some reading material

Courtesy of The New Yorker, an exclusive excerpt from Barack Obama's soon-to-be-released presidential memoir, A Promised Land: "A President Looks Back on His Toughest Fight"

enlightenment

Listening to the Enlightenment album by McCoy Tyner, recorded in 1973 at the Montreaux Jazz Festival. Alphonse Mouzon on drums (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphonse_Mouzon). More about the album here.

two from pragmatic

Found two nice articles from pragmaticlinux.com. First:

"Getting started with Double Commander" - https://www.pragmaticlinux.com/2020/06/getting-started-with-double-commander/

This article, from back in June, offers some tips on using the dual-paned, "orthodox" Double Commander file manager. As the author writes:

Double Commander is a free and open source dual pane file manager. It is an excellent file manager, especially for those who prefer a consistent file manager experience, while trying out different Linux desktop environments. This article assists you with getting Double Commander installed and configured on your Linux system.

Each desktop environment ships with its own file manager: Nautilus on Gnome, Dolphin on KDE, Thunar on XFCE, etc. Working in the file manager forms and integral part of my daily PC work flow. Therefore I do not enjoy being forced to switch to a different file manager, each time I try out a different desktop environment on Linux. Additionally, I really enjoy dual pane file managers. If you recognize yourself in these file manager preferences, then I can highly recommend giving Double Commander a try.

Kinda sums up why I use "DC".

Second:

"Install a minimal KDE on Debian 10 'buster'" - https://www.pragmaticlinux.com/2020/10/install-a-minimal-kde-on-debian-10-buster/

Good tips here. Basically, do a netinstall, choose only "standard system utilities", then run:

sudo apt -y install kde-plasma-desktop plasma-nm

After that, add whatever packages/apps desired.

sweet music

Listening to Iron Starlet, a very nice album by young jazz pianist Connie Han. Here's a link to it at YouTube Music: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=Vywx6n3Qzo4&list=OLAK5uy_njjp_GoWQ7v0iRuvuhDeR57KcwYPSu4aE

More info: https://modernjazztoday.com/album/iron-starlet-connie-han/

 

asunder

Testing out the Asunder CD ripper and encoder. Project homepage: http://littlesvr.ca/asunder/

I installed Asunder in Debian Buster GNOME:

$ sudo apt install asunder

Optional dependencies include the lame and vorbis-tools packages, the latter of which was already installed here. I decided not to add lame.

I inserted a CD and started up Asunder. Asunder showed the found CDDB info.

For now, I left everything at the defaults. Asunder was set to encode to OGG Vorbis, which was exactly what I wanted.

I ripped the files and then opened them in the Audacious music player. Track information was picked up as expected, and the songs played perfectly.

I was planning to look at some other options for ripping CDs in GNOME. I took a quick look at ripperX, but then I tried Asunder and it seemed to give me what I wanted out-of-the-box. Good software, does what it's supposed to do. Sold.

 

getting filenames/pathnames

Here's a tip on how to quickly copy and paste the full path of a file from GNOME's Files (aka nautilus) onto the command line in Terminal (aka gnome-terminal): Drag And Drop Files And Folders In Terminal To Print Their Absolute Path

Not all terminal emulators will support this, but it also works with KDE Plasma's Konsole.

I found that this trick also works for copying the absolute pathname of a file from my preferred file manager, Double Commander, into gnome-terminal.

Double Commander offers a few other options for copying filenames. In this shot I've got the ~/scripts directory selected, and I can copy the filename to the clipboard via a menu entry (Mark > Copy Filename(s) with Full Path or Mark > Copy Filename(s) to Clipboard):

 

Even nicer, buttons for those actions can be placed on Double Commander's toolbar:

Very handy. From the clipboard, the filenames can be copied to the terminal emulator with the Ctrl+Shift+V keystroke.

The menu entries in Double Commander show keystroke hints for yet another way of doing this:

Ctrl+Shift+X - copy filename to clipboard
Ctrl+Shift+C - copy absolute pathname to clipboard

I've found it worth my time to practice those keystrokes a few times to get my fingers used to 'em. And, again, after copying:

Ctrl+Shift+V - paste from clipboard to terminal emulator

ugly, ignorant, and just plain sad

"The grocery manager, the anti-maskers, and the one thing he wouldn't say"

C'mon, people.