Thoughts dereferenced from the scratchpad noise.

Latest posts


Hostname generator

Published at February 20, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  1 min read

Many times happened that I spend time, during the installation of the new system, whether it be a virtual physical machine, wondering about it’s hostname. One day I asked myself the trouble searching for host name generator. Best I could find (currently second in the results of google) is rospo.net. It gives you the choice of category for the host name. My favorite, as a fan of fantasy is “Characters from Tolkien”....

Categories: miscellaneous

Improve productivity by tracking work environment with git - vim

Published at February 20, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  3 min read

In this post I try to describe my vim configuration procedure and how it is connected with git. The whole concept is based on keeping all the configuration files in a separate directory. These files are connected using symbolic links in places where system or application requires it....

Categories: miscellaneous

Improve productivity by tracking work environment with git - preparation

Published at February 19, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  1 min read

Update: My repository is available here. Below is first post from series in which I want to describe my experience gained in attempt to enhance my productivity by using git to control the contents of some files in my home directory. The first step to improve the productivity is good organization of working environment. It happens very often that I work on multiple machines both physical and virtual. Therefore I need a good mechanism to share knowledge, experience, code, configuration and many other things....

Categories: miscellaneous

Set irssi under debian to use freenode server

Published at February 15, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  1 min read

Very short manual on how to set up irssi to work with freenode servers. First, install irssi: 1 sudo apt-get install irssi Run: 1 irssi For freenode write: 1 /connect holmes.freenode.net Send register command for your {nickname} and add information about your {e-mail}: 1 /msg nickserv register {nickname} {e-mail} Copy and paste line, which you get from freenode registration server to your mailbox, to irssi....

Categories: miscellaneous

arbtt as productivity improver for Linux environment

Published at February 6, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  3 min read

As I mentioned in previous post I work a lot on improving my productivity. After FreeMind it is time for arbtt. This is small tool which tracks active windows during your work. It is delivered with distro that I’m currently using (Debian wheezy). So all I had to do was: 1 sudo apt-get install arbtt Below I try describe how I configure arbtt to work with some apps that I use (Google Chrome, FreeMind, gnome-terminal and screen)....

Categories: miscellaneous

First steps to improve work productivity in Linux environment

Published at February 5, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  2 min read

The problem encountered on several occasions over several months. Now it is time to deal with it. How did this happen? As always, resources were not sufficient, and if we can not increase the amount of resources we must strive to optimize their use.In this case, it was about time. While reading my last acquisition, once again I faced the problem of re-configure Linux account. Every time when I need new account for some reasons I need to configure some things manually....

Categories: miscellaneous

UEFI from Linux enthusiast perspective

Published at January 15, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  2 min read

Another interesting topic with which I am dealing with recently is the UEFI. As we read on wikipedia: “The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) is a specification that defines a software interface between an operating system and platform firmware.". The purpose of this specification is to create something what in the future fully replace the BIOS. Of course, as always in such a situation, I wonder what OpenSource and Linux gurus have to say....

Categories: miscellaneous

Tmux as screen replacement and productivity accelerator

Published at January 6, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  5 min read

As I wrote in previous post I switched from GNU screen to tmux. I use it for a few moths and have to said that I’m really impressed by simplicity, performance and community support in this project. In this post I want to discuss my configuration and useful additions for it like tmuxinator, session logging, colors or status bar configuration. Basics Debian contain tmux package but for stable and testing release it is pretty old version....

Categories: miscellaneous

flashrom and Shuttle AV18E2

Published at January 6, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  2 min read

During Christmas break I found an old unused motherboard in my home, right away I thought that it maybe useful as learning environment for coreboot. First you need to do with this kind of board is to check if it is possible to flash its BIOS with user space tool called flashrom List of supported hardware can be found here. All you need to do is go through this HOWTO. Be aware that these operations can cause you will not be able to run your motherboard if something goes wrong....

Categories: firmware

How to begin with coreboot

Published at January 6, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  1 min read

About a month ago I started my adventure with coreboot. As coreboot home page says “coreboot is a Free Software project aimed at replacing the proprietary BIOS (firmware) found in most computers”. Although I read the majority of materials from mentioned page I still suffered from a lack of basic information that would help me to arrange everything in my head. Therefore, I decided to write a series of posts described my actions associated with this interesting project....

Categories: firmware