The site is back up on line! For more than a month it’s been down while I transferred it from the Namibian server to a new Hungarian web host and now it’s back. Apologies to anyone who wanted to access the site during this time and thank you for your patience. Now that things are working more or less smoothly I should be able to post some fresh content! 🙂
I am now engaged to Ruzsás Bernadett!
Image
Berni and I atop the Hármashatár mountain, seconds after she agreed to marry me!
Switch Colours in the GIMP
After my previous discovery I thought surely there should also be an easy keyboard shortcut for swapping the foreground and background colours in the GIMP, even though it doesn’t seem to be documented anywhere. There is. Just press X.
Actually I think it would be useful if this was shown in the tooltip text when you hover over the colour switching button, like it does with the other tools. If you’re curious, here is a list of 74 keyboard shortcuts for the GIMP (including this one) that you might not have known otherwise. I think keyboard shortcuts are great for editing pictures because you can change tools (and now also swap colours) without moving your cursor away from where you’re drawing!
Wood Chopping
Last weekend we went to visit Berni’s family in Vaszar and we chopped wood for the winter. The logs were really big, so we used a hydraulic wood splitter like this one. It was still a lot of work moving the heavy logs onto the splitter and carrying and stacking the split wood into piles, and I’m told that the next step will be to axe those into smaller pieces that can be used to heat the house in winter.
Unfortunately nobody thought to take any pictures of us in action, but these two large piles were the result of our day’s work:
A large pile of wood we chopped
Another pile of wood behind the first one
I think I might write more often about the fun stuff that happens when we go to visit in Vaszar.
Automatically Pop Up Steam Key
Now that I’ve got steam, I get to be constantly pestered by e-mails sending me keys with which to identify that I am myself. To save a few steps in this annoying, repetitive process I wrote a tiny bash script which finds the key in an e-mail from steam and uses zenity to pop it up on my screen, then added a filter in Evolution Mail to mark these “steam verification” messages as read and pipe them to the pop-up script. This allows me to copy the key with a double-click and paste it into steam with a middle-click, without having to poke around in my mail client for the e-mail and the place where the key is mentioned in it.
In the hope that it saves someone else from this irksomeness, here’s the code for the script:
#/bin/bash
# Displays a pop-up showing a Steam activation key piped to it by a MUA.
# In the e-mail the steam key is wrapped in <h2> tags
# Author: Sion Le Roux <sinisterstuf@gmail.com>
# read e-mail from pipe
while read -r line; do
# find <h2>
buffer=$(echo $line | grep 'h2')
if [[ ! -z $buffer ]]; then
#strip surrounding <h2> tags
steamkey=$(echo $buffer | sed -e 's/<\/\?h2>//g')
fi
done
# display the steam code in a pop-up
zenity --info --title="Steam Key" \
--window-icon="/usr/share/pixmaps/steam.png" \
--text="<tt><big><b>$steamkey</b></big></tt>"