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!

I never promised myself a rose garden

Viking to the left, Pink Fairy to the right

But now I have a rose balcony.

I wanted to have something growing on the balcony (in addition to the dirt), so I went to buy a rose bush.  I got a bit carried away, as usual, and got three of them.  A (I’m not kidding) Pink Fairy, a (I’m still not kidding) Viking, and a (how boring) Sympathie.

The Pink Fairy is the hardiest one, of course.

So now I just have to wait a couple of months, and I’m sure they’ll end up looking just like on the last picture.

Right?  I don’t have to remember to water them or anything?

Right?

I should write an Emacs-based watering interface.

Sympathie
This is what they’ll look like.  Right.

RAID Fun Redux

Addonics Mini Storage Tower

You will remember me getting a new eSATA box with the crappiest thermal design ever.  To recap, there’s a big fan situated a few millimeters from an almost totally non-holey wall, Batman.  When fans are that close to an obstruction, the air flow makes a lot of noise.  So I unplugged the fan to see whether it would work as a fanless box.

And it didn’t.  One disk died after a week or so, presumably from heat stroke.  So I plugged the fan in again, and lived with the sound of a vacuum cleaner emenating from the hall closet.

Cthulhu Attacking

Until today, when a new enclosure (from Addonics) arrived.  As you can see, there’s nothing obstructing the air flow here.  However, it’s not really a hot-plug enclosure, which is disappointing.  With all the various loose wires inside the box, it looks like Cthulhu exploded inside it.

But it’s pretty quiet.  I can’t hear it at all on a two meter distance, if the closet doors are shut.

So I give this a two thumbs up on a five star scale.