Venam's Blog — Patrick Louis (Lebanon)

How would you describe yourself?

Here comes another life update.

No this isn't a post trashing shell scripting.

Let's have a discussion about all the kinds of trust stores found on Unix-like operating systems.

We often hear discussions about X configuration files and their roles.

Collapse, the word that is on everyone's lips in Lebanon.

As the field of SE/CS is getting more press, graduates are flooding the market.

In Lebanon conspiracy theories are such a common occurrence that the whole world but yourself is to blame for your ailment.

In the blink of an eye 6 months have gone by.

Time can be measured in all sorts of ways, some more accurate than others, but the perception of its flow varies widely depending on the subjective experience.

The new year has begun...

In this article we will put some light on a lot of tools used in the world of Unix desktop environment customization, particularly regarding wmctrl, wmutils, xev, xtruss, xwininfo, xprop, xdotools, xdo, sxhkd, xbindkeys, speckeysd, xchainkeys, alttab, tri…

In this post I'm going to go over "fonts for xcb" a mini-project I've been working on recently and I'll document the parts that are not usually found online.

In this article we're going to go over the big list of words found in the title.

Five months have past since my last post about personal projects.

Let's say you've been using a machine for a year or two and over time you gradually become more attached and dependent on it.

Today we take for granted the concept of software as a tool but it didn't always exist.

In this article I'm going to pose a not so novel compatibilistic idea about the so-recurrent philosophical discussion of free will and determinism.

This article is about nothing surprising but may act as a reminder to anyone that wanders online or that manages a community.

Five months have past since my last post about personal projects and endeavours but it feels like I've been stagnating for much longer.

Libraries and banks, amongst other institutions, used to have a filing system, some still have them.

This article is about a rarely discussed component that resides in the background of our lives.

Logos and artworks in the Unix world, where do those come from.

In this episode we'll tackle a topic that joins many parts of the systems and so is hard to fully cover.

It's been four months since the last post about my personal projects and endeavours.

It's not uncommon to hear, from persons that relocated to a new country, discussions related to the dissatisfactions with the new land they've set upon or the land they've just left behind.

The topics in this episode are fairly simple, even basic, but I'd like to tackle them from a different perspective.

At the beginning of time there was nothing...

Browsers, your windows to the WWW What do you use, customize, the problems you've stumbled upon, how we're using those browsers in the Unix world, the most used browsers, why we use them, and all the problems we've encountered I'm venam and you're listeni…

You've certainly heard of daemons, those processes that lurk in the background and do what they're supposed to do.

A set of dynamic values, helper or configuration values, that can affect the way a process runs.

An executable is something that causes a computer to perform some tasks according to encoded instructions.

Files, the predominant representation of everything on Unix, how are they scattered around?

Understanding how the fonts work on Unix isn't simple.

The world of licenses is the legal world, a world where the literal meaning of words is important and where all the crevasses are exploited.

Unix is known for its set of small command line utilities.

What would you say or give as advice to newly unix users.

We've had an episode about display servers and libraries, and then we had another episode about window managers and desktop environments, and so the next logical step is to do one about ricing and customization.

Everything is a file, right.

System calls are one subject that scares many people.

We spend so much time typing at a terminal and yet the underlying mechanisms and history behind it are often overlooked.

Understanding the Unix philosophy and what makes a Unix system Unixy.

What's a shell, what does it do, why would we need that?

The idea of green text on black background comes from the "Green screens" aka monochrome monitors.

We've had a previous episode discussing xcb, x11, wayland, all about display servers.

You check your processes and see some hanging around with a weird status and using no resources.

There may exist someone in your entourage, someone you may care deeply about, or maybe even yourself, that is being crushed by the real and raw perception of themselves.

It has become rampant nowadays to find many persons misinterpreting or skewing evolutionary psychology studies to praise or blame the stance they fancy or despise.

Hello fellow readers, This is the first post of 2017, let's recap what I've been up to since the start of the year.

We take actions based on our unconscious mind, we follow our unspoken norms and taboos.