In 2024, I added a new skill on my slasher profile, by learning the art of piano tuning.

Still a keyboard in front of me, different sounds.

More informations on Bonjour Piano’s website.

Let’s goooo.

New year means New Epic Linux Desktop customization.
Useless therefore essential.
This is the way.

Soooo… time for a yearly post of pretty useless shell commands!

On XFCE, I was using the epic Ubo icons to customize the desktop panel.

I faced two issues when setting up the Firefox button :

• If an existing Firefox instance is running but not activated (minimized or behind other windows), I want to activate it instead of creating a new one.
• While the launcher icon is OK, the running app icon is still showing the default app icon.

Here’s an example of how I dealt with the issue, using wmctrl and xseticon.

!/bin/bash

APP_CLASS="Navigator.firefox"
APP_PATH="firefox"
ICON_PATH="/path/to/icon.png"

# wmctrl can display various info on running windows (PID, class, etc)
RUNNING_WINDOWS=`wmctrl -l -x | grep ${APP_CLASS}`
if [ -n "${RUNNING_WINDOWS}" ]; then
    # Activate any window matching given pattern
    wmctrl -x -a ${APP_CLASS}
else
    ${APP_PATH} &
fi

sleep 1
# Get window PIDs (1st column of wmctrl returned strings).
# There can be multiple matches !
# In this case, we use the xargs command :
# by using '-I %', we tell that any occurence of the '%' character 
# will be replaced by input.
wmctrl -l -x | grep ${APP_CLASS} | cut -d ' ' -f 1 \
                                | xargs -I % xseticon -id % $ICON_PATH

Happy new year ! I’ve started cantosearch, a little terminal toolkit which helps me querying different cantonese resource websites.

For now, it allows me to query the great www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk dictionary like this :

mrpingouin@localhost:~$ python3 cantosearch.py -j "faai lok"
Found 11 jyutping entries
新年快樂	san1nin4faai3lok6	Happy New Year
聖誕快樂	sing3daan3faai3lok6	Merry Christmas
快樂	faai3lok6	happy; joyous
生日快樂	saang1jat6faai3lok6	Happy Birthday!
天天快樂	tin1tin1faai3lok6	happy everyday
快樂主義	faai3lok6zyu2ji6	hedonism
不快樂	bat1faai3lok6	國unhappy
情人節快樂	cing4jan4zit3faai3lok6	Happy Valentine's Day
快樂幸福	faai3lok6hang6fuk1	cheerful, happy
元宵節快樂	jyun4siu1zit3faai3lok6	Happy Lantern Festival!
快速以太網絡	faai3cuk1ji5taai3mong5lok3	Fast Ethernet

# Using an alias makes it even more effective
alias cs="python3 cantosearch.py"

It should be sufficient for a while, although I might add support for other resources like cantonese.org, or yellowbridge.com.

Writing chinese with the jyutping system (cantonese pinyin) on Linux (Mint 21.2 at the time of writing) was not as straight forward as I thought.

If you want to be able to write canto anywhere in the system (I mean, outside the very efficient Chromium + Google Inputs tools), here’s a TL;DR;

• Use Ibus input system instead of Fcitx
• The default jyutping database returns strange answers, proposing very rare characters first instead of usual ones : download an updated database source, compile it and replace system’s default file

Finally ! After working on it for almost two years and a half on our spare time with the great Thibault Barbaroux and the unstoppable Kévin Loustau, our very first project Wise Garden released under the Double Machine flag !

Many thanks to all the people who helped us, and most of all, all hail the magnificent Godot Engine.

Pro-tip : starting a first project with a puzzle game with complex mechanics is not a good idea 😑

A friend of mine is working as a journalist on a french radio, La Clé des Ondes, which is broadcasted as well on FM (Bordeaux area) and as a webradio.

I’m currently helping him to evaluate a migration from the current Windows proprietary streaming setup to free software solutions.

This post is more like a friendly reminder post-it for me, last time I’ve done such IT was on Debian 9, I didn’t even know that ifconfig disappeared :]

The idea is to find a free software solution that fits his needs, in other words, that allows him to perform at least as well as his current setup. There are a lot of existing solutions, but fortunately he already limited the search range on two linux clients : Rivendell and Libretime

The roadmap is the following :

• Reinstall an old unused rig with a fresh stable Debian
• Use KVM to spawn 3 virtual machines :
  • One icecast2 server (for broadcasting)
  • Solution A, connected to the icecast server, on stream 1
  • Solution B, also connected to the icecast server, on stream 2

I started writing an Antlr4-based linter for 3dsmax’s maxscript language.

Project and details can be found on my gitlab page.

I’m trying to make my own bread (I’m gluten/lactose/sugar intolerent -_-).

This is a “pain cocotte”, using just the oven, no bread maker involved.

Recipe can be found here (fr).

I was recently working the walking bass on the jazz standard “I’m beginning to see the light”, recorded as MIDI within Ardour, a free DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) software.

I started using the default midi instrument rendition of Ardour, set on “jazz guitar” : it works, but the rendition is poor. I then started looking for a good VST for a contrabass rendition. We must face the facts : all the good rendition plugins are built for Windows or Mac !

And then I found this gem…

Some monthes ago I tried to the take a glance at chess engine programming. I first started by writing one in python (ChessBuddy) with absolutely no knowledge on the subject. Although it was quite slow, it worked and already beat me (spoiler alert : this means nothing, I suck at chess).

Then I opened the pandora’s box : How will it compete against other engines ?