Month: June 2020

A few words on why I still listen to albums (and how)

I’ve been talking and writing about music a lot over the last week, and am part way through writing up my thoughts on what live music might look like when we all emerge from lock down. In the meantime, my response to Jehnny Beth on how I listen to albums. Jehnny’s question was:

What’s your favourite way of listening to an album? Do you still take time to immerse yourself? What do you think an album represents in 2020? I’d love to read your thoughts.

My response was:

I love to immerse myself in it. I tend to buy albums I really love on vinyl and listen to them when I can fully concentrate on the music. I also prefer to listen to them in the order they were sequenced. I also have playlists on shuffle, but that’s a different type of listening.

I think there is still a place for the album in the world of streaming. A proper album is as different to a load of songs in a playlist as a novel is to a tweet or a short blog post, and I think we still have room for both.

Using the i3 window manager

i3 is a window manager for Linux that I’ve been using for the last few weeks. It’s a fairly steep learning curve, but definitely brings some productivity gains. i3 is a tiling window manager, and by default will fill up the whole screen with applications. So if you have one application open it’s full screen, if you have two open then they each take up 50% of the screen, etc.

Installing i3

A excerpt from my installation script:

# Install the i3 window manager and some basic utilities

sudo apt install -y i3 feh arandr byobu htop

# Download some wallpaper and set it as default when using i3

wget https://www.dropbox.com/s/n5o7jjg4qpuebjn/2017-12-27-13.38.44.jpg
mv 2017-12-27-13.38.44.jpg  default_wallpaper.jpg
echo "feh --bg-scale default_wallpaper.jpg" >> .profile

## Add some aliases

echo alias ls="ls -l" >> .bashrc
echo alias top="htop" >> .bashrc

Using i3

When you log in for the first time you’ll be asked to choose a modifier key (I chose ALT). The keyboard shortcuts below use $mod to refer to that modifier.

  • Open a terminal window – $mod + Enter
  • Open a different application – $mod + d then type the application name (eg firefox)
  • Open (or go to) a second desktop – $mod + 2
  • Send the focused application to that desktop – $mod + Shift + 2
  • Split a container vertically – $mod + v
  • Split a container horizontally – $mod + h
  • Move between containers – $mod + arrow keys
  • Switch to a tabbed layout – $mod + w
  • Switch to a stacked layout – $mod + s
  • Close a window – $mod + Shift + q
  • Exit i3 – $mod + Shift + e

For multiple monitors it’s possible to enable/define them using xrandr. The sysntax is something like:

`xrandr --output HDMI-2 --auto --right-of HDMI-1`

As I have three monitors I find arandr to be a better way to set them up though. It’s a graphical wrapper to xrandr and lets me see the layout of my monitors which I find much more useful.

More information about i3 can be found at https://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html.