LanguageTool

March 9, 2021

LibreOffice’s default spellcheck is awful.

I hadn’t noticed until I joined a writing group that uses Google Docs to gather feedback. Google caught a lot of stuff and I started to think it would be nice if my word processor had similar functionality in 2021.

I read up and discovered LanguageTool, a LibreOffice add-on. It requires Java, which made me nervous about performance, but it’s been fine for the past week or so. It’s not blowing my mind, but it behaves much more like a modern spellcheck, so it was worth the installation for me.

LanguageTool

Calendars Are Tricky

February 18, 2021

I’m not sure this is a purely Linux issue, but it’s a work-from-home technical challenge.

I use Thunderbird/Lightning as my master calendar so I can see my days in one place. I subscribed to my work Outlook feed and could see everything in Thunderbird.

For some reason, recurring events would get stuck in that calendar, though. Like if a recurring meeting moved, it would still display. On the one hand, it’s always nice to realize you don’t have a meeting. But it’s probably better to have an accurate grasp on your time.

I looked into the issue and couldn’t really see any solutions (nor even how to express the problem). But I noticed that in my Fastmail web calendar, where I also subscribed to my work calendar, everything displayed perfectly. So I now subscribe to the Fastmail version of my work calendar.

It’s not pretty, but it’s not ugly either. And most importantly of all, it works.

So if your Outlook calendar is giving you similar problems with recurring events, try adding it to a web calendar and subscribe to that.

And yes, my Plan B was to keep adding adding calendars to calendars to calendars.

A Visit from the Zune Squad

January 28, 2021

That’s one of the wrinkles you tend to learn after spending time with the Zune Crew, most of them are lifelong audiophiles — the sort of people who get religious about terms like “lossless” and “FLAC.”

When you give certain people file format choices, they become very loyal.

I’m very particular about MP3 players, too, so this spoke to me.

A Visit from the Zune Squad | The Verge

The Linux Setup – Leah Neukirchen, Void Linux

January 20, 2021

I found Leah through a fascinating tweet where she charted out her IRC activity over the past 10 years. Leah’s setup is just as interesting, mostly in that there’s no desktop environment. Leah also helps maintain Void Linux, which is a rolling release built from scratch. It’s a little too hardcore for me, but it seems pretty beloved on Reddit. So this setup is technical and intense, but also a lot of fun.

You can find more of The Linux Setup here.

You can follow me on Mastodon here and follow me on Twitter here.

  1. Who are you, and what do you do?

    Hi, I’m Leah Neukirchen. I’m a maintainer and long-time contributor to the Void Linux distribution. I wrote some popular Ruby libraries such as Rack and bacon, created the first musl-based Linux distribution Sabotage, and the mblaze suite of tools for dealing with mail, as well as a dozen other unixy utilities which you can find on my Github. When I find the time, I try to contribute to other open source projects as well.

    I also publish the link blog Trivium.

    I studied math and theoretical computer science, but professionally I now work as a consultant specialized on back-end, cloud, and infrastructure topics.

  2. Why do you use Linux?

    I started using Linux around 1999 when I was picking up programming and I liked that it had many of the languages I was interested in already included. I didn’t have internet on my own machine back then, so the Debian CD set was a very good investment to get a lot of software easily.

    For a while, I used Apple products and OS X, as it was called back then, which was unixy enough to get along with, but later I switched back to Linux on my notebook as well, and immediately enjoyed it more, and finally could tweak all the things again.

    I also use BSDs on servers occasionally, but I found Linux most suitable and convenient for use on physical machines I sit in front of.

  3. What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?

    I use Void Linux on most machines, and also have a few servers also running Debian, Arch and various BSD. Even though it’s a rolling release distribution, Void Linux has proven to be very stable as a daily driver, and in the rare cases something breaks, we are quick to fix it.

  4. What desktop environment do you use and why do you use it?

    I don’t use a desktop environment in the typical sense of the word. I use OpenBSD’s cwm as a X11 window manager, and the majority of my windows are simply urxvt terminals. I tend to have lots of open windows, so the search function of cwm is essential to me. Most of the programs I use otherwise are GTK-based (e.g. Dino, Firefox).

    I never felt a need to use a desktop environment, since my setup works very well for me, and I do most things on the command line anyway.

  5. What one piece of Linux software do you depend upon? Why is it so important?

    I guess it’s Emacs. I edit most of the text and code I write with it, and also use it to read mail and newsgroups. It has good support for many (and even obscure) programming languages I use. However, on remote systems, I do most sysadmin-style editing with Vim.

    Now and then I try other editors (lately acme, kakoune, or vis) and then I realize how many small features Emacs has that make my life a lot easier.

    Second most important software is zsh, which I have extensively tweaked to my tastes.

  6. What kind of hardware do you run this setup on?

    I’m typing this on a Lenovo T480 which is my daily driver and work machine. It has 16GB RAM, but an empty slot left which I really should fill. Together with a Logitech MX Ergo trackball and Audio-Technica ATH-M50XBT headphones it’s the core of my current home office setup.

    Other systems I use are described better on my wiki.

  7. Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

    Sure.

Leah Neukirchen's desktop

Interview conducted January 6, 2021

The Linux Setup is a feature where I interview people about their Linux setups. The concept is borrowed, if not outright stolen, from this site. If you’d like to participate, drop me a line.

You can follow me on Mastodon here, follow me on Twitter here and subscribe to the feed here.

New in Thunderbird 78.0

January 12, 2021

Thunderbird 78 looks great. I can’t wait until there’s an upgrade path from 68.

I use Evolution for work mail, for psychological separation, but also for Exchange support, and I have to say: Thunderbird is just much easier to use, in that you can customize it into whatever you want from a client. I’m genuinely shocked people prefer web mail interfaces to something more robust, like Thunderbird.

New in Thunderbird 78.0 | Support moz://a

How and why I stopped buying new laptops

January 5, 2021

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kris uses Linux (Linux Lite):

Having used Microsoft Windows for a long time, I find Linux operating systems to be remarkably better, even more so because they are free to download and install. Furthermore, Linux operating systems do not steal your personal data and do not try to lock you in, like the newest operating systems from both Microsoft and Apple do. That said, even with Linux, obsolescence cannot be ruled out. For example, Linux Lite will stop its support for 32-bit computers in 2021, which means that I will soon have to look for an alternative operating system, or buy a slightly younger 64-bit laptop.

I feel the 32-bit support. That was part of the reason I needed to upgrade my old laptop, although I’m happy I did.

How and why I stopped buying new laptops | LOW←TECH MAGAZINE