Code for Concinnity

Today I checked out Arch Linux. It’s just that cool. It’s a minimalistic distro that focuses on, well, minimalism, simplicity and elegance.

What’s more of a pleasant surprise is that I find the Arch Linux Wiki to be probably the most comprehensive and high quality resources of Linux in general available on the net. Among those gems, I’ve found the way to change the font at the console. I’ve been using nix environments for a couple of years and this is the question that has always bugged me but nobody seemed to have talked about. There you go, several years of research

Setting up Arch Linux was a pleasant learning experience from itself. The package manager pacman offers the same level of convenience as the famous apt, if not more. The nice thing about it is that Arch’s packages seem to be much more recent than those ancient rugs on Debian and Ubuntu.

At the same time, Arch doesn’t bog you down with lots of unnecessary stuffs. Right out of the box, Arch almost doesn’t have any packages, and you have to edit a couple of config files just to be able to download things from the repos. But it was a pleasant learning experience, largely attributable to the excellent wiki.

If you want to improve your nix-fu or just want plain, beautiful distro to play with, give Arch a try!

Peteris Krumins created a phenomenal blog at good coders, great reuse code. I found it so full of useful information and great posts that I’m going to go out of the way and do my share of Google “SEO voting” for it by linking to it.

It contains a lot more than just programming and is an excellent mind-food.

I use the very out-dated Gmail Notifier client. I know it hasn’t been updated since 3 years ago but very sadly it’s still the best Gmail client around (it’s lightweight, works properly and official).

Today I finally solved one annoyance I have with this application, is that it keeps popping out the password dialog box every time I login. Until stumbled upon the solution:

If you want Gmail Notifier to do NOT ask for password each time it starts, the next time that windows pops up asking for username and password, do not use it: just close it. The Gmail Notifier icon will get an (!) warnning after that. Just open Internet Explorer and go to http://mail.Google.Com/ and login with your mail and password, and choose to keep the session open. Then go to Gmail Notifier, yet with the (!) and with the right mouse button choose the option Check Mail Now.

It will not ask you again the password with a desktop window.

Oh well, so the answer turned out to be IE, lol! It looks like the Gmail Notifier client uses IE’s component to access the server, so the password session stored in IE can be used directly. Hooraay!

(This mainly serves as a reminder to myself because it is not really obvious)

By default, Pidgin uses the theme’s font in conversation window. Most of the time, though, that would be too small for my liking. There is an option in the preferences window that allows you the change the conversation font.

However…

If you change the font size via that option, then the other party will see your messages typed in that font. That’s not always desirable. For example, I may just want my fonts to be bigger so I can read the text easily, but the other person using a netbook probably doesn’t appreciate me robbing his screen real-estate.

So how do we do it? We do it with a plug-in: Extended Preferences