Monthly Archives: September 2017

Bye bye Awesome!

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My desktop is not awesome anymore, but it is full of high trees.

In a preceding post I complained about Awesome’s inconstant API and concluded that I would probably switch in the near future which I finally did last week. That’s right, I finally ditched AwesomeWM for i3, and so far not disappointed at all.

In overall the configuration is a lot easier with i3 than it is on Awesome. Sure you cannot play as much as you used to with lua, but the syntax of the configuration file is rich enough that you don’t need much scripting anyway. It’s very Unixy, simple in its core and delegates itself nicely to external tools (i3bar, i3status) and scripts. There is a very nice IPC mechanism (that goes through a Unix socket) that you can use from command line or librairies in C, Python, OCaml and many others.

Now there is no fancy widget as you do have in Awesome, everything is text + UTF8 with some coloring. Perhaps there is an i3bar alternative that can do more than this but I don’t know of any yet. Workspaces are also different, they are shared between outputs and not visible in i3bar until focused or contain a window, but in time you get used to it. Although there is nothing that I really miss from Awesome, also the simple API, simple configuration, nice documentation, clean IPC via Unix socket (which is really nice, you can communicate with i3 from virtually anywhere, even assembly), all of those were really worth the change.

Atari soldering day!

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Had to do some soldering on my Atari recently, so I took the opportunity to take some photos of the mainboard (from both sides since I also had to desolder and replace some components). Not that it’s that much hard to find on the Internet, but here’s my two cents. It’s a 1040STE, however I took the photos with my phone so it’s not the best quality:

Also if you want more info about STE hardware I highly recommend this site.

Today’s movie: Valérian AND Laureline

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Simple and efficient.
If Luc Besson only had the occasion to do one single movie in its entire life, that would probably be it. That’s the consecration of the fifth element. Now go ahead in your Limouzingue fly me from Rubanis to Syrte the magnificient, we’ll stop by Point Central and we’ll head for the stars, or a world without star, par l’Espace.

We are but simple travelers who seek the enchanter who lives beyond these woods.

Now if you think that’s a rip off of Mass Effect, you are wrong! Stop playing video games and go read your classics. Now if you think you are going to see an adventure of Valérian and Laureline, you are wrong! It’s heavily inspired but it’s nothing like it, and it’s something in its own right. Valérian is not that clumpsy hero of the equinox, a brave knight despite himself. Laureline is gratuitously aggressive (so much that it gets kind of scary). The Shingouz are not as dubious as they ought to be. The grumpy transmuter is not grumpy at all (they don’t even come from Bluxte, but they sure are rare), and except for the apparence they are closer to telepathic Spiglics than anything else. And for god sake, in this movie Point Central is the ISS!

M. Bison little known brother, he’s the one who made it in the family.

It’s very close to the Ambassador of the Shadows (despite the title), but there are numerous nodes to some of the other albums in the series. The movie is still Valérian and Laureline (also despite the title) their is an unspoken balance about it that is very hard to find nowadays, they are acting as a team, they are each other’s sidekicks, and they are each other’s heroes and that’s incredibly refreshing.

It’s also very simple. You shouldn’t expect the need to turn your brain on for two hours. But I’m not sure you should expect anything else. Would it have been more faithful, it wouldn’t have been enough. Would it have been less faithful, it wouldn’t have been worth the name. And this movie tries hard to do just that by placing itself right in the middle. So in the end it’s a pleasant and visually stunning space adventure among the riches of cosmos.