in Tech

tagged fedora, thinkpad

Switching to Fedora

I recently got a new ThinkPad T440S through work, and decided to install Fedora on it. This was a few weeks ago, so I started out with Fedora 20 (now running F21).

Overall, it's perfect. There are a few issues so far, but all of those seem to be hardware related. Mainly:

  • wifi randomly drops causing the entire OS to freeze
  • touchpad gets annoying while typing (I ended up disabling it)

Other than that, I absolutely love it. I'm always amazed at how fast the boot is compared to my MacBook, the SSD was totally worth it.

in Tech

tagged irc

Quassel

I've recently switched from using ZNC+Textual over to Quassel. It has the same idea as a bouncer, with a "core" that runs on your server, and a "client" that you run locally. I've been using ZNC for over 2 years now, so this was a pretty big switch for me. I did it for a few reasons:

  • Textual didn't really handle crappy networks well, constantly disconnecting
  • Textual 5 was a paid upgrade, something I wan't too enthusastic about after already paying for it
  • Textual was having issues loading past scrollback, requiring force quits and manual cache clearing
  • ZNC would fall over and die when freenode netsplit.

In addition, I'm getting a second laptop soon and want to be able to use both for IRC and keep everything in sync. Quassel seems to make that feasible, as the core manages scrollback rather than individual clients being responsible.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with Quassel so far. It handles terrible network connections pretty well, and makes it extremely convenient to go back days in scrollback. The UI on the other hand leaves a lot to be desired for...Textual's was far superior. My main issue so far has been that until a message you typed has been sent, it doesn't show up in the scrollback. There are also some issues with the channel selector picking the wrong channel.

I'm slightly concerned about how much space quassel will use for logs. It's already using 33MB after only a week of usage, and I tend to be in some highly active channels.

For now I've left ZNC running as a backup, but I'll shut it down in another week. I still have an irssi session running in a screen on a server I'm logged into with mosh, which is handy for being on both sides of freenode netsplits :P

in Meta

tagged pelican, python

Pelican theming

Pelican theming isn't actually that difficult. It's based on jinja2 templates, and there were enough themes already out there to pick one and just start forking it.

I'm not too happy that they want themes installed into your system python path (or a virtualenv in my case), but since you can symlink them, it's not too bad.

I found one I liked called pelican-sober, which I ended up forking to customize some parts of it.