keyboard monkey

Can you live without your mouse for a day? It takes a lot of patience and learning, that’s for sure! Here are some alternatives I use:

• Use a tiling Window Manager, or turn your current WM into one with Pytyle
• Make shortcuts for desktop switching, window managing and music control
• Simulate mouse clicks and drags with your keyboard and keynav
• Hide the mouse under your desk slash plug it out

Motivations for doing this?

• Trackpads frustrate me
• Because I can, and
• I’m a little crazy

We moved to a new blog engine: Chyrp. I found Wordpress a bit bloated on low-speed wireless, plus I like the minimalism of it.

Lest we forget that Blogs started as online Development Logs, text and links, it reminds us that information was the motive. Everyone likes flashy, sometimes indistinguishable from cruft, which divides usability from frustration.

When you step back to the basics, once again you think in terms of: “How else can I do this?”.

Aah, so refreshing!

Who can use these laptop and netbook touchpads, trackpads, whatever you call the thing you-accidentally-tap and lose-focus-and-type-into-the-wrong-spot.

Specialized layout keyboard navigation is the way to go!

• Customized Conky to a top horizontal bar, always visible by setting my desktop margins.
• Installed Pytyle to organize my windows running on top of Openbox, with vi-like keybindings relying on the Super key.
• Hacked in a few global shortcuts for easy volume management and frequently used applications.

 
Crash course in navigation

So far I can manage 99% of tasks using the keyboard layout I set out below.

The Super is also known as the Winkey

Window shortcuts

• cycle the focused window, Super-J/K
• move the active window between panels on the screen, Super-Ctrl-J/K
• move the active windows to another desktop, Super-Shift-J/K
• switch desktops, Super-Alt-J/K
• Change master tile size, Super-H/L
• Add/remove master tiles, Super-./,

Media shortcuts

• Ctrl-Ins, up volume
• Ctrl-Del, down volume
• Ctrl-Backspace, pause/play music
• Super-V, alsa volume mixer
• Super-M, mocp music player

CLI Mode

When it comes to flash in websites that steals your focus, I feel like screaming. Due to bandwidth limits I use the text-mode CLI browser Elinks, and the CLI mail client Alpine.

I rebound many Elinks shortcuts for a vi-like experience to scrolling the page, within the page, browsing history, selecting links and so forth.

Everyone loves a Live OS on a bootable USB disk, it’s useful and very geeky. Let’s up our geek by making a  multi-boot live USB disk!

I had the inspiration while using the Debian based distro Tails, I wanted to be able to save data onto the USB for later use. Tails is mastered with the iso9660 filesystem,  more commonly used for CD’s,  it is a read-only file system. It’s worth saying this was by design, as a security centered distro it leaves no room for accidentally leaving traces behind.

Some digging found that grub can load a kernel from a ISO directly via a properly configured grub.cfg line, which differs for each distro mind you. This is when I found multibootusb, a shell script that does the heavy lifting, including generating your grub.cfg, and it works on partitioned USB disks to boot – that means we can have a storage partition on the same USB disk too. Perfect!

Prep

Use your partitioner of choice and setup 2 partitions on the USB disk. Partition 1 will carry our grub boot loader and each distro’s files. Partition 2 will be storage. I named my partitions “multipass” and “store” respectively.

Warning: this will destroy all the data on the USB stick. Make doubly sure you use the correct /dev/sdX assignment for your USB disk. You can see it’s device name with ‘fdisk -l’ or ‘df’.

I have success using up to a 6GB partition, I formatted both partitions as FAT 32 for compatibility reasons, using this command:

 sudo mkfs.msdos -F32 -n “multipass” /dev/sdXY

Of course you will replace sdXY with your own device name. Change ‘multipass’ to whatever names you want for your 1st and second partitions.

Setup

Download, extract and run MultiBootUSB as sudo within a terminal so we can  see any output messages:

sudo sh MultiBootUSB.sh

It prompts you to choose your USB device:

Choose to add distros Manually:

Add your first distro:

Choose ‘Yes’ to add more distros, as many as your space allows, and choose ‘No’ when you are done choosing your distros:

Next the script asks us to check which distros to install and add to our grub boot menu:

Now you may go make some tea while the script extracts the ISO’s onto your USB disk, and builds your custom grub.cfg.

Behold the grub boot menu for your multi-boot USB disk:

Geek On

There you have it, a very geeky multi-boot USB disk! It’s a great way to carry a couple utility operating systems like Tails or Clonezilla, and as you can see I included Crunchbang and Kubuntu too.

I keep the truecrypt setup on my store partition in case I need to access any encrypted containers.

Happy bootin’!