Ion™ is a tiling tabbed window manager designed with keyboard users in mind.

In recent years I've been a GNOME / Compiz guy, but while I've enjoyed it's tight integration with Ubuntu and flashy effects, I've always missed the simplicity of so-called minimalist window managers, mainly fvwm. These days, however, practically everything I do happens inside a Firefox, gvim, or gnome-terminal.

I want keyboard-driven. I want scriptable. And I don't want windows hiding behind other windows. Ever.

Enter ion3. I've only been using it for the last 24 hours, and even though I haven't memorized all of the keymaps, or learned how to code in Lua (yet!), I already love it. So far the only problem I've not been able to overcome is a bug in the latest Adobe Flash that breaks fullscreen video. This isn't specific to ion3 - it's a problem with any focus-follows-mouse system. I hear there is a workound, but it didn't seem to work for me. I consider it a microscopic trade-off for such an efficient window manager. Many of my previously sluggish applications now run incredibly fast, and with a couple days of practice I'll be working faster too.

Installation

Now just log out, choose ion3 and start a new session. The first time you log in you'll be greeted with the man page, which I highly suggest reading. If you try not to "cheat" by using the mouse, you'll pick up almost everything in a couple of hours, and from there you'll find yourself navigating faster and faster until you don't have to think about it at all. Just like vim.

Ion is both simple and well-documented, so it would be pointless for me to write introductory tutorial. Instead, here are a couple tricks I've discovered.

Modifying your configuration

One of the first things you're going to want to do when you're done messing around is change a few settings. For the most part, this is done in a file called cfg_ion.lua. Copy the system-wide file (I found mine at /etc/X11/ion3/cfg_ion.lua) to  ~/.ion3/cfg_ion.lua and open it with a text editor.

You'll need to restart Ion for your changes to take effect. Don't worry, all your applications will stay open; only the window manager needs to be restarted. Hit F12 and type session/restart.

I messed this file up a few times experimenting, and I'll probably mess it up a few more. If you screw up this file like I did, your F12 shortcut can disappear, and you'll need another way to restart Ion after you've fixed it. Keep a terminal open whenever you're editing, because you may not be able to launch one. The trick to restart Ion from the console is simple:

Remapping Mod1

The Mod1 key is used to initiate most interactions with Ion. On most systems, this is Alt. This is usually a very bad choice, because a lot of other applications need the Alt key for other things. I tried the Flying Window key, but it turns out it's in a very uncomfortable place on the keyboard. The number keys are used a lot. Try reaching Win+6, and you'll see what I mean. CapsLock has been working great for me, and as an added bonus, makes it much more work to shout on IRC.

Check your keymaps with xmodmap -pm. On my system, Mod3 was unused, so I remapped CapsLock to that.

Edit (or create) ~/.Xmodmaprc and insert these lines at the bottom…

Then run it…

Also add this line to ~/.Xsession so it is run automatically whenever you start X.

If your xmodmap -pm now reads…

then you're in luck! Now you just need to edit the META variable near the top of your cfg_ion.lua to reflect the change

and restart.

All done! I hope you enjoy learning and using Ion3 as much as I have. I don't think I'll be switching again any time soon.

I do a lot of freelance work with the Twitter API, and someone asked me for a quote on a clone of a Ponzi-style follower train site. Not the kind of apps I build, but it looked slightly more legit than usual and I was foolish to log in to have a look around - that's where the trouble started. The site in question used the pre-oAuth login (as unfortunately most sites still do) which requires giving up your Twitter screen name and password.

As soon as they had it I was locked out of my account due to "too many incorrect password attempts", and didn't recover the account until tonight. The password has been changed and the spam in question deleted. I've learned my lesson, and will only use oAuth credentials in the future - you won't receive any more spam from this account.

So I'm walking through a grocery store with an umbrella, and randomly I'm approached by a drunk Julia Deakin, who is yelling and slurring at me incomprehensibly. I look down to see what she's pointing at, and five black cats jump out of my umbrella. The topic drifts abruptly from my cats to the Palm Pre, and she offered me a job on the register. Which was a nice of her, but she clearly didn't work in the store.

If you can figure out the symbolism behind this one, the men in white coats should be there any minute.

TweetShrink, a web service from TRNSFR, uses a database of common instant / text messaging abbreviations to reduce the number of characters in a tweet. It's essentially a human-readable compression algorithm. For example, "Some text to shrink" becomes "sum text 2 shrnk" when passed through their API.

But it doesn't enforce Twitter's 140 character limit, which means it can be used beyond Twitter for whatever you like. Back in March I released the tweetshrink gem for Ruby, and today I've updated it to 0.2 which includes a command line interface.

From the command line

First, make sure you have Ruby and Rubygems installed. On Debian-based operating systems (such as Ubuntu), this goes a little something like

Now install the gem from it's GitHub repository:

You can use it from the command line like this:

From vim

Or, you can integrate it with vim for ultimate text shrinking convenience. Just add the following to your .vimrc:

Now you can shrink a single line by hitting ,tws in Normal mode, or shrink a whole a visual block.

Of course, this is just as easy to integrate with your favorite text editor; I just happen to use vim.

On the Web

When I integrated this feature with my blog & tweet scheduler PingLater.fm, I realized TweetShrink didn't have a favicon. I needed an icon to use for the button, so I created these - feel free to use them for whatever.

There is a service called Ping.fm for broadcasting updates to your blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks all at once, from one place.

This can save you a lot of time if you're trying to manage a brand or keep up with different groups of friends, and it makes it easier to prevent your presence on these sites from becoming stale.

The application I'm calling PingLater.fm takes it one step further. Now you can set up pings to be sent at a specified time in the future. You could schedule a product highlight for each day of the month, release new blog posts while you're off on vacation, or whatever else you want to use a service like this for.

It's free for now while I gather feedback and optimize the code, but free users will eventually be limited to 3 pings scheduled at a time.

I have a number of premium features in mind (RSS posting, image/video, iPhone…) to make it a really indispensable tool  for pro bloggers and internet marketing people.

But we'll get to that. For now, I just want to hear from you. Let me know what I can do to make this useful for you!

Click here to try it out!

Okay, just kidding, there's only one. I'm planning on editing this post over time

• AWS Access Identifiers
• AWS Management Console

Bundling an AMI from a running instance

1. Use scp to copy your private key (pk-*.pem) to root@yourami:/mnt
2. Log in as root and bundle the volume
   $ ec2-bundle-vol -d /mnt -k /mnt/pk-*.pem –cert /mnt/cert-*.pem -u YOUR_AWS_ACCOUNT_ID -s 10240

   Now you have several minutes to kill. Click play…

3. Upload the image to Amazon S3. You may want to do this inside of screen; I had my ssh session time out on me while it was working a couple of times.
   $ s3cmd ls # List all S3 buckets
   $ ec2-upload-bundle -b YOUR_S3_BUCKET -m /mnt/image.manifest.xml
   $ ec2-upload-bundle -b YOUR_S3_BUCKET -m /mnt/image.manifest.xml -a YOUR_ACCESS_KEY -s YOUR_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
4. Register the AMI. This is something you need to do even when updating an image that has already been registered.
   $ ec2-register YOUR_S3_BUCKET/image.manifest.xml

   This will return an AMI identifier that can be used to run a new instance.

   $ ec2-run-instances YOUR_AMI_IDENTIFIER

More information on Creating an Image at Amazon

You can read more about the problem at Ardekantur's "Phusion, Rack, Sinatra, and sub-domains", but here's my quick solution:

1. Disable mod_autoindex if it is enabled.
2. Make sure your RackBaseURI does not have a trailing slash.
3. Add this before_filter to your Sinatra app:

   
   before do
     request.env['PATH_INFO'] = '/' if request.env['PATH_INFO'].empty?
   end
   
   

I suppose an alternative solution would be feasible using Rack middleware, but this is what I'm using. Thanks to Ryan Funduk for helping me figure this stuff out.

Being the closest thing we have to a native uTorrent in Linux, I really like Deluge. But, at least for me, it uses a seemingly impossible amount system resources. Since a Bittorrent client is the kind of thing I want to leave running in the background, I needed a lighter alternative.

I don't see any real need for a graphical interface when ultimately all it's doing is moving bits around on a network, so I went with rTorrent. One of the benefits of using command-line software is that you can use SSH and screen to control it over the network… we don't need no fancypants AJAX interface for this!

Part 1 - rTorrent

If you're using Ubuntu, you can get rTorrent from the repositories, like so…

Now that you've got the software, you're going to need to configure it. rTorrent looks for a configuration file called .rtorrent.rc in your home directory. Don't panic. Just save the sample as ~/.rtorrent.rc and open it up in your favorite text editor.

You don't need to worry about most of the stuff in this file, but you can if you want to. Here's how I have it set up:

Part 2 - Save Link In Folder

Okay, so you've got rTorrent all set up now, and configured to watch for new *.torrent files in a directory (mine is ~/downloads/torrents/*.torrent). Now let's configure Firefox. There's an extension by Achim Seufert called Save Link In Folder. You'll want to install this.

After your browser restarts, go to Tools > Add-ons > Save Link In Folder > Preferences and add a new folder, like this…

Remember - the download directory must be the one you told rTorrent to watch!

Now when you click a torrent link, just save it instead of opening it with Deluge. If rTorrent is running it will notice the new torrent, and get to work! You can even queue up torrents while rTorrent is off, for downloading later.

I'm definitely an rTorrent noob, having just set this up tonight, but so far I like it a lot, and no longer have the performance issues I had using Deluge. This configuration would also be ideal for setting up a seedbox / media center machine, if you set up all your Firefoxes to save torrent files to a network mount on the server.

Links

• rTorrent
• rTorrent user guide
• rTorrent man page
• Save Link In Folder

require 'rubygems'
require 'tweetshrink'

t = TweetShrink.shrink "One wonders why"
# t['difference'] => 4
# t['text'] => "1 wonders y"
# t['original_text'] => "One wonders why"

You can get it from my github account, here, or via rubygems like

$ sudo gem install logankoester-tweetshrink

Enjoy.

Install Linux Mint

Since the EeePC has no optical media drive, you will need a USB flash drive to install Mint. Download the Linux Mint .iso file and use UNetbootin to burn it to your USB disk, then plug it into your Eee.

Turn on the machine and hit F2 to enter the BIOS setup. Set the boot priority to try the USB disk first. You may also want to make sure the webcam/bluetooth is turned on, while you're here. Save your changes and reboot, and Mint will guide you through the rest of the installation.

When it asks you how you want to partition your disk, choose Guided - use entire disk and let it use the larger of the two SSDs.

Install the EeePC kernel

As usual with Linux installations, most of your hardware will work from the get-go, but not everything. The first thing you'll want to do is get the wireless card working. Plug in an ethernet cable, and then follow these instructions. I recommend the lean kernel, and uninstalling the generic one since it will just be wasting precious disk space.

Enable Desktop Effects

Mint makes this easy for you by taking care of installing the correct drivers for your video card. All you should need to do is turn Compiz on in Preferences > Appearance > Desktop Effects.

Allow tall windows to move past the top of the screen

Sooner or later you're going to run into a window that is too tall to display on the 9" screen, and cannot be resized. The solution is to open up a terminal and run this command:

$ gconftool-2 --set /apps/compiz/plugins/move/allscreens/options/constrain_y --type bool 0

This will allow you to move these windows past the top of the screen (use ALT+Drag anywhere in the window. There are a number of other useful gconftool hacks on Ubuntu's EeePC page.

Create $HOME/bin directory

You're going to want a place to store little scripts and tools where they can be executed on the command line.

$ mkdir ~/bin

Now add it to your PATH so bash can find it. Open up your ~/.bashrc file and append

if [ -d ~/bin ] ; then
  PATH=~/bin:"${PATH}"
fi

Make the LCD ultra bright!

This hack is really cool. I found it on the EasyPeasy wiki. Create a new file called ultra-bright in $HOME/bin and paste in this line, then save.

sudo setpci -s 00:02.1 f4.b=ff

You will need to make it executable, so

$ chmod +x ~/bin/ultra-bright

Now you can run

$ ultra-bright

to turn on the extra brightness, and use the bright/dim function keys to reset it. If you're like me, you'll want the extra brightness turned on all the time, so go ahead and create an entry for it in Preferences > Sessions.

Enable the WiFi / Bluetooth / webcam toggle and performance tuner

For this you'll need a package called eee-control. You've already installed the Eee kernel, so this package should be available to you from the repository you added to your Software Sources.

$ sudo apt-get install eee-control

Alternatively, you can download the Ubuntu package from the website.

Now you can find this nifty utility in your Administration menu. Unless you need the extra battery life, I recommend setting performance to "super". To make use of your webcam, install the cheese and/or skype packages.

Make sure text is being rendered crystal clear

Open Preferences > Appearance > Fonts and select "Subpixel smoothing (LCDs)". Then click Details… and set Hinting to "Full". If you're like me you absolutely hate Ubuntu's default monospace font. I prefer Terminus. To switch, install the xfonts-terminus package and make it the default Fixed Width font.

Boost GNOME Performance with /etc/hosts

Following this guide will help improve your system performance, and it takes about 2 seconds.

Installing Avant Window Navigator

AWN is similar to the Dock on Mac OS X.

$ sudo apt-get install avant-window-navigator

Right-click the panel at the bottom of your screen and check "Allow Panel to be Moved". Drag it to the top of your screen, right-click and lock it again. Now launch Accessories > Avant Window Navigator. It's kind of ugly and huge by default, but we can fix that.

Right-click on AWN and click Preferences. Turn on "Auto hide bar when not in use", then switch to the Bar Appearance tab and change Bar Height to something more reasonable, like 32.

Now you'll want to get rid of the Window List at the top of the screen. Right-click on it and select "Remove from Panel". Gone! Now there is lots of room for program shortcuts and silly panel applets.

That's it!

You now have a usable OS on your Asus EeePC, which means you are both cooler and more attractive than every other clown with a clunky Xandros-based netbook. Thanks for following my guide. Let me know in the comments section how your installation experience went and if you have any other EEE tricks worth sharing.