funky up in here

"James Brown - Hot Pants (Part 1, 2 & 3) [Single Version]" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgfIKiVrSRA

 

"James Brown - Make It Funky Part 1 Thru 4 (Super Rare)" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2D2oUNTbjU

ripping with dolphin

While most KDE users will turn to k3b for ripping music files from audio CDs, KDE Plasma's Dolphin provides a fairly easy way to do it, as well. For info, check out "Encode and copy audio CD tracks" at the KDE UserBase Wiki, down near the end of the "Dolphin/File Management" section: https://userbase.kde.org/Dolphin/File_Management#Encode_and_copy_audio_CD_tracks

I've ripped quite a few CDs using this method, with KDE Plasma 5.16.5 in Kubuntu 19.10. After inserting a CD, a "Device Notifier" popup appears on the desktop. I select "Open with File Manager". There's something about the kioclient examining the CD, then Dolphin opens the files.

Also, with a CD in the drive, one can simply open Dolphin and click on "Audio CD".

Then, the user can copy the music files from one location to another -- drag, drop, copy. Dolphin presents the files in .wav format, but also puts corresponding .ogg and .mp3 files within the "Ogg Vorbis" and "MP3" directories, respectively. I prefer to go with the .ogg format.

Very cool. This is one of many reasons people say that Dolphin is the best Linux file manager. (I use Double Commander for most file management, though!)

1960

A couple of recordings from almost sixty years ago -- both from March, 1960, I think. Miles Davis with John Coltrane.

Konserthuset, Stockholm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_z221y8TOs

Olympia Theatre, Paris: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VE_dP90V84

a pacman tip

Found at: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman/Tips_and_tricks

This pacman command returns a list of installed packages on an Arch system, from smallest to largest:

$ LC_ALL=C pacman -Qi | awk '/^Name/{name=$3} /^Installed Size/{print $4$5, name}' | sort -h

This is how the output at the end looks here:

This expac command can be used for about the same thing; it lists the sizes of installed packages and their dependencies:

$ expac -H M '%m\t%n' | sort -h

Not as cool as Debian's dpigs command, which I mentioned in an earlier post, but simple enough to copy and paste onto the command line.

wintry

A couple of shots of my LXQt desktop in Arch, with a left-side, vertical panel, and an auto-hiding panel (horizontal, top right).

chilly

Frosty in the mornings, but overall not bad for mid-January.

dpigs

Just found out about dpigs, a Debian tool for finding out which packages are taking up the most space on the drive. Looks like dpigs can't be installed by itself; it's part of the debian-goodies package (see https://packages.debian.org/stable/utils/debian-goodies for a complete list of the debian-goodies tools).

Installing debian-goodies also provides access to the dpigs man page, which has info on usage and options. A link to an older version of man dpigs: https://www.commandlinux.com/man-page/man1/dpigs.1.html

Here's what happened when I first ran dpigs here:

$ dpigs
270589 fonts-noto-extra
262512 linux-image-4.19.0-6-amd64
260714 linux-image-4.19.0-5-amd64
204486 fonts-noto-cjk-extra
177044 firefox-esr
165839 openjdk-11-jre-headless
145747 libgl1-mesa-dri
132921 libreoffice-core
111246 papirus-icon-theme
86721 fonts-noto-cjk

I promptly did a sudo apt purge on some of that stuff.