Linux Mint 11

Here is my todo-list to get a freshly installed Mint 11 tweaked as I want it:

• Tweak Firefox
•     Add-ons and search engines.
•     Started Firefox Sync, which will save my bookmarks and preferences so I  won’t loose them again next time.
•    Installed the research organizer and collector Zotero and Zotero Word Processor plug in. My Zotero account came in very handy to reinstall data.

Screenshot of the whole screen, showing a tweaked Firefox

• Installed Dropbox (synchronisation) again and feeling blessed to have so much online – it contains a lot of important files, like backups and databases.

• Downloaded the launcher Kupfer -IMO it beats Unity, and is therefore the main reason for switching away from Ubuntu. (Gnome-Do is a good alternative).

Kupfer

• Change power- and screensaver settings

• Go through the programs that start automatically at every boot of Lunix. Disable those not needed. (As explained in this blogpost)

• Download Chromium to install the Tweetdeck app. – my favourite twitter client. (Didn’t they say that Adobe will no longer support the Adobe Air application for linux? So Chrome comes to the rescue to run Tweetdeck.)

• Install the password manager KeepassX and thank Dropbox for keeping my Keepass database available. So no passwords were lost this way.

• Download Skype – Eventhough it is not the full version that is available for Linux, it still comes in handy for long distance calls.

• Tweak Thunderbird. This time I choose IMAP again in stead of POP-mail.
•   Installed for fun Add-on Display Contact Photo.
•   I forward my mails to gmail automatically, as a backup, so nothing was lost there either.
•  Installed the e-mail notifier Mail Notification.

•  Downloaded the Linux Feed Reader Liferea. (Dropbox had a list of my subscriptions).

• Downloaded RSSOwl.  Another rss-reader with lots of options to play around with.

RSSOwl

• Downloaded the podcast collector gPodder – and made my gpodder-account put the subscriptions back into it.

• Downloaded Abiword. I want that fast and lean wordprocessor at hand.

• Installed Textroom. The fullscreen tekst processor to grab those fleeing thoughts that can’t stand distraction.

• Scid. Has all you need to study and play chess. I just have to figure out how I added the super strong chess-engine Stockfish to its list of chess engines.

And I couldn’t resist installing

• 0AD again. The real-time open-source strategy game with the truly stunning graphics. The gameplay is not finished yet, but starting it up feels like going on a holiday to the Mediterranean.

After that I went through the Control Center – Main Menu again to uncheck all the items I don’t think I will miss and that I therefore don’t want to see there.

There were a few things I found out during the process, that I didn’t know about:

• Glipper for Gnome comes in handy when you want to past something you copied a while ago on a page you can’t remember. So I installed that too.

• The template folder that can be found under “Documents” is used for opening templates directly from the desktop, Right-click on the desktop and choose “Create Document” to do so. Unfortunately it creates a shortcut to new file on the desktop. That’s not completely what I want, I would prefer it just to open the new file.

•  I never realized that by just selecting a piece of text in Linux, it is already copied to the memory of the mouse, so by clicking on the wheel or the button in the middle, it can be pasted. Smart!

• There is option on my “print” option screen to “print to PDF”, which creates a PDF of the selected items and puts it into the Home folder.

I tried Backing up my system with the back-up tools provided by Linux Mint, but I think I will do it myself next time, and only go for the folders with my content, such as the “Photos” and “Documents” folders, before installing a new release.

So there you are. Mint 11 is running fine with everything I want installed, and I got rid of Unity. Starting up programs and finding folders seems much faster now with Kupfer, and I don’t have this row of icons on my desktop.

As ever I have trouble finding out which language to use when I write, and who knows, even when I think. I have been writing in English the last years, but I try to speak Danish in my normal life (not to mention the other languages that are running around somewhere in my head).
Lately I started writing some more things in Danish, and as I didn’t know where to put these on this English blog, I decided to add a wordpress.com blog in danish to it. Just to keep things gathered in the right places. I’ll just see what happens with it, as I don’t want to force me to use a certain language. When I read a book in Danish or Dutch, my natural reaction is to write about it in its language, and the same happens when I listen to a radio program, a video or whatever.

For now I decided to try not to worry about it, even though I know that as a result of changing languages none of them will perhaps be used in an eloquent way, but I will put my trust in the eventual power of simplicity. I have to.

Following the news and joining debates about the political, social or even financial issues is perhaps beneficial for democracy, but I am not always sure about it. Nowadays in our fast media there is a lot of debate and action going on about thousands of things. Do we need all these fast opinions, or should those important debates take place in a slightly slower pace, with thoughtfull people who have studied the subject for a longer time because they have a genuine interest in the subject?

A lot of the news in the media is created by the media itself. They live from producing news and that’s also what they do, every day. We, the audience, need to be conscious and aware of our world. What is it we need to know, what are our interests and needs? If we know then we can decide what news is for us, and we can adjust our daily intake of it.
There is so much debth in every problem that remains in the dark, that it can make one feel rather hopeless sometimes.
Take for example history. As a young student we would ask the teacher: “What is the use of history, why do we need to learn all this old news?” We probably got an answer that didn’t really satisfy us, as we couldn’t really grasp its meaning.
Now I know. There are so many things that happened before, yes – there is nothing new actually – that it is amazing that we often are unaware of it. We make the same mistakes again and again but we treat them as something unique and new, and we try to find some sort of solution that will work for the moment. But how many times could we have foreseen it? Did we learn from previous occasions?

I had written these thoughts down some days ago, but decided not to publish them as I was unsure about their value. But I just read on Thomas Nyhland’s blog (in swedish) that he stops talking about politics. One of the reasons is that he doesn’t want to be dragged into endless, and in his opinion often not well-thought, political discussions – also because he feels that he already clearly stated his opinion on numerous occasions.
Part of his reasoning might come from the same sort of feeling that I tried to express here. One can write about politics, or one can try to focus on one’s deepest voice inside. In our information-overflow world, where everybody has a voice, these two things can probably not be combined.

I never liked fairy tales, not even as a child. Yesterday I visited the H. C. Andersen museum in Odense and it didn’t really help me to change my mind. As a boy I liked the set-up of the stories, the athmosphere and questions that arose during the reading. I often was wondering how the story would end and how all problems would be solved. But the solutions that were offered to create an end to the stories were most of the times very unsatisfying. It was as if the writer didn’t know himself and just when it became interesting he or she created a witch or a fairy to do some magic and suddenly solve all unsolved endings. And they live happily ever after and got many children. Boom! End.

I had in mind that H.C. Andersen and the Grimm Brothers used old folk tales and other sources and I got the idea that those original sources might be more interesting than these uninspired endings.

During my visit to the museum yesterday I got the impression that H. C. Andersen was a hard working writer that gave almost everything in order to succeed. He tried many things to get his career going and apparently had the plan of producing as much as possible and hoping that something might work some day. This fits with my idea of the writer of the fairy tales being someone who knew how to write a story but who didn’t had much to add.

It is also interesting to make a comparison between all his travels and visits to the upper class of Europe, and an, especially in our days, often advised managment plan of making one’s name known by giving interviews, lectures and making as much noise as possible. His travel activities must have helped him making a career in writing, which might explain part of his fame.

According to the museum there are some reports of H. C. Andersen being unaware of the impression he made during these visits (most striking when visiting Charles Dickens) and probably unjustly combined with the fact that the seemed to be unsuccesful with woman I got the idea that he might have been a hard working man that had his mind set up on succeeding as a writer.
The texts of the exhibition gave the impression that he wasn’t perfectly happy about his private life. It must have been tough for the young H.C. to become anything at all considering his unfortunate background, so his determination must have been vital for him during the main part of his life. One wonders if it didn’t turn into an obsession that ruled his life a little too much to become happy. It is nice that people like his stories but it must have been even more important for him as a person to live a happy life.

The best writing tool for writers is in my opinion a text editor, as I explained in this post. And frankly, it doesn’t matter what text-editor.

But I am not sure how to progress from there. I am a fan of freewriting, and this practice produces a lot of .txt files. Finding a system that can help me order it in the best way so that it can give me an overview and search possibilities will probably be a life long quest.

For my daily writing I started some months ago with the Linux text editor Gedit. It’s a good looking text editor that, combined with its plugins, does a fine job for a writer. Especially with the session saver plugin activated it is easy to keep different chapters, notes or a todo list of a book you are writing, in one session. Very practical and efficient.

The open source program Zim-wiki (see this post for my introduction of Zim) does more or less the same, but has a more streamlined approach to sessions. This could well help to keep an overview of the many .txt files that I produce. Zim-wiki  is not as allround as Gedit, but focuses on text writing. I tried both and wrote the following comparison:

The Comparison

First of all I must stress again that there is a big difference in the aim of both programs. Gedit can be used for many things, it is great for writing code for example, Zim-wiki is for writing text or at least notes.

My comparison only deals with those features that writers of text or notes would use.

Zim-wiki

• Zim .txt files are always gathered in so called notebooks, but stored as individual .txt files. The files of the current notebook show up in the sidepanel, where they can be moved around and new files can be added or created. New files can also easily be made in the txt file itself.
• The possibility of basic text formatting is nice for the eye and therefore a bit practical for writers, although a final more complicated layout should be done in a wordprocessor. Links can be added and the preferred application will open them. For example links to websites will open in your browser. Pictures can be added too (but I am not sure if that is a true advantage for a writer).
• All sorts of files can be imported into a Zim notebook, for example as an attachment. Txt files like for example from Gedit can be opened and entered into the system without a problem.
• The shortcut “[]” produces checkboxes that can be checked or unchecked. They are a bit fun and practical as Zim can gather all these [] boxes from all pages in the notebook, so that they can be used as a todo list or as tags for other purposes.
• The calender plugin turns Zim into a journal or logbook. It stores the calender files in a year/month/day structure on the computer, which is practical.
• There are many keyboard shortcuts so that the hands can stay on the keyboard as long as possible.
• There is a search option giving quick access to search results of all files in a Zim-notebook. This is good way to go through a group of files.
• Zim is available for windows too.

And with all this Zim still produces just a gathering of .txt files, ready to use wherever you want. Although the Zim-wiki way of formatting will be replaced by its equivalent symbols (E.g. “a bold word” becomes “a **bold** word” in a standard .txt file).

Gedit

• With the panel plugin Gedit can create an F9 sidepanel that shows all files in a folder using the computer’s file system . There is no interaction between the files from this panel (but they can be opened from there of course).
• One can create sessions with the session saver plugin, this reminds of Zim’s notebooks, but Gedit’s sessions is not much more than a quick way to open a number of files at once.
• The fact that Gedit can’t format text can certainly be seen as an advantage, as less possibilities should give less distraction.
• Just like Zim-Wiki, Gedit also has many plugins for writers, like “Documents Statistics”, “Spell checker” and “Snippets” (for entering often used text).
• It produces pure .txt files that can be opened as the are on any computer or other device regardless of the operating system or writing software installed.
• Gedit is optimized for much more than just writing .txt files, like for example coding and LaTex

While checking both programs I noticed that Gedit does a good job when the same file is open in both Zim and Gedit. Both notice that the same file is being updated on the harddisk, but Zim just saves its version or comes with a rather confusing error message, where as Gedit shows immediately a warning message stating that the file has been updated on the harddisk and gives the option to reload it.

Conclusion

As Zim focuses solemnly on writing text and notes it has extra features that are practical, like the many shortcuts, the search option within a notebook (a series of .txt files), the sidepanel with good overview of the files and its subfiles and the text formatting possibilities. The notebook system might be a good way to have some order in the may .txt files, so I will use Zim for my writing for now and see how it works out with large amounts of data.

Gedit will definitely be my preferred .txt application on my computer for all other purposes than my normal writing activities, as it is most practical in opening and editing a single .txt file. And of course it excels in writing and reading code.

The Change

It was a wish to create a frontpage on my homepage that made me decide to move the entire blog from bartwestgeest.dk/blog to bartwestgeest.dk. Now I publish the blog in the same bw.dk/blog but use WordPress.org to publish a static page under bw.dk.

A new subject: Writing Tools

I added a number of posts from another blog that I decided to give up. That was a blog about writing software. It took me too much time to maintain it as ambitious as I had set it up, but since I still like the subject I decided to merge it into this blog and to work on it whenever I feel like doing so. That part is added under the menu item “writing tools” with posts under the category “tools“. I have moved the connected diigo account with lots of “writing tools links” to my own diigo account, and as soon as I have cleaned up the mess I plan to add a link to it here on my blog.

The Theme

At the occasion of the movement I had another look at the theme available for WordPress.org, but after another evening pleasantly surfing from theme to theme I decided that the theme I was already using, the Igloo theme by Bizzthemes.com, actually serves me well. I even decided to buy the premium version. The free version of the theme works very well, but the payed version gives some more design tweaking possibilities and things like shortcode and slider-settings etc. In pure theory it would have been possible to tweak everything myself, but that would have taken me months, if not years, as I know practically nothing about coding. And as a member of bizzthemes.com I have access to the forum and direct messages to other members and the maker of the theme, so help is always near. The company is very young, let’s hope it becomes a success with lots of members and possibilities.

The Future

As I now can add pages and connect them through the frontpage I have the possibility to fill up my webhotel with whatever I want using WordPress and the Igloo theme. Apart from growing the blog-section and the writing-tools section, I hope to put some texts there, maybe longer articles or anything that I would like the reader to spent more time on than an average blog post. But who knows, maybe it will turn into something completely different.

Music: Hank Williams – I saw The Light (1948)

It is hard to think of a truly good reason for us humans being around, if you ask me. There are several reasons possible, but which one you choose is depending whether or not you are religious, positively minded or for example an oblivious sports fan. If you are not one of the lucky ones that can somehow find a reason, chances are that you are wandering around trying hard to find some purpose in life.

Not knowing what it all is for is one of the worst things that can happen to you. When there is no good reason for the existence of any part of the world around you, why would you bother trying anything, or even care about something?

The one thing we do care about is our own person. We are the ones that see, feel and hear the world, and most of us are aware that we have a huge influence upon the interaction between ourselves and our surrounding. This means that the best thing to do in life is to develop ourselves and to be good to us and the people we meet.

This isn’t always easy though, because when, for whatever reason, you meet boundaries that limit your possibility to develop or when you never seem to meet anyone willing to share at least some goodness with you, you might feel like your life is an endless trying to swim up the river with hardly any gain what so ever.

Lucky are those that find their call, their niche, and that find a way to build upon their talents, to open up unexpected possibilities within themselves and their world, to blossom.

If you manage to, let’s say, start a bank in your neighbourhood, and you love your work and things go well, you thrive and will be able to do good to yourself and others.

If not, you struggle and hopefully will try again and again, and one more time. Will you ever see the light?

Religion can serve as such an opener, as it gives, without needing any prequalifications, a sudden goal and aim in life. Here you can be good to others and therewith also to yourself. Your life has meaning, you are saved from trying and trying, no more swimming upstream.

Maybe that is was drives us, whether we become a bank director or a good religious person, we are saved and have a purpose, we are doing well and feel happy.

And who knows, this might include the answer why religion is less attractive in the western world at the moment. We have many opportunities to become bank director, nurse, a world traveler or a splendid partner. We can choose from many possibilities with hardly any financial or material worries.

It irritates me that a general article in Danish about the name Lucifer is linked to a Dutch article about the devil, without mentioning any roman predecessors. This is in my opinion another small sign about the Dutch society still being so entangled in christianty that it misforms history. There are many prechristian traditions, names and stories that were transformed at one point in history to fit into christianity, and I think that it is our duty to at least inform each other that there actually was life before that.

The English Wikipedia page refers briefly to the name being a latin word given to the planet Venus and at the bottom of the page it links to an article about the ancient Greek god Eosphoros. They also mention the use of the name Lucifer or the interpretation of it in other beliefs than Christianity.

I do not know how to make a remark about this on the Dutch Wikipedia pages – I might have to read the Wikipedia introduction first.

As a writer you write, as an editor you edit and as a publisher you publish. The writer in you wants a tool that can create texts as quickly and easy as possible. Quick because when you are finally getting some good ideas or when the words are coming to your mind faster than you can type,  you need a tool that reacts immediately. Your mind is occupied with trying to grab the ideas and impulses so you also want something that is fool-proof and not distracting.

After many thoughts and attempts I settled for the one obvious tool that does the job best: a plain text-editor.

Text it

A text editor is a small program that basically produces .txt files, which is just about the most bare and smallest kind of text-file you can produce. No different letter types or sizes, nice layout or  italics or bold, but just text, ready to be used everywhere you want. Because of the simple .txt format you can take it anywhere you like in the world of text-based software. Open it in your favourite word-processor and create the most beautiful layout you can think of or send it by email to your best friend who can read it instantly in the mail or open it in what ever software and operating system he or she might happen to use. Copy and past that long post into your blogging tool or create an archive of lightweight basic text files, future-proof.

Text files are very convenient to back-up as their small size guarantees the shortest possible uploading time to a backup service, be it on the web or on your memory key. It will take you very likely more than a lifetime to write 2GB of .txt files, so you don’t have to worry about running out of space anywhere.

But one of the main advantages is the quick response time of text editors. They open instantly and make my old computer react like a brand new top model. Keep a shortcut at hand and whenever an idea pops up write it down immediately and save it, either in a file of its own or keep a file open to gather related ideas.

Save it

Save your files naming them with the current date like yymmdd (for example: 100211) and you automatically create a diary or journal that is stored in the right order and with the exact date you had that brilliant idea.

When you consequently start a new file each day you can keep track of different versions by copying the lightweight .txt file of the day before in your new file and edit and save it.

Control it

In order to keep control over your growing archive of .txt files you can use a search-tool that you tweak to index your archive of .txt files only. In this way you will be able to search very fast and won’t get distracted by .mp3 files or house-cleaning schedules. To ease up the searching process I add tags to pieces of text that I think I might want to use or reread later. A tag like #(tag), as for example: #quote or #idea, doesn’t really work in the search-tools I used as they apparently don’t “read” the #-symbol. So I opted for tag-quote or tag-idea that is certainly indexed by all search tools.

Screenshot of the results of a search in my .txt files (using Tracker).

I put the tag on a new line and I add a few words that somehow describe the piece of text I am referring too as these words show up in my search results directly behind the tag.

Screenshot of a text editor with tabs (gedit)

Choose a text editor that supports tabs so you can open search results or other multiple files you are working on in the same window and quickly switch between them. These could for example be chapters of a book, a plot or character descriptions, quotes or articles. I keep always two tabs open; a todo list or notes file and a file with the tags I use so I can be consistent.

Screenshot of the my complete screen.

Most text editors have the F11 shortcut that will turn it into a full-screen productivity machine and with a default easy-for-the-eye background colour there will be no stopping you.

Well, I can’t see a reason anyway.