Think Freely GNU Guix Background Wallpaper
After some experimentation with GNU Guix, I was inspired to make a background wallpaper with the Guix logo and my favourite slogan, Think Freely. The slogan was inspired by both Apple's late 90s Think Different slogan and another background wallpaper I found with the Arch logo and Think Correctly (which I appreciated especially since I worked as an English teacher at the time). My external screen is 2560 x 1440, so that is the resolution of the JPEG as well. My X230 also has a 16:9 aspect ratio so it scales down nicely. As always, this image is licensed as Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 international, so feel free to resize it, add to it, subtract from it or do whatever you like as long as you attribute me for the original and share with the same license. (It would be ironic not to use a copyleft free culture license for a wallpaper with that slogan…)
Rapid Photo Downloader Error on Wayland on Arch
If you try to run rapid-photo-downloader on Arch on Wayland, you get this error message:
qt.qpa.plugin: Could not find the Qt platform plugin "wayland-egl" in "" This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.
Available platform plugins are: eglfs, linuxfb, minimal, minimalegl, offscreen, vnc, xcb.
Fatal Python error: Aborted
Current thread 0x00007fa0cd669740 (most recent call first): File "/usr/lib/python3.11/site-packages/raphodo/ui/viewutils.py", line 975 in anyscreenscaledqt File "/usr/lib/python3.11/site-packages/raphodo/ui/viewutils.py", line 991 in anyscreenscaled File "/usr/lib/python3.11/site-packages/raphodo/rapid.py", line 7489 in main File "/usr/bin/rapid-photo-downloader", line 33 in <module>
Extension modules: PyQt5.QtCore, gi.gi, zmq.backend.cython.context, zmq.backend.cython.message, zmq.backend.cython.socket, zmq.backend.cython.device, zmq.backend.cython.poll, zmq.backend.cython.proxysteerable, zmq.backend.cython.version, zmq.backend.cython.error, zmq.backend.cython.utils, psutil.psutillinux, psutil.psutilposix, gphoto2.widget, gphoto2.version, gphoto2.result, gphoto2.portlog, gphoto2.portinfolist, gphoto2.list, gphoto2.filesys, gphoto2.file, gphoto2.context, gphoto2.camera, gphoto2.abilitieslist, PyQt5.QtGui, PyQt5.QtWidgets, PyQt5.QtNetwork, tornado.speedups, PyQt5.QtXml, PyQt5.QtX11Extras, PyQt5.QtWebChannel, PyQt5.QtTest, PyQt5.QtSvg, PyQt5.QtSql, PyQt5.QtQml, PyQt5.QtQuick, PyQt5.QtQuickWidgets, PyQt5.QtPrintSupport, PyQt5.QtPositioning, PyQt5.QtLocation, PyQt5.QtOpenGL, PyQt5.QtDBus (total: 42) Avbrutt (SIGABRT) (kjerne lagret i fil)
Reinstalling the program does nothing. It turns out that there is a missing dependency. I have spent a lot of time trying to figure this out, but finding the information is hard, so I thought I would help my future self and maybe some others by supplying the fix I have found. It is not, as many suggest online, enough to install Python-PyQt5. It is already a dependency and installed. You need to install qt5-wayland to get it to work. On some distros, you also need to install egl-wayland, while on others, it comes as a dependency of qt5-wayland.
This is not just a problem with rapid-photo-downloader. There is a lot of discussion online about this error message with other Qt5 and Qt6 packages from different distros like Debian, Ubuntu and Arch. qt5-wayland is a dependency only if you run Wayland, so maybe that is why it does not come with the package as a dependency even if I think it should. Now that the larger desktop environments are all Wayland by default, I would guess X11 users are the minority of GNU/Linux users. Therefore, Wayland dependencies should come with all packages that need them. Legacy X11 users would probably not worry too much if a small extra package they do not need is installed. If they really worried about bloat, they would not have used X11 in the first place since it is a baroque collection of legacy cruft.
Update August 6th, 2023: I have experienced the same issue with Kdenlive on GNU Guix as well. It turns out that both Qt5-wayland (qtwayland@5.15.8 on Guix) and egl-wayland are missing dependencies for Kdenlive for Wayland users. I tried installing both qtwayland (qt6-wayland on other distros) and qtwayland@5.15.8, but Guix complained and only let me have one of them. This makes it impossible to mix and match Qt5 and Qt6 apps on Wayland on Guix. Guix should have two sets of packages like other distros (qt5-wayland and Qt6-wayland) even if it is simple to make a clean environment since users expect to be able to mix and match packages from different versions of the same toolkit as on any other distro without going through extra hoops. It is not the users' choice if the devs of their favourite packages use the older version of the Qt toolkit instead of the newest one. We need both Qt5-wayland and Qt6-wayland, just as we still need both GTK2, GTK3 and GTK4.
Maximize screen real estate
Real estate is expensive. Bad room layout can make a large flat seem small and a small flat seem large. A space with too much furniture can seem small even if it is large and a place with just a few select pieces of furniture can seem large even if it is small. All of this also applies to screen real estate. Especially with smaller laptops with lower resolution displays, it is nice to get as much space as possible for the actual content and waste as little as possible on distracting UI elements that makes the screen seems smaller than it is. By having more space for the actual content, you also minimize scrolling.
I achieve max pixel efficiency by using the tiling Window Manager Sway. Since it is a tiler, it automatically places windows in a tiled layout. Compared to working in a floating WM or Desktop Environment, I save a lot of mousing around to move my windows. I have a nice wallpaper, but no icons that clutter up my desktop. I have set up Sway to have 2 pixels of border around each window and no title bar on top to get as much space as possible for the programs I work in. The two pixels are needed to see where one window ends and another starts and also to distinguish between the active window with a red border and the inactive window(s) with a blue border. One pixel was hard to see, so I went for the somewhat wasteful setting of two pixels in stead.
I have also set smart_borders on which means that if I have only one window on a virtual desktop, it is without any border at all. This saves four pixels in both directions and looks nicer. I use a small 12 inch Thinkpad X230 with an internal 1366 x 768 pixel display as my main machine and usually just one program per virtual desktop, so the smart_borders make a difference. On my external 2560 x 1440 pixel 25 inch wall mounted screen behind my standing desk, I am more inclined to have two programs side by side if I am actively working on something in one window and just need to look something up or do a related task in another window. Humans are generally worse at multitasking than we think, so I like to separate different tasks on different virtual desktops even on large screens to not get distracted.
I do not use a panel on the top or bottom of my screen since this wastes pixels in the directions most screens have the fewest (height). I have set up the built-in Swaybar to autohide. I use scripts launched with keyboard shortcuts for the few things I need that most people keep in their bar or panel, like getting battery status in a notification or turning wifi or bluetooth on or off. A benefit of using scripts launched by the keyboard in stead of a bar with lots of information or system tray applets is that I save mousing around in submenus of my system tray or clicking on my panel to get things done. Since Sway implements the system tray of Swaybar in an xdg standards compliant way, but most programs still use a legacy Gnome implementation, most tray applets do not work anyway and this is what forced me to think closer at what functionality from the system tray I actually needed in the first place.
Over time, I have gradually switched out some of the larger GUI programs I used with smaller, simpler, more customizable and easily scriptable tools. Some of them are terminal programs, some are Emacs packages and some are small GUI programs. Many of the small GUI programs also have a minimal GUI that only present a few very useful elements and is otherwise controlled through keyboard shortcuts, like zathura or mpv. By having very few user interface elements, these programs give more room to the actual content you read or watch. The same applies to the TUI programs and Emacs packages I use.
Since switching from vim to Emacs, I have integrated some of the tasks I used to do in separate programs into it. Emacs is very efficient since it is so keyboard and text centric and by having fewer programs, I save the cycles my brain would use for context switching with different keyboard shortcuts for different programs. Emacs also has the ability to run both in a GUI which is what I normally use (since it adds support for different fonts in different contexts, pictures and PDFs), but can also be used in a terminal emulator or the tty with most of the same functionality. An example of how I gradually have integrated my workflows into Emacs is that I recently stopped using PCManFM as my file manager and instead now use Emacs' dired and the GNU coreutils in a terminal (inside or outside Emacs).
To save space in Emacs, I turn the menubar, toolbar and scrollbar off which saves some pixels on the top and right side of every window. I instead use F10 for the occasional dive into the menu and keyboard shortcuts like C-v and M-v to scroll down or up and M-< and M-> to go the the start or end of a document. I also turn on showing column and line numbers in the modeline and do not turn on line numbers on the start of every line since I can easily find the right line with the modeline if I am debugging something with an error on a specific line. It looks a bit cleaner and saves some space on the left of the screen. Usually, this does not matter much since screens are generally wider than they are tall, but when having three windows with code side by side on a small laptop screen, it can be the difference between having to scroll horizontally or not.
All in all, by saving some pixels here and there, I get more space for the content I work with, watch or read while also reaping the efficiency benefits of a more text and keyboard-centric workflow that came as a consequence of having fewer visual clues on screen and using the mouse less. A lot of functionality is not obvious at first sight, but since I have set this up myself and know my keybindings and the available functionality, it works well for me. Sometimes less really is more.
Offline dictionary lookups within Emacs
There is a dictionary-mode in Emacs. It used to be a separate package, but now comes as part of Emacs. The usual way to use it is to (setq dictionary-server "dict.org") in init.el (or equivalents) to tell Emacs to look up dictionary definitions from the internet when used. There are a lot of dictionaries in dict.org. The availability of the full text of the Webster 1913 dictionary within it has been much lauded in the Emacsphere by wordsmiths eager to vary their outpourings' formulations. However, I am not always online. I like to keep as much functionality as possible available to me offline to not become over-reliant on the internet or loose functionality when the internet is unavailable.
The solution is simply to install the dictd server and the dictionary packages you want on your computer. In Debian, these are available as dictd and a number of packages that supply dictd-dictionary for it. In Arch, dictd is an ordinary package in the community repo, but the dictionaries has to be added through the AUR. The dictd server and related dictionary files are however not available yet for GNU Guix. The Arch Wiki has an excellent page on dictd if you want more information on its usage. Once installed, you can just change the aforementioned dictionary-server variable from "dict.org" to "localhost" and Emacs will find your installed dictionaries. Depending on the distro, you may also have to systemctl enable dictd.service and systemctl start dictd.service to make certain dictd runs at every startup as well as immediately.
The selection of freely available Norwegian Bokmål dictionaries is rather slim. I only found an English - Norwegian dictionary that seemed slightly useful to me. I wish there was as Norwegian Bokmål - English dictionary as well since that would sometimes be useful for me even if I have a decent English vocabulary. There are some dictionaries from other European languages to Norwegian Bokmål, but I seldom use other languages than English these days. (I used to play opera, cantatas and masses and then those would have been useful to me.) There is also a Norwegian Nynorsk - Norwegian Bokmål dictionary by freedict. It could occasionally be useful when I read very old Nynorsk (Landsmaal). I wish there were a comprehensive Norwegian Bokmål dictionary with word definitions, synonyms, IPA pronunciation, example of usage and expressions. I would use it especially for synonyms and spelling. Since I have lived and worked some years in Denmark and Sweden, my Bokmål spelling isn't as good as it used to be, and ten years of using English as my working language after I returned to Norway did not really improve it either. I naturally blame the morons in the government of Denmark-Norway that decided to support Napoleon for all my current spelling troubles. Or maybe the Swedes that broke up the Kalmar Union should ultimately be to blame? Ok, maybe I need to take some responsibility myself as well…
American English is well covered by the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English (dict-gcide) that includes the full text of the 1913 Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, the 1906 Century Dictionary and some other additions. I also installed WordNet (dict-wn) for synonyms. It is a pity that Oxford University Press do not release the Oxford English Dictionary or my favourite, the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, under a free culture license so it could be included as well. I have the Advanced Learner's Dictionary as a paperback in my bookshelf, and there is a website with it available gratis, but leaving Emacs breaks my flow when writing, the internet is not always available and my paperback is only available in my home.) In my opinion, a university should use free culture (or software) licenses for everything they produce, both since they are tax-payer funded and public money is used to create those works, so it is only fair that the tax-payers get access to the works they funded in return, and because the freedoms to study and share information should be the core values of a university. Peer-reviewed journals should be available for free to anyone in open formats and with licenses that secure free sharing of the knowledge they contain in perpetuity, such as Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike. I used to read journals on Early Music when I was a student since I had access through the university library, but I have no access to that research now unless I pay for very expensive subscriptions. I find it illogical and annoying since I gladly pay my taxes every month to fund, among other public institutions, the universities and colleges that create that research. There are also some good computer term dictionaries like the Jargon File (dict-jargon), Virtual Entity of Relevant Acronyms (dict-vera) and the Free On Line Dictionary of Computing (dict-foldoc) available. With those dictionaries installed, American English and computer terminology is well covered, but I miss a dictionary with both British and American spelling and also IPA pronunciation since I try to stick with British spelling and pronunciation (not always successfully) even if I hear and read a lot of American English. The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary includes all the information I want, but even if it is publicly funded by British tax payers, the information within it is not publicly available in open formats with a free culture license so the British tax payers (and the rest of the world) could use the work they funded. Since these dictionaries are under constant revision, they will never go out of copyright either, so the public will never benefit from funding the work. There are legitimate reasons for copyright law to exist (such as ensuring artists can earn a living), but keeping publicly funded works from being used by the public is not one of them.
I use both M-x dictionary-search and M-x dictionary-lookup-definition. The former lets you write in a search term while the latter looks up the word at point. The latter is obviously very useful while reading while the former may be more useful when writing, except if you want to find a synonym while revising your text where the latter becomes useful again. There is no need to change dictionary language for dictionary-mode unless you have installed too many dictionaries or dictionaries of languages with a lot of collision of vocabulary and spelling. Norwegian and English share a lot of vocabulary, but seldom collide in spelling, so I see no need to exclude any of the relevant dictionaries in either language. If you are overwhelmed with hits, it is possible to change dictionary inside the dictionary-mode buffer to limit the number of entries you get.
Combined with recently setting up flyspell-prog-mode for prog-mode and flyspell-mode for text-mode and (setq ispell-dictionary "british") in my init.el, I now feel more confident than before when writing text in Emacs, whether in code or not. (Dictionaries for lookup with dictionary mode and dictionaries for spell checking are separate and aspell or hunspell has to be installed with relevant dictionries on your distro for ispell-dictionary to be set to the language you want for spell checking.) It's nice with spell checking for variable names and comments. Maybe I should add a toggle function with a keybinding for ispell-local-dictionary between "british" and "nb" to avoid the stress of M-xing ispell-change-dictionary when I occasionally write Norwegian Bokmål. (Or is it "M-xxing" from "to M-x" since consonants are doubled before grammatical endings in English, although not always in American English? Or even "emexxing", "emexing", "emmexxing" or "emexxing" for a more phonetic spelling? Neither a dictionary-lookup-definition nor ispell seems to have anything close to it even if it is one of the most obvious verbs to Emacs users. Maybe my confidence in these tools was premature?)
Road photography
A classical "road photograph" of a boat racing a car between Lyngdal and Farsund (at least that's what I saw) in early October 2022.