01 july 2021
Happy July!
It's finally starting to cool down in the house. The air conditioner is starting to be able to keep up with the heat, and it's an enormous relief. Still too warm, but not having to constantly bunker down in the basement to not feel like we're suffocating on the air.
Haven't done much with tech or anything really the last week because it's too hot to think or do anything CPU or GPU-intensive. Played more Starbound as distraction- currently terraforming a planet to be entirely flat for building on. Really need to get back to work on the notes program but that requires it to be cool enough to think without being exhausted- getting there! Please let the temps come down before the 4th. We're in the USA and it's going to be a major fire hazard- we don't do fireworks ourselves because they're way too loud for us, but a lot of people here do, even the illegal ones. There's definitely going to be a fire in this heat.
On the plus side, we finally configured our side laptop with Debian so that it both looks nice and works well. The challenge there is that it has a touchscreen, so we had to pick themes and set up the panel with big clunky fingers in mind. Wound up going with one XFCE panel on the left side, vertical orientation, with two rows. Whisker menu, time, common application launchers in two rows, space, system stats and logout buttons. Works like a charm. Definitely different from what we usually go for but honestly, it's kind of nice. Might have to go with side panels more often. Our main laptop is running i3 and i3bar so that limits it a bit more- would look into polybar but honestly, i3 bar does everything it needs to.
Thinking about changing our main laptop's color scheme though. We love Nord and it's very nice to look at, but there's just not quite enough contrast. Going to look at other popular color schemes, see what they do well, and probably roll our own from there. Or use a popular one if there's one that perfectly matches our needs. Definitely want to stick with cool colors, so Gruvbox is out. Also want to keep a dark theme. Considering Solarized but unsure if that has enough contrast. Going to need to look around and explore options.
Wow, that makes it sound like we change color schemes and appearances a lot. We don't. Usually we find a good one and stick with it for months unless it's not working. Nord is sort of working but again, the contrast is a little too low. It mostly becomes an issue in terminal. Maybe someone's made an increased contrast Nord colorscheme for terminal? Worth a look, or trying to tweak it ourselves. Probably easier than changing everything.