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I have been having a lot of fun messing with my Lenovo Thinkpad x201 over the past couple of weeks. I installed Gentoo Linux on it as a first step. Being as this is a 2010 Intel i5 with 4gb of RAM, installing Gentoo took about 15 hours for the base system and X. I opted for openrc as the init system and lilo as the bootloader. In X, I am using i3 as my window manager, powerline as my bar, and compton as the compositor. All the ThinkPad buttons for audio have been mapped in sxhkd and function as advertised (the screen brightness controls worked straight away). I decided to make all my audio and program launching keybindings in sxhkd instead of i3 in case I get a wild hair to change WMs, but so far it is nice to use i3 again.
I have been screwing around with LaTeX for my resume (CV) for my ongoing job hunt, and have a nice cover letter template also in LaTeX. Both of these items look fantastic (IMO), and as soon as the local job market kicks back into gear at the turn of the year, they will hopefully aid me.
Setting up scripts for LaTeX boilerplate and template generation (I quite like this setup as a general word processor), I have developed a fondness for PDF as a format. So I started using it all over. I wrote a one liner script to pipe man pages thru ps2pdf and into zathura:
man -t "$1" "$2" | ps2pdf - | zathura -
This led to a bunch of other PDF generation scripts. I have one, for example that awks out a column of companies I have applied for work with and plops some groff into it and makes a nice, uniq'd bulleted list in a PDF, complete with contact info for following up on things. I have been keeping this list in sc-im while I have been hunting. Since it is just tabular data with no formulas, CSV it not a poor choice of format and allows other simple actions like the PDF list.
I have also returned to the vimwiki fold and have started a knowledge base wiki with several sections. Since the wiki is in the markdown format, I can easily pandoc it into PDF format as well.
I am a little distracted at the moment by my music in MPD stuttering a bit as I am currently compiling WebKitGTK and with j=3 it is taking its toll on my system. Hopefully it finishes up soon. On Monday I should be receiving an eBay purchase of 8gb of DDR3 to upgrade this laptop from 4gb. This will be a welcome enhancement and will max out this computer for memory. Once compilation of WK completes I will compile surf. I want a lightweight GUI browser around as a choice. I already have tabbed installed so it will be a nice, useful tool to have around.
I have been keeping a remind calendar. Gentoo does not have tkremind in its main repo, so I installed TCL and TK, then copied over the tkremind script from RPoJ. Works like a champ. It is a very utilitarian and easy way to use remind, which is the most comprehensive (in facility and syntax!) calendar software I have ever encountered. So, while manually entering REM statements in a text file is not too terribly hard, the GUI makes it quick and painless, and the large graphical calendar is nice to look at to see upcoming events.
I had dated this as the 13 December entry, but now the weekend has arrived, so I will rename it.
EDIT: just checked eBay and my RAM is already at the local post office. Looks like I upgrade tomorrow!