Shoes On Couches

Extreme Couching

It’s always fascinated me that on American TV shows, people seem to put their feet up on furniture, even though they are wearing shoes.

After spending some time in the US, I realised that TV was only reporting fact.

It’s so shocking, I’m sure.

I’ve got a cold now, so I’m watching episodes of Murder She Wrote.  It’s the closest thing you can to do being asleep without actually sleeping.

And there I found the most extreme example of Couchshoeing ever.  It’s two guys on a bed WEARING SKI BOOTS!

We have a winner.

Stupid xorg.conf Tricks

Mimo Monitor

I’m getting addicted to small USB monitors.  They’re so practical for displaying “extra” information that I don’t want to clutter up my main screen.

These monitors just require one single cable to the computer, and they typically have a touch screen interface, too.  So you can pretty much use them for any small control/display project you have.

For the office, I wanted to display the currently playing music, because otherwise I frequenly have to query the music server what’s playing, and that disrupts my work flow.  So I hooked up the screen, and I started a separate X server to display the cover and the artist/album/track name.

Then I wondered: what would I want to control with this device?  The only thing I could think of was pausing.  And writing a program just to do that seemed like overkill. 

So I just pointed evrouter at it, with the following evrouterrc-file:

“eGalax Inc. USB TouchController” “/dev/input/event7” none key/330 “Shell/pause”

So when I tap the screen, then the music pauses.  Couldn’t be easier.

My problem was then that the main X screen also got the “tap”.  I’ve long wondered how to filter out certain input devices.  X, these days, is very helpful.  If you plug in an input device, it’ll use it.  I’ve previously tried to find out how to remove certain devices from certain servers, but never been able to find out how.

It turns out to be really easy. You just remove the stuff from /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-evdev.conf, and then put the stuff you want into the xorg.conf file for the server.


Not the least bit hacky!