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motidu day 10: mpd, ncmpcpp, & nntp


tldr:


using mpd and ncmpcpp for radio

slrm and alpine for nntp

manpages on alpine os

vim talk

more email organization

website management

writing cgi scripts


it's the 18th, which means it's been 10 days since i started the "month of things i don't use"! it's crazy that it only took 10 days to get super comf in an alien environment (of course, if i were trying windows or temple os for a month, it might have been a different story)!


mpd and ncmpcpp


the music playing daemon is a neato idea! basically it's... well... a daemon that plays music, so instead of writing all the backend stuff for your music player, you can just write a frontend to mpd, and let the mpd devs work on the hard bits! it's nice.


wait hold on... mpd, emacsclient, urxvtd, lsp... i think i might just be a "server + client" software fanatic... but hey, it works!


my ncmpcpp config looks like this:


# in ~/.config/ncmpcpp/config

mpd_music_dir = "~/music"

and my mpd config:


# in ~/.config/mpd/mpd.conf

music_directory    "~/music"
playlist_directory "~/.local/share/mpd/playlists"

db_file      "~/.local/share/mpd/database"
log_file     "~/.local/share/mpd/log"
pid_file     "~/.local/share/mpd/pid"
state_file   "~/.local/share/mpd/state"
sticker_file "~/.local/share/mpd/sticker.sql"


i just wanted to put all my mpd stuff in .local, but it's easier to slap it in ~/.mpd/ because that's the default directory.


i have a playlist file containing a bunch of radio streams at

~/.local/share/mpd/playlists/radio.m3u


that playlist file looks like this:


#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:-1,anonradio
http://anonradio.net:8000/anonradio
#EXTINF:-1,tilderadio
http://radio.tildeverse.org/radio/8000/radio.mp3
#EXTINF:-1,chiptune
http://79.120.11.40:8000/chiptune.ogg

this way, all my streams are listed as "songs" in a playlist file, and the extinf data lets me label the streams with custom names! very comf.


nntp


the "news network transfer protocol" is pretty dead, i think. the last time i checked it out, all the newsgroups i went to just had spam in them, and maybe 2 old people yeling at each other. not a fun experience. it was more like "walking into a dark alley on the internet".


but alpine has support for newsgroups, and since i still have my old block account with 100 gb on it, i decided to give it another shot!


alpine was a lot smoother than emacs' gnus, in my opinion. it worked, i understood what to do, and it was sort of fun. a few groups i checked out had actual people in them, so that was a pleasent surprise! it felt a bit less like a creepy abandoned town and more like a slower reddit. i might use it a bit, but i might not.


last time newsgroups made me feel bad. like *really* bad. just that distant, abstract feeling of emptiness, seeing this entire protocol that was once bustling with nerds, now old and filled with garbage... and in the void, in the garbage, you see two people arguing, and you go back in time only to find that they have been arguing for 10 years.


i also tried slrm, but it had to generate extra files and i just figured i'll stick with alpine. alpine is cute.


manpages!


quick note for people running alpine linux, install these two packages:


docs

man-pages


these will install the manuals for all your installed programs, and a few extra for system stuff. ah, much more comfy!


vim update


i'm getting smoother at using vim. moving around, deleting lines and charecters using ed-like commands has been getting easier, and that's nice! there's still a lot to learn but i'm glad that i'm finally starting to get the hang of basic editing!


email configuration


so "movemail, msmtp, alpine" is my trio for mail. it's very nice and that's good. mostly my configuration has been about directories!


i used to keep my mail in ~/.emacs.d/mymail/emily, but now that i'm using programs that aren't emacs, it feels weird to put my mail in an emacs-related directory! within that folder i had a few mbox files:


conv - for personal conversations

note - for automated mail

list - mailing list replies

misc - other stuff


so i threw all these files into ~/mail, and now at the end of the month, when i go back to emacs, i'll have to fix up my rmail config! it's much cleaner now though, and switching to other clients should be pretty easy.


website stuff


my site on the web used to be hosted by an indian hosting company. i paid $6 a year for it. the payment was due on the 17th and i almost just let it go down, cause i'm cheap, but i remembered that gitlab does free static hosting, so i just routed my domain to a gitlab page and all was well!


including this cause gitlab-ci is sort of "new software". i've used it before but i never could understand it properly.


cgi scripting


i wrote my gopher ring in bash as a cgi script, and it was really fun to figure out how that all works! it's still a bit clunky, but i'm happy with it! i'll see if anyone joins. if not, that's coolio, it was still fun to make!


anyway i need to sleep, cause sleeping is neat.


march 18, 2021

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