ignore-article "https://forum.ddnet.tw/feed.php" "title =~ \"Map Testing •\" or title =~ \"Old maps •\" or title =~ \"Map Bugs •\" or title =~ \"Archive •\" or title =~ \"Waiting for mapper •\" or title =~ \"Other mods •\" or title =~ \"Fixes •\""
I have a simple todo file containing my tasks, that is basically always sitting open in a Vim session. For work I also use the todo file as a “done” file so that I can later check what tasks I finished on each day.
For writing documents, letters and presentations I use [LaTeX][54] for its superior typesetting. A simple letter in German format can be set like this for example:
\setkomavar{fromaddress}{Meine Str. 1\\69181 Leimen}
\setkomavar{subject}{Titel}
\setkomavar*{enclseparator}{Anlagen}
\makeatletter
\@setplength{refvpos}{89mm}
\makeatother
\begin{document}
\begin{letter} {Herr Soundso\\Deine Str. 2\\69121 Heidelberg}
\opening{Sehr geehrter Herr Soundso,}
Sie haben bei mir seit dem Bla Bla Bla.
Ich fordere Sie hiermit zu Bla Bla Bla auf.
\closing{Mit freundlichen Grüßen}
\end{letter}
\end{document}
```
Further example documents and presentations can be found over at [my private site][55].
To read PDFs [Zathura][56] is fast, has Vim-like controls and even supports two different PDF backends: Poppler and MuPDF. [Evince][57] on the other hand is more full-featured for the cases where I encounter documents that Zathura doesn’t like.
[GIMP][58] and [Inkscape][59] are easy choices for photo editing and interactive vector graphics respectively.
In some cases [Imagemagick][60] is good enough though and can be used straight from the command line and thus automated to edit images. Similarly [Graphviz][61] and [TikZ][62] can be used to draw graphs and other diagrams.
As a web browser I’ve always used [Firefox][63] for its extensibility and low resource usage compared to Chrome.
Unfortunately the [Pentadactyl][64] extension development stopped after Firefox switched to Chrome-style extensions entirely, so I don’t have satisfying Vim-like controls in my browser anymore.
[mpv][65] with hardware decoding allows watching videos at 5% CPU load using the `vo=gpu` and `hwdec=vaapi` config settings. `audio-channels=2` in mpv seems to give me clearer downmixing to my stereo speakers / headphones than what PulseAudio does by default. A great little feature is exiting with `Shift-Q` instead of just `Q` to save the playback location. When watching with someone with another native tongue you can use `--secondary-sid=` to show two subtitles at once, the primary at the bottom, the secondary at the top of the screen
My wirelss mouse can easily be made into a remote control with mpv with a small `~/.config/mpv/input.conf`:
```
MOUSE_BTN5 run "mixer" "pcm" "-2"
MOUSE_BTN6 run "mixer" "pcm" "+2"
MOUSE_BTN1 cycle sub-visibility
MOUSE_BTN7 add chapter -1
MOUSE_BTN8 add chapter 1
```
[youtube-dl][66] works great for watching videos hosted online, best quality can be achieved with `-f bestvideo+bestaudio/best --all-subs --embed-subs`.
As a music player [MOC][67] hasn’t been actively developed for a while, but it’s still a simple player that plays every format conceivable, including the strangest Chiptune formats. In the AUR there is a [patch][68] adding PulseAudio support as well. Even with the CPU clocked down to 800 MHz MOC barely uses 1-2% of a single CPU core.
![moc][69]
My music collection sits on my home server so that I can access it from anywhere. It is mounted using [SSHFS][70] and automount in the `/etc/fstab/`:
Linux is great to build packages for any major operating system except Linux itself! In the beginning I used [QEMU][71] to with an old Debian, Windows and Mac OS X VM to build for these platforms.
Nowadays I switched to using chroot for the old Debian distribution (for maximum Linux compatibility), [MinGW][72] to cross-compile for Windows and [OSXCross][73] to cross-compile for Mac OS X.
The script used to [build DDNet][74] as well as the [instructions for updating library builds][75] are based on this.
As usual, we nearly forgot about backups. Even if this is the last chapter, it should not be an afterthought.
I wrote [rrb][76] (reverse rsync backup) 10 years ago to wrap rsync so that I only need to give the backup server root SSH rights to the computers that it is backing up. Surprisingly rrb needed 0 changes in the last 10 years, even though I kept using it the entire time.
The backups are stored straight on the filesystem. Incremental backups are implemented using hard links (`--link-dest`). A simple [config][77] defines how long backups are kept, which defaults to:
```
KEEP_RULES=( \
7 7 \ # One backup a day for the last 7 days
31 8 \ # 8 more backups for the last month
365 11 \ # 11 more backups for the last year
1825 4 \ # 4 more backups for the last 5 years
)
```
Since some of my computers don’t have a static IP / DNS entry and I still want to back them up using rrb I use a reverse SSH tunnel (as a systemd service) for them:
```
[Unit]
Description=Reverse SSH Tunnel
After=network.target
[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/ssh -N -R 27276:localhost:22 -o "ExitOnForwardFailure yes" server
KillMode=process
Restart=always
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
```
Now the server can reach the client through `ssh -p 27276 localhost` while the tunnel is running to perform the backup, or in `.ssh/config` format:
```
Host cr-remote
HostName localhost
Port 27276
```
While talking about SSH hacks, sometimes a server is not easily reachable thanks to some bad routing. In that case you can route the SSH connection through another server to get better routing, in this case going through the USA to reach my Chinese server which had not been reliably reachable from Germany for a few weeks:
Thanks for reading my random collection of tools. I probably forgot many programs that I use so naturally every day that I don’t even think about them anymore. Let’s see how stable my software setup stays in the next years. If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch with me at [dennis@felsin9.de][78].
