My TODO list is big. More annoyingly, it’s not really one TODO list. I have notes scattered throughout my computer: in text files; in a local knowledgebase; in program source.. and in this case in the rc.xml configuration file for Openbox.
I wanted to have OSD (On Screen Display) feedback for volume control on my not-particularly-fancy multimedia keyboard. Right now I’m using aumix like so:
\aumix -v+5
And in Openbox the rc.xml keybinding would be:
<keybind key="XF86AudioRaiseVolume"> <action name="Execute"> <command>aumix -v+5</command> </action> </keybind>
I was originally going to use XOSD, but when I first glanced at it I declared that it was insane and not intended for mere mortals.
\echo "foo" | \osd_cat \echo "test" | \osd_cat --font "-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--*-*-*-*-c-*-*-*)" -d 1 \tail -f /var/log/messages | \osd_cat
Now does that make any fucking sense to normal people? Yay Linux.
At any rate, I did a bit of hunting and thanks to Ubuntu noobs I found a good tool. anrxc wrote pvol.py which is a simple python-only volume control and OSD. As an example, let’s raise the volume by 5% with:
pvol.py -c 5
Nothing fancy, and nothing difficult. There’s no configuration, which is both a good and a bad thing.. but I can live with the developer’s defaults. No extra dependencies to speak of. Just Python. Perhaps I already have a huge amount of Python bloat on my system, but I don’t mind so much.
There are more and more little Python scripts that I’ve been running into over the last bunch of years. It’s really too bad that it’s an ugly language to me. I should take another look at it, but I’d bet that I’ll be using Ruby for a long while before I bother checking Python out. I’ve got some other languages lined up too, so I should be good for the next few hundred years.
Ok, so I’m a slow programmer.. Stupid morality is so inconvenient.
