of view.
Its concept is equally odds with the way I like to interact with my computers.
KDE is very different to Unity in Nome 3 and visually it's very impressive
but I still have trouble understanding where they're coming from.
The standard desktop 1.linux is mate which as I'm sure everybody knows is a reinvention of Nome 2.
It's not bad at all but when I first installed point Linux there were only a few themes available
for it. None of which were anything special. Consequently I soon installed XFCE and stuck with
that until my move to Linux Mint. At this point can I make a plea to application developers
to pick sensible names for their software. There's nothing wrong with the word mate,
spell M-A-T-E and there's nothing wrong with the word mate if that's what you want to call it
but for Gaulsake choose an unambiguous spelling otherwise you end up with a ridiculous situation
where every discussion is invariably prefaced with the mate or matter confusion.
What am I greater to mint? On my two main laptops I opted for cinnamon
but I knew the netbook probably isn't up to it with only one giga memory in an atom processor
so I went straight to XFCE for that machine. On my deal though I stayed with cinnamon for maybe a
month or so but once the novelty war off I inevitably end up installing XFCE and that's what I
use now. Unfortunately some of the GTK3 themes which come with cinnamon also work to some extent
with XFCE so you benefit from a lot more icon sets and color schemes than you get with stock XFCE.
So that's my desktop choice so the next issue is what I use my computers for.
Well I've already described how I use the netbook as a media player but what about the main delt?
Well this is the centre of my computing world as I often spend all day sat in front of it.
For the most part I'm writing documents or emails sometimes entering stuff into spreadsheets
and when the leader eyes I do a bit of programming which tends to be an intense burst every few weeks
rather than as a daily task. Most of the time I like to have musical speech playing in the background
often internet radio. I'm a bit of a musician on the side so I do quite a lot of audio editing
generally stuff like recorded on my Zoom H2. Over the last couple of years I'll be making a
concerted effort to scan my family photos for safekeeping. There's thousands of them going back
80 or 90 years in some cases but not only does it take time to scan each image it then has to be
processed to take care of any fading or damage and this means I spend quite a bit of time using
graphics software. Right let's start looking at the applications. I'll do this by working my way
up the XFCE menu. I won't draw much on general utilities which come as standard with the distro
and they say playing the important role in the way I use the computer. Now because I installed
XFCE alongside Cinnamon I have some tools from both sides of the fence and most of these will run
perfectly well with either window manager. For example the Nemo Far Manager works fine with XFCE
but I prefer to not simply because it's faster especially when you view folders containing a large
number of items. Starting with the system menu the first item I see which I installed myself
is Unit booting. For testing out distros in live mode what I always do is download the ISO
then use Unit booting to write it to a USB memory stick or even an SD card.
I've listened to podcasts where people testing out distros have complained that Unit booting
wouldn't work with their ISO or the computer wouldn't boot from it afterwards.
Right to say it's not a problem I've ever encountered for me booting from a memory stick
or SD is so much faster than from a CD I wouldn't consider any other approach.
Also on the system menu I have virtual box. I've got a few Windows applications which I use very
occasionally but certainly not enough to justify dual booting so using a Windows XP virtual machine
is the ideal option for me. I've tried using wine but it involves too many functional compromises
for my liking. Well with a virtual machine I know that everything will work properly.
Also if I bugger anything out I can easily revert to a backup of the VM.
What I use Windows for is mainly running an old copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator and there
also a couple of specialist applications which my Mrs. uses for her work.
A great thing about virtual box is that although the VM is completely self-contained
you can also map the Linux file system to a Windows drive letter as if it were a network drive
so you can access all your usual data from Windows application if you need to.
I've never really tried any other desktop virtualisation tools I've found virtual box so easy
to use from word go. The only problem I've ever encountered is that setting a VM up to recognise
some USB devices like the joystick I use with Flight Simulator. That always seems to be a little
more complicated it needs to be but if you just want to use Windows applications with a keyboard
and mouse I really wouldn't consider looking at anything else. There's nothing else a particular
note and system menu so now it's onto the office menu. The main feature on this is Libra Office
which I'm sure everybody is familiar with. Apart from base the database tool I think is excellent.
I'm heavy user of it but not a power user in terms of hammering every feature it provides
but I use writer all the time and calc quite a bit as well. Draw comes in handy from time to time
but I'll find that the drawing features within writer are good enough for most things I need to do
like creating flow charts and simple schematics. The best thing about draw is that it saves everything
you need as vector graphics so you can expand objects as much as you like without losing definition
or getting jagged lines on the diagonals. As far as I can tell all the graphics capability
within writer is the same functionality as you find in draw so there is a considerable measure
of overlap there. I almost never have to create presentations these days but I used to in the past.
I found the impress pretty much did everything that PowerPoint does
but base just doesn't do it for me I'm afraid. The database itself is slow compared to just
about every other tool I've used and the form design is arcade and the programming language
you use to create any decent functionality is quite long-winded. It's a variant of basic which is
in principle I'm very much in favour of but the implementation compared to visual basic is
very torturous. It will take a mess about the work to have become a competitor in Microsoft
Access and I can't see that ever happening but I do have another solution to that problem but I'll
come to that a bit more later on. For all my documents I just saved them to the default ODT
format. If I need to send the document to anybody which they just need to read not update then I'll
save as a PDF and using the button on the main toolbar and that's a very handy facility.
Before I'm sending a document to a Microsoft user that they may need to update then I save as
Doc as that is a completely stable format now. I'm told that DocX is still evolving so long-term
compatibility might be more of an issue there. The same prints will apply as to the spreadsheet formats.
For my own use I just saved to the default ods format but if I'm sending something to a Microsoft
user then I use XLS instead of XLSX. Whenever I import the document in a Microsoft format
but a sort of stuff I deal with there really are only problems opening either Doc or DocX.
I've come up to know might be issues with highly complex layouts so we've got lots of
embedded objects and graphics but that's not really something which affects me. It is a tip if
you ever need to check the compatibility with Doc you've been creating in Librofist or any other
non-microsoft application for that matter, open a hotmail account and then upload the document
into Word Online. In the event it needs any fine tuning do it there and it doesn't cost you any money.
I've almost never used Librofist math but on the rare occasion when I've needed to insert a
formula into a document it's great. Because my main requirement is for word processing and spreadsheet
functions in principle I could use other applications instead. Today I gave Abbeyword a numeric
quite a serious try. My conclusion was that numeric is certainly a potential replacement for
Calc for most users who need is just for standard spreadsheet functions but Abbeyword is a long
way behind writer. Apart from anything else in all my machines there seems to be a bit of a lag
between hitting a key in the text appearing on the screen. It's as if the keyboard buffer's not
being read efficiently. So if you're not going to use Abbeyword the charts are you'll usually
profit so it's open off is cousin for your word processing needs. In that case you get Calc anyway
so running numeric separately doesn't really make a lot of sense unfortunately.
One thing Abbeyword is very good at though is document conversion. You can run it as a command
line utility to cover almost anything to anything. Librofist can do this to some extent but the syntax
is awkward and there are a lot fewer reformat options. I once wrote an application to analyse documents
for word occurrence statistics and used Abbeyword as a headless utility in a background to
cover the input files of the text before the parsing. Some hills I've tried are a couple of
proprietary office applications which also run Linux. These are soft maker office which is from
Germany and Kingsoft office which is Chinese. Now they both have no frills free versions but these
are free of charge not free as in which is stormant. I have to say they're both doing a pretty
decent job of word processing and spreadsheet work but for anyone like me with a distrust for
anything that's not open source they're just not realistic propositions. The other thing I didn't like
about both of them is that user interface is clearly hard coded so it your desktop theme is ignored.
Another useful tool in my office menu is PDF Shuffler but what this does is take one or more
PDF documents and lets you add or remove pages or even copy pages from one to another so you can
make an entirely new document. It's one of those applications I only use three or four times a year
but when I do use it it really is invaluable. Moving now to my internet menu I only use Firefox
nowadays. I use to use Chrome for quite a long time but then I started creating a few websites
and I was surprised at how poor the font rendering could be. Websites where I thought they were
poorly designed with a choice of fonts was concerned actually had nothing wrong with them at all
it was a shortcoming with Chrome. One application of mine to the menu I wouldn't be without
is FileZilla. It's an FTP client which also supports secure FTP. Now to use secure FTP you need to
have an SSH server installed and running on the remote end and the SSH client at local end
but sending those up is trivial. I use FileZilla every day at some point to move files between my
computers. It may be a DVD rip from my delta net book or it may just be an instant safety backup
of a document I'm working on but it works equally well working with remote servers on the internet.
Now I'm looking at the multimedia menu. Now here there's quite a few applications I've installed
from choice. Started atop I've got audacity. Now for most people it's the ubiquitous application if
you're planning to record or edit the audio but it isn't for me though I find it slow,
occasionally unstable and more than anything else complete overkill for what I need to do.
My audio requirements are mainly cut and paste, fade in, fade out and normalization.
For those basic operations a much better application is MHWaveInit. It can be expanded
through plugins to apply all sorts of effects but in its default configuration it does everything
I need it to do. This simplicity makes it very fast. You can open a one gig file in seconds
and save it after editing. It's not a great deal longer. It can also record from any input source
including the sound card. So it comes in handy if you want to make a look at the copy of an audio
stream which you can't get access to directly. I only use audacity for a few occasions but I
need to remove background noise from an audio file. For this task the noise fingerprint
facility is very useful. All it does is subtract all the noise matching a selected clip
from the selected area of the file. It can be very handy when I was making digital copies of
all my old vinyl albums and some of the old family 78s. It got rid of most of the surface noise
to the extent that the digital copies actually end up much better and replay than the original records.
One further thing I use Audacity for is converting flash player audio to MP3.
I use get iPlayer to download BBC Radio programs but that runs fastest if you fix the
programs in a native flash format rather than convert them on the fly to MP3. There are other
applications which will make that conversion but they all seem to introduce imperfections into
the sound for some reason. Audacity on the other end will convert it blimished free.
For me Audacity is certainly a useful tool to have around but MH Wave edit is the work
or saw my audio editing. For playing audio though I use decibel. It really is a simple
no nonsense player and it plays all the common formats and indexes the tracks by artists
and albums but that's about it. There's no messing around with playing live network streams,
acting as a spotify or last FM client or anything like that. I try just about all the popular
audio players like Banshee and Rhythmbox and I've settled on Clementine for a while but they all
cloud the issue with the extra complexity which I just didn't need. To tag audio files I use the
audio tag tool. The interface is cleaner than the easy tag and to my eyes it's a bit easy to use.
To convert audio files I generally use sound converter. Apart from not handling flash audio
well it converts everything else faultlessly. My main conversions are Wave to Walk, Wave to MP3
and Og to MP3 but unlike some converters it can also create variable bitrate MP3s which give
you a high quality sound but with a generally smaller file size and that's great for crony lots of
music onto a two gig USB music player like the one I use. I tend to restrict VLC to VLC
video playback. There's really nothing better in my book but the only place it doesn't work
quite so well is on the netbook. If you play a video around 720p you work it on its limits
but for normal actually it's still okay. However if you get a burst of high speed action where the
entire screen is changing rapidly then it can get a bit blockier at times and even freeze for a
second or two so ensure it gets overloaded. Now because I've played around with lots of video
players before settling on VLC I knew there were some less sophisticated ones which ought to have
lower resource requirements. So I revisited those which weren't simply tool for the Compton
Plate as I'm afraid some of them are and I found the solution is to use parole. It's much lighter
than VLC but of course it gives you fewer options and control over the playback but it's worth
that compromise to be able to view those marginal videos. On my other computer zone for video playback
it's VLC all the way. For DVD ripping I only use handbrake, it's excellent. You're a bit limited
in the output format but it hardly matters if you're going to be playing back the video on a Linux
machine. I tried DVD ripped for a while but it was very slow and sometimes it wouldn't even read
the disk properly. Now when I was on point Linux the repositories didn't have handbrake in them
so for the first time on Linux I compiled an application from Source. I followed all the
instructions on the handbrake website to letter but it still gets running up compilation errors.
They're not having any other solutions whenever the error showed a missing dependency or an
invalid setting. I just edited the previous command to remove it and continued.
Miraculously I ended up with a working executable which I even managed to get running
when I've copied it to my other machines but I'm sure it's their sunning but I'm just not sure
quite what. But fortunately Mint does have handbrake in the repository so it was a bit like I won't
need to do that again. For interesting video I use OpenShot. I'll read a fair bit of criticism of
Linux video instances in general and OpenShot in particular some extent but frankly I can't
understand why. I've used Windows Movie Maker in the past and that was a lot harder to use.
OpenShot has dozens of output options so if I really need to rip a DVD to a video format not
supported by handbrake I can just use one of the supported formats and then re-encoded
afterwards with OpenShot. One final note worth the application on my multimedia menu is MiniTube.
This is a view of YouTube videos which doesn't require flash to be installed. It's really good
and it's used to have a download button but I suspect the developers have had a bit of grief
from YouTube people about that. However it's still as a function to keep you the full URL for the
video so you can save it via your browser or perhaps download it directly using WGET.
The advantage of Linux version is that it's free of charge. The Mac and Windows versions require
payment for you can install it. Another advantage of MiniTube is that it just fetches whatever video
you select. There's no messing around with signing in to access certain categories of content
so whether it still works like that when YouTube introduced page channels I've got my doubts
but you know below. In the meantime it's definitely an application I recommend.
From time to time I have to create a DVD from a video file for someone who hasn't got a computer.
I've tried a number at all to this and while they all work some will only write direct to a
disk and some require you to create a menu or a welcome screen. If you just want to get the file
onto the disk in a format that will play on the standard DVD player I recommend an application
called Bombono. It takes a video file does all the necessary reformatting and it creates an
ISO file which can then be burnt to the DVD although it can write direct to the DVD if that's
what you're able to do. Finally on my multimedia menu is the Spotify clone. I know this is a closed
source but it's one of the few areas along with MiniTube where I'm willing to turn a blind eye.
I listen to an awful lot of music so at a £9.99 it costs me a month to be a premium member
whose money will spend compared to buying CDs or buying tracks to iTunes it says you're
afford you. You can get the client from a Spotify website they classify it as experimental software
and it comes out and you warranty. I mean it's early days it really wasn't up too much it would
play the music brilliantly but any searches for artists and tracks were often crashed the
application but over the last six months or so it's improved enormously it still looks exactly
the same but those crashes seem to be a thing that I've passed. One of these Clementine before
settling on decibel it did claim to work as a Spotify client but I found that searches really
retained all the relevant tracks. The biggest advantage of the native client over the browser
based Spotify player is that the client can play music at 320 kilobyte resolution whereas the
web player is only I think 128. Also it lets you download tracks for the local stories to play offline
but these downloaded using an algorithm which breaks up each track into small chunks with names
which mean nothing to the human eye. That makes the tracks unplayable using anything other than
the Spotify client but what it does mean though is that if you're going away an old e for example
with no internet connection you can plan ahead and download all the albums you think you may care
to listen to while you're away. Next we'll have a look at the graphics menu. At the top I've got
the DEA drawing application. I admit I don't use this an awful lot but it's been very handy on
your occasion. I suppose it's the limit segment to Microsoft Physio. His purpose is to draw all sorts
of flow charts, schematics, entity, relation, diagrams and so on but most of my needs in this
respect can be met by a lever office using draw all the graphics tools built into writer but where
DEA does win hands down though is if you need to produce a diagram using a specific formalised
notation as you might find in chemical engineering or something like that. You can export data in
a large number of formats so it should be able to interpret a lot of other tools as well.
Moving down the sub menu we get to GIMP. I get the feedback this is one of those
love more hater mount applications. Personally I think it's fantastic as it does everything I've
ever wanted to do in terms of image manipulation but on the other hand I'm not a professional
photographer or a graphic artist. What I can say though is that from what I see people who
start with GIMP seem to stay with it and people who start with Photoshop are equally reluctant to
change. Of course when you spent several hundred pounds on Photoshop then Ravardo may play a part
as nobody wants to admit afterwards that their needs could have been met by a free program.
Risking or enhancing photos with GIMP can be very easy if you use some of the semi-automated tools
like white balance and equalise. Other tools which work with colour saturation, contrast, brightness
and so on cover most of my needs for photo enhancement but I've used other tools to create images
or apply effects to images for using websites and documents but they're not quite so easy to use
but then again neither are they in Photoshop. The key to both these competing tools is
knowing what you are trying to achieve and understanding the terminology. It's a complex area
no professional standard tool can be expected to a decent job if it applies too many compromises
just for the sake of some simplicity. I've been told that Photoshop can do a few things which
GIMP can't unless bound to be the case GIMP that GIMP is not just a Photoshop clone.
All I can say is that every visual effect I've ever attempted to create has been possible
using GIMP on its own. Even it has sometimes taken a fair bit of research to find out how to do it.
Just recently I heard about another graphic application called Criter. It got quite a few mentions
on other Linux podcasts. I've installed it and had a brief play around with it and it certainly
dresses some of the same areas GIMP with regard to image manipulation but it strikes as being
aimed more at the person creating an image from scratch rather than modifying an image created
by an external means like a camera but so perhaps it's more for the artist than the photographer.
Another drawing application I've got is Inescape. Now that's one of those applications which
impresses me a lot but at the moment I don't really have the skill or the real need to use it
in earnest but I still love playing around with it. I think it can be said to overlap Criter and
Librofist draw that it makes it very easy to create and manipulate complex shapes and apply a
sophisticated lighting and shading effects and so on. With somebody designing logos or perhaps
a computer artist it's a tool which I think could probably provide with a lot of satisfaction.
For scanning documents or photos I use simple scan which as its name suggests does all the
donkey work for you. I've used it a lot over the years and I've come to Ryanic but all the same I've
also installed Xane or Zane what I'm supposed to be called X-S-A-M-E. If you've got to scan
something where you either want to ignore or specifically capture a subtle feature like a
watermark it gives you just an extra bit of control compared with simple scan. I can't say I like
its users interface very much but it does a good job for all that and might say many things you
can get used to its idiosyncrasies. Instead you want to always still on point Linux and having
trouble getting my new printer scanner to work. I've played around with a number of scanning
applications just in case the problem lay in that direction and I discovered a package called
G-Scan to PDF where the two is at number two. I found that it would detect the new devices
a scanner where nothing else would. So perhaps if you ever have scan and detection problems give G-Scan
to PDF a try. Why should recognise devices nothing else can see I just don't know but if it gets
you out of trouble you're not going to worry about that. I'm moving now to the education menu.
There's only one item on there and it's Stellarium. In case you've never heard of it it's what you
might call an interactive Skirmap or Planetarium. If you've got even a remoteness interest
of astronomy or even just get a bit curious about something you see in the night sky you've just
got to install Stellarium. You set your location and time and it will reproduce exactly what you
should be seeing in the sky at that moment. I've tested it at a night against the real sky
and I can tell you it's 100% accurate. In fact it's better than that in a way because it shows
objects which are too dim for the naked eye and would otherwise require a telescope to view.
You can zoom in on any part of the sky or an individual object and find exactly what you're
looking at and Stellarium will tell you all about it including its distance from the earth.
The display changes in real time in sync with the Earth's rotation. If you zoom in on Saturn for
example even displays the rings in the correct inclination as you see through a telescope I know
that because I've tried it. If you keep it updated Stellarium will show transit objects such as
comets that could also identify long-lasting artificial satellites as they pass overhead.
I've never stopped being pressed by Stellarium and I'd recommend it to anything in person with
the computer as it also runs on Windows and Mac. The last menu category I'm going to look at
is the development menu. This is just two items on it. Sequelite manager and Gambers will start
the SQLite manager and this is a tool for managing SQLite databases so it serves no purpose unless
you install SQLite first. So the first question might be what is SQLite? Well it's a relational
database engine which stores the entire database in a single file. Consequently it's the same as
a Microsoft access MDB file. You can copy it and email it to somebody else and as long as they have
SQLite installed which can be on Linux, Mac, Windows or BSD they can access and manipulate the
data in exactly the same as you can. You can even stick the file on the shared server and multiple
users can access it. Not large numbers mind you but half a dozen or so shouldn't be a problem
as long as they're not retrieving records with large binary fields.
The beauty of SQLite is that it scales brilliantly. The only effective size limit is
determined by the constraint of the operating system so tables containing millions of records
are perfectly viable. Sequelite manager is an application which enables you to create and
manage SQLite databases. You can define views and you can perform what few housekeeping tasks
required for sheer simplicity and flexibility is nothing that comes close whatever operating system
you're using. Gambers is my preferred development environment. Why it's not far more widely used
defeats me because in terms of power and ease of use it beats everything else on Linux hands down.
The Gambers is the closest you'll find a visual base on Linux but it's most definitely not
just a VB clone. The people behind Gambers have gone to a lot of trouble to see what VB does well
but they also looked at where VB gets it wrong and put those things right. If you've ever
developed an application in VB you can use Gambers but you'd have to get used to a few changes
in the basic language syntax but the way you design the form and attach code events is just as about
the same though. The Gambers library is for just about everything you could possibly need.
You can use them to create anything from a simple command line program to a highly complex
multi-meter application integrating with a website. You can connect to a SQLite database in
four lines of code and any other kind of database in not much more. Alternatively you can use
bound controls where you define the databases as a set of attributes. With no code required at all
at that point if you SQLite what you have is something very close to the concept of access.
You know a user interface with bound controls talking to a database contained in a single file.
All my business management tools have been developed this way. The first one took a bit of work
to develop but by reusing the code and forms the rest have been a double to implement
less than a couple of hours in one case. I've spent 20 years developing software using
all sorts of programming languages like Fortran, C, C++, Cobal and VB plus a few of the less
no ones as well. It abuses me how people frown on basic as if it's some kind of no-deal or
hobbyist language. You can't call yourself a proper developer if you use basic it seems.
When you dig down the most common complaint seems to be that the ability to use go-to's
leads to amateurish spaghetti code. Well I hate to disillusion all your basic
haters but just for every other programming language as a go-to facility either with that exact
keyword or something which has the same effect. Now I've got used one single go-to in the last 12
years of using VB, access and gambas. If you design and write good, Anakin code you don't need
go-to's. On the other hand if you're a crap programmer you can produce spaghetti code in C,
Python or in the other language you take care to use. Another Linux development
environment I tried is Lazarus. The weird gambas is clearly inspired by visual basic,
Lazarus is inspired by Ball and Delphi. It has a whizzy week form designer and you can
have divine event handlers using a Pascal programming language. It's a lot more complicated
to use than gambas. In fact the program structural workflow reminds me more of using visual C
plus plus. The big advantage Lazarus has over gambas though is that it compiles some native
executable while gambas only creates an executable within an inescapable dependency and runs on
compome. Also Lazarus has Windows and Mac implementations which use identical coding syntax. This means
that by copying the project files you created on Linux onto Windows you can create native Windows
application with the same user interface and functionality without need to make any compatibility
changes. That's the serious useful feature for anyone developing that application for a wide
scale multi-platform deployment. Of those real plans to use Lazarus other than for a bit of
experimentation but it's my consistency option if the gambas project should ever close down.
I hope that's never necessary because gambas fits my needs perfectly and if you only need to
run on Linux it's far more productive than Lazarus is but it doesn't all for the fact that Lazarus
has had a lot going for it. I was about to say that's it for my menus but I've just remembered
a brilliant new tool so I'll run from my accessories menu. That's Search Monkey. If you use Nemo
which is the standard file manager for cinnamon it includes a search facility which lets you track
down files based on parts of their names. Thunard doesn't have a search facility so you need a separate
tool. Search Monkey also lets you search the contents of files for strings and even Nemo doesn't
do that. I imagine that Search Monkey is probably a front-end for a grip. Now that really is it for
my menus. I also use one command line application a lot. Let's get iPlayer. This is the most
utility which dips into the BBC Library of Radio and TV programs and lets you download them to
view your convenience. I'm not a huge watcher of TV but the BBC does produce some first-rate
documentaries on science and on more general interests subjects as well. How useful get iPlayers
depends on where in the world you are. As far as I can tell you can only access TV programs if
your IP address links you to the UK but I've managed to access radio programs from quite a few
countries in Europe so it could be that they have no geographical restrictions at all.
The default format for both TV and radio programs is Flash, the FLV extension. You can set the
tool to convert them to more portable formats on the Flies part of the download but it slows things
down. Unless you have a really fast connection I'd always advise downloading them in their native
format which you do simply by including the Raw are a W parameter in the command string. If you
need to convert to another format to suit a particular device just use a local tool afterwards.
VLC and Parole are quite happy playing Flash audio and videos so I imagine that conversion to
other formats is not really necessary for most people. With this complete tour of my desktop I
do hope there's been something of use to somebody. Right at the beginning of this I mentioned that
my last HPI episode was encouraging people to try out some of the lesser known applications
rather than just setting for the most popular. It may not have gone unnoticed that I still use a
fair number of the most mainstream applications like LibreOffice, VLC and Gimp. The point is I've
arrived at the decision that they're the best for my requirements after trying quite a lot of other
packages. So by adopting that approach I've uncovered some real gems like MHWVD, Gambers,
Search Monkey and Decibel which are now in this central part of my computing toolset.
Others which I've tried and rejected have subsequently come to my rescue later on
when the mainstream applications let me down things like Parole and G-Scan to PDF.
Well that's it then this is Beezer signing off for now. Thanks very much for listening.
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