xfce 4.14

A few shots of my Xfce 4.14 desktop in Arch (recently updated from 4.12):

classic

Herbie Hancock - Takin' Off



Personnel:

Herbie Hancock - piano
Freddie Hubbard - trumpet
Dexter Gordon - tenor saxophone
Butch Warren - double bass
Billy Higgins - drums




 This was Herbie Hancock's debut album, released in 1962. The first cut, "Watermelon Man", went on to become a jazz standard, but the entire album is a classic.

listing files and directories

Good article about the ls command in Linux: "16 Practical Examples of Linux LS command for Beginners"

It kinda bugs me that the author used capital letters in the title for the command. But I'm over it. The article contains some great tips. The ls command is one of the first commands most users learn about when they're new to Linux, and even after using Linux for many years, I'm still finding it to be a very useful tool.

Here's one I like to use that wasn't mentioned in the article:

$ ls -dl $PWD/*

I like to use it mainly because it outputs the full pathnames of all of the files and directories in the present working directory (except for hidden ones). Here's an example, from one of my Arch installations:

That listing shows only directories. Here's another example, from within another directory, and this one contains only files:

That's convenient sometimes when I want to copy and paste the full pathname of a file/directory. But most of the time, I'm keeping things simple and using one of these four commands:

$ ls
$ ls -a
$ ls -l
$ ls -al

For more info about the ls command, check out man ls.

on books

Here's a link to an article about one of my favorite authors: "In Praise of Samuel R. Delany"

I've read his books Dhalgren and Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand a couple of times now.

And, here's a very good book that I just finished: Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus by Robert D. Kaplan, first published in November, 2000. More info here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33687.Eastward_to_Tartary

galileo woud have loved this

A recent shot of Jupiter:

"This new Hubble Space Telescope view of Jupiter, taken on June 27, 2019, reveals the giant planet's trademark Great Red Spot, and a more intense color palette in the clouds swirling in Jupiter's turbulent atmosphere than seen in previous years. The colors, and their changes, provide important clues to ongoing processes in Jupiter's atmosphere. The new image was taken in visible light as part of the Outer Planets Atmospheres Legacy program, or OPAL. The program provides yearly Hubble global views of the outer planets to look for changes in their storms, winds and clouds. Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 observed Jupiter when the planet was 400 million miles from Earth, when Jupiter was near "opposition" or almost directly opposite the Sun in the sky."

Credits: NASA, ESA, A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center) and M.H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley)

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/hubble-new-portrait-of-jupiter

screengrab

Screengrab, a light-weight screenshot app:

Users can choose to edit the screenshot in another app:

The settings options are simple, yet sensible:

I like that the app stays open between screenshots (xfce4-screenshooter needs to do that!).

Info about the screengrab package in Arch Linux:

$ pacman -Qi screengrab
Name            : screengrab
Version         : 1.101-1
Description     : Crossplatform tool for grabbing screenshots of your desktop.
Architecture    : x86_64
URL             : https://github.com/lxqt/screengrab
Licenses        : GPL2
Groups          : lxqt
Provides        : None
Depends On      : qt5-base  qt5-x11extras  kwindowsystem  libqtxdg  libx11  libxcb
                  hicolor-icon-theme
Optional Deps   : None
Required By     : None
Optional For    : None
Conflicts With  : None
Replaces        : None
Installed Size  : 1139.00 KiB
Packager        : Chih-Hsuan Yen
Build Date      : Thu 28 Feb 2019 07:37:36 AM MST
Install Date    : Sat 03 Aug 2019 09:55:21 AM MDT
Install Reason  : Explicitly installed
Install Script  : No
Validated By    : Signature