serhii.net

Yunohost full app information / data / install paths

yunohost app info -f appname returns the A LOT of info about the appname, including installation paths.

Qutebrowser userscripts folder location / Writing informative error messages

… can be located in ~/.config/qutebrowser/userscripts, not just in ~/.local ..! When tried to run one it didn’t find it helpfully outputted all the paths it looks for them - which is great and I’ll steal this. If a file is not found you know the person will probably need this, especially if they are many.

GNU Stow for dotfiles management

One of the cooler solutions I’ve seen: Managing dotfiles with GNU stow - Alex Pearce (There seems to be a canonical page¹ I found first, but I like the other one more)

TL;DR create a directory for the dotfiles, with each folder containing dotfiles mirroring the usual dotfiles’ locations in the system; Then from inside the main dotfiles directory do stow vim bash whatever and it’ll magically put it in the right place in the home directory.

This works because

Stow assumes that the contents of the

you specify should live one directory above where the stow command is run, so having our .dotfiles directory at ~/.dotfiles means using stow to manage our dotfiles just works. ²

This is awesome because:

• No manual symlinking
• Dotfiles directory can be easily backed up with git or whatever

The same article²’s sample github repo: dotfiles/neovim at master · alexpearce/dotfiles

Cool dotfile ideas

The stow linked github repo’s dotfiles are actually fascinating: alexpearce/dotfiles: My dotfiles.

dotfiles/.gitconfig at master · alexpearce/dotfiles:

# Clone git repos with URLs like "gh:alexpearce/dotfiles"
[url "https://github.com/"]
  insteadOf = "gh:"
[url "git@github.com:"]
  pushInsteadOf = "gh:"
# Clone CERN GitLab repos with URLs like "gl:lhcb/Hlt"
[url "ssh://git@gitlab.cern.ch:7999/"]
  insteadOf = "gl:"

Git config aliases

Applying the above to my own configs in ~/.gitconfig.

Assuming the ssh port is 1234 ~/.gitconfig is like

[url "ssh://git@myserver:1234/"]
  insteadOf = "gh:"

and then in the per-repo settings something similar to

[remote "bitbucket"]
	url = gh:myusername/myproject.git

Cloning it is now easy:

git clone gh:myusername/myproject

Neat!

Jekyll syntax highlighting supported languages

List of supported languages and lexers · rouge-ruby/rouge Wiki Quite a lot! Will try the generic conf for the .gitconfig above.

Yunohost

I’m very impressed by it! Makes everything really easy, I remember the last time I had to install stuff manually. After 48h 9/10, some things surprised me (removing root ssh access…) but they were always mentioned in the relevant docu I hadn’t read.

Official docu is quite okay, but rarely appeared when I was googling my problems. My instinct is to Google the problem instantly - sometimes they should actually be to find and check any existing official documentation/README first, then google. (An even better instinct would be to skim any official documentation before starting, as religiously as I do it for unknown real-life 3D things.)

Adding subdomains for Yunohost

This took me too long to find, has info about correct DNS records: DNS and subdomains for the applications | Yunohost Documentation

By trial and error the complete process is:

1. Add DNS record for subdomain like last examples here:

   @         A            XYZ.XYZ.XYZ.XYZ
   @         AAAA         1234:1234:1234:FFAA:FFAA:FFAA:FFAA:AAFF
   *         CNAME        mydomain.com.
   agenda    CNAME        mydomain.com.
   blog      CNAME        mydomain.com.
   rss       CNAME        mydomain.com.
   

2. Add new domain to yunohost, input the domain with subdomain (subdomain.my.domain) as it if were new
3. Do a diagnostic, which does DNS checks too, which are needed for Letsencrypt
4. Install letsencrypt certificate from the usual Yunohost panel

I kept messing up NAME and DATA of the CNAME records because I was following more the other ones Yunohost created, a row of

Name: xmpp-upload.my.domain
Data: @

For subdomainname.my.domain I needed this (kinda-sorta-reversed from the above; as usual, dots are significant):

Name: my.domain.
Data: subdomainname

Random / colored fonts generator / CLI

cfonts is like figlet, but with many more settings (colors and alignment blew my mind!)! Link has a lot of colorful examples. I might get a nice colorful motd and/or banner soon. :)

Setting a new hostname linux

There’s a command for that: hostnamectl set-hostname new-hostname

Symbolic links and ~/.local/bin

I like the idea of having ~/.local/bin in my $PATH, and putting there symbolic links (ln -s TARGET LINK) to my usual folder where I have programs/executables. I’d even have a separate thing in $PATH for shell scripts and binaries, which will get rid of so many stupid CLI aliases I have whose function is to point to a single executable with a long path. TODO - look at my aliases and commands I run often and see how many of them can I symlink

VPS plans

• Taskwarrior sync
• git for ~/.timewarrior/ and similar folders
• git for dotfiles
• Some basic automated backups of small important things
• Possibly some Telegram bots will live there
• CalDAV & Contacts sync - both for sync and for backups
• Possibly self-hosted password management?

Timewarrior on-modify hook for taskwarrior

Had always problems with umlauts etc, looked at the source, changed #!/usr/bin/env python to #!/usr/bin/env python3 - now it works! Wanted to do a pull request, but it’s fixed on github master¹, the apt repo has an older version as it often does.

git clone to different directory

.. As expected. git clone git@what:ever outputdirectory. git clone git@what:ever . works.

Setting up serhii.net

New domain, yay! I’ll slowly move stuff there, starting with this diensttagebuch.

Setting up multiple remotes in github + .git/config

I wanted to set up two remotes, so that the dtb deploy.sh script after building the html & rsync-ing would push it to both the github dtb repo and my own. Followed this basically (except that I had deleted origin by error in the process, so recreated it back again and added both remotes to it so I’ll still be able to do git push origin master): How to push to multiple git remotes at once. Useful if you keep mirrors of your repo..

Mostly copying from there, changing/sanitizing some of my configs:

# Assume the git repost are set up like this
git remote add github git@github.com:muccg/my-project.git #this is the one "origin" pointed to to
git remote add bb git@bitbucket.org:ccgmurdoch/my-project.git

# Add to origin two remote urls for push
git remote set-url --add --push origin git@github.com:muccg/my-project.git
git remote set-url --add --push origin git@bitbucket.org:ccgmurdoch/my-project.git

# Look at the result
git remote show origin

which outputs this:

> git remote show origin
* remote origin
  Fetch URL: git@github.com:pchr8/my-project.git
  Push  URL: git@bitbucket.org:pchr8/my-project.git
  Push  URL: git@github.com:pchr8/my-project.git
  HEAD branch: master

Mentioned in the comments, it works, but has to be done twice of as it seems to rewrite the original remote: git remote set-url --add --push origin <...>

But maybe the most interesting thing there is .git/config! I didn’t know it existed, it shows most of the same things but much easier to read/edit! It currently shows something like this:

> cat  .git/config
[core]
	repositoryformatversion = 0
	filemode = true
	bare = false
	logallrefupdates = true
[branch "master"]
[user]
	email = me@me.me
	name = SH
[remote "bb"]
	url = git@bitbucket.org:pchr8/my-project.git
	fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/bb/*
	pushurl = git@bitbucket.org:pchr8/my-project.git
[remote "github"]
	url = git@github.com:pchr8/my-project.git
	fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/github/*
	pushurl = git@github.com:pchr8/my-project.git
[remote "origin"]
	url = git@github.com:pchr8/my-project.git
	fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
	pushurl = git@bitbucket.org:pchr8/my-project.git
	pushurl = git@github.com:pchr8/my-project.git

Creating redirects to new website

Adding the RedirectPermanent lines to .htaccess in the root of pchr8.net, that now contains the following:

ErrorDocument 404 /404.html
ErrorDocument 403 /404.html
ErrorDocument 500 /500.html

RewriteRule ^wiki/(.*)$ /f/$1 [R=301,NC,L]
RewriteRule ^fiamma/(.*)$ /f/$1 [R=301,NC,L]

RedirectPermanent /d/dtb https://serhii.net/dtb
RedirectPermanent /blog https://serhii.net/blog

Experimenting with rewriting everything except /f/, seems to work except for the main page https://www.pchr8.net/f/index.php/Pchr8.net_wiki_thing

RewriteEngine on

#RewriteRule (f) - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/f
RewriteRule (.*) https://serhii.net/$1 [R=301,L]

It gets redirected to serhii.net - maybe it chokes on the many weird characters or the repeat of pchr8.net?..

Setting up HTTPS/TLS for serhii.net

As per nfs docs ², it’s very easily done just by running YourPrompt> tls-setup.sh, and nfs takes care of all autorenewals, automatically sets up redirects etc. Awesome!

utimer

utimer can do a countdown, count-..up?, and can work as a stopwatch. It outputs time remaining too.

English

A pizza dough recipe³ reminded me that

DTB/markdown/footnotes/macro improvement idea

I have my vim macro for footnotes where it creates the [^..] things and then I paste the URI manually, but what I’d actually like is something that automatically creates a footnote at current cursor position, and as content uses the URI currently in the clipboard register! TODO (And also try to make it readable/interpretable this time)

Yunohost

To create a subdomain, you have to add it as “new” new domain and it takes care of everything, no magic with DNS records needed

taskwarrior non-work user account

Changed the zsh alias for it:

s () {task s project.not:w sprint.not:s "$*"}

Now on my non-work account, it shows non-work tasks from any sprint except “s” (which is a proxy of due:someday).

German foreign words

Foreign Words (Fremdwörter) - really nice! Has specific suffixes and what genders they create in German. In general - I remember that excellent website.

Also: “das Thema, die Themen”) - which plural rule is that? TODO

DTB - TODO

Given that I need to push/pull it a lot now, I should exclude the generated .html files in .gitignore

qutebrowser

W opens the last closed window! … on the topic of ’learn well the tools you use daily'

ding

Installed ding! Still remains the best dictionary program ever. ding buch works!

TODO - add keybinding to search for currently selected word. Or a basic prompt to quickly look for words, a la dtb - and that ideally adds the needed words to a list, and maybe even generates anki flashcards from them!

ding -m to start it minimally, likely make it floating for i3 by class, is a really nice start. Added this to config:

## Ding float
bindsym $ms+Shift+d exec ding -m
for_window [class="Ding"] floating enable

(got class from xprop)

Redshift settings for late-night work

If default automatic settings are too strong, these work well: redshift -xO 2500 -b 0.7

Noisetorch / polkit / policykit / pkexec saga

Couldn’t load noisetorch, error 127 when attempting to get the needed privileges. The help of Noisetorch said this means pksudo doesn’t work, and to fix this. After some googling, found a solution:

apt install policykit-1-gnome

Then add /usr/lib/policykit-1-gnome/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1 & to your autostart configuration. ¹

Interactive mode matplotlib

According to the docu it should be this, not working for me:

plt.ion()

Somehow it magically worked before without any changes from my side actually. Anyway, this¹ worked:

import matplotlib
matplotlib.use('TkAgg')
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

i3 startup - final

I can’t start everything from within i3 config. keynav doesn’t work (though it’s running), and compton creates a black strip in the bottom monitor when started as exec compton via i3. Though executing a startup script from within i3, a script starting everything else I need, somehow works. I remember dealing with this in the past, and this created the current chaotic setup.

Startup script (./s/s.sh) :

setxkbmap -option -option 'grp:rctrl_toggle, compose:rwin, compose:paus' v5,ruua
xmodmap ~/s/mod4
xcape -e 'Control_L=Escape' -t 100 

autorandr -l home

feh --bg-center ~/s/bg.jpg ~/s/bg.jpg

compton

keynav

i3 config startup script:

exec ~/s/s.sh
exec --no-startup-id redshift
exec --no-startup-id nm-applet

Removing dysfunctional setups

vim - remove save as root

I had this, but it started too often by error.

:W sudo saves the file 
" command W w !sudo tee % > /dev/null

New zsh prompt

Added this in a modified sh-trapd00r theme:

dir_status="%{$c1%}%* %B%7c/ %?"
PROMPT='%{$fg_bold[green]%}%p%{$reset_color%}${dir_status} ${ret_status}%{$reset_color%}
%{$fg_bold[green]%}> %{$reset_color%}'

loginctl as a way to manage sessions of logged in users

Instead of killing all processes belonging to someone, loginctl will return all sessions, and loginctl kill-session $number will log the user off!

New non-work user account!

Set my old Lain background with feh. I should look at some of my old i3 settings etc, to make it look different from the work one.

• zsh theme: trapd00r
• vim theme: pablo

General plans for vacation

• Don’t touch any ‘should’s - java, python, …; mostly focus on ‘housekeeping’ things if I want to do stuff with the computer
• Learn to use kitty well
  • Highlighting/copying URIs etc especially
  • See if I can use it to replace some of my hacks
• Learn to use tmux or screen well
  • Screen is available almost everywhere, but tmux is ‘better’
• Learn to use vim much better
  • Make an effort to learn it systematically and well from the beginning, I have a lot of antipatterns
  • w/E etc
  • vim recovery of swap files
• Sort out my i3/user config and all configs in general
  • Something easy to enable/disable keyboards (xinput float ..)
  • Something to turn on/off audio/webcamera
  • Move container splitting keybinding further away from window closing keybinding
• Sort out all dotfiles
  • A place where they are by default and can be imported/overwritten
  • In general any kind of dotfiles management/backup
• Sort out my startup scripts
  • In general something that doesn’t make me afraid to disconnect the laptop from the screen
    • Automatically use connected screens, without arandr-ing every time
    • Same for keyboards
    • Same for keyboard layouts
    • Run redshift and stuff only once
    • Even just an i3 keybinding that sets up what’s needed

“Ricing” - English / Unix / …

• Ricing is “making improvements to a system that don’t actually do anyone any good, and can sometimes have negative ramifications” ¹
• “Rice” is “a word that is commonly used to refer to making visual improvements and customizations on one’s desktop. It was inherited from the practice of customizing cheap Asian import cars to make them appear to be faster than they actually were” ²

(was curious about the name of a PPA)

i3 stuff

• lpicanco/i3-autodisplay: i3wm multiple monitors auto configuration

Test config file:

displays:
  - name: eDP-1
    workspaces: [1, 0]
    randr_extra_options: "--primary --mode 2560x1440"
  - name: HDMI-2
    workspaces: [2, 3, 4]
    randr_extra_options: "--above eDP-1"

• A long time ago I wrote something like this, but worse: nonpop/xkblayout-state: A small command-line program to get/set the current keyboard layout..

autorandr for flexible multimonitor setup

This is even better than the above: phillipberndt/autorandr: Auto-detect the connected display hardware and load the appropriate X11 setup using xrandr It saves configs readably and automatically to ~/.config/autorandr/config

General small things

• autorandr set up
• i3lock
• better autostart
  • start the diensttagebuch, work notes in the correct workspaces
  • start slack, Telegram and co in the correct workspaces
  • Put workspaces on the correct screens

i3-gaps fun

Very simple config:

gaps inner 10
gaps outer 10

Installed compton to get transparent terminals. Added this to kitty config:

background_opacity 0.8

Git use use specific public key file

When using public key and ssh for git, when you can’t use ssh-add ..., this works: GIT_SSH_COMMAND="ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa_example" git clone example ³

Pycharm / matplotlib / pyplot debugging

I can happily use plt.plot()/plt.imshow() inside the <Alt-F8> and debugger console windows, it’ll be shown!

Recursively change owner in files owned by other user in current directory

Replace -user root with source user, $USER expands to user currently running command:

sudo find ~ -type d -user root -exec sudo chown -R $USER: {} +

sshfs / ‘Transport endpoint not connected’

In line with Day 784 about unmounting broken endpoints, yesterday I got a lot of errors (thunar didn’t start, I blamed memory, but df -h also didn’t start…), at the end the issue was with a sshfs directory:

fuse: bad mount point ./mountpoint’: Transport endpoint is not connected`

Using day 784 didn’t help, still got the above error. This helped: fusermount -uz myserver

Also, TODO: Why doesn’t linking stuff like this work?

{%raw%}
[Day 784]({% post_url 2021-02-23-day784.markdown %})
{%endraw%}

numpy true booleans

a is True is false for a numpy array of one element a, even if it’s value is True. a == True works correctly. Why does this happen?

pycharm debugging in console

You can use the console not just to look for output, but to interact with the variables etc! Why didn’t I think of this before: Using Debug Console | PyCharm