Conserving screen space in GNOME

I finally found a tool to accomplish something I have wanted for a long time, namely tuning the size of icons and buttons in Gnome. Gnome applications waste a lot of precious screen space by default, probably the default settings are developed for and by people with six HD monitors at their desks. On a tiny screen such as the 1024x600 screen in my eee-pc, pixels are precious and should not be wasted.

The tool I found is called gnome-color-chooser. Install it with

sudo aptitude install gnome-color-chooser

I should say that I'm using Linux Mint Debian, with the Mate desktop based on Gnome 2. Gnome 3 appears to be configured differently, judging from a quick search.

The color chooser tool allows you to choose the colors of different elements, but it has several settings for button sizes and icon sizes as well. First, let's set all paddings to 0, except the y-padding of widgets which I chose to keep as 1. Check Use shadowless Menubars and Use shadowless Toolbars. On the Icons tab, you can set icon sizes. I set the sizes to 14-12-12-12. I particularly liked the setting Start menu, setting it to 12 pixels made the menu small, nice and manageable.



What the tool actually does is to provide settings in a file included from .gtkrc-2.0.
As the Archlinux Wiki points out, one can also modify the .gtkrc-2.0 file by hand.

Other settings to change for a compact look:

• System > Preferences > Appearance, Fonts-tab, Details-button. Change Screen resolution from 96 to 80. For some reason, this setting works better than changing the font sizes.
• System > Preferences > Appearance, Themes-tab. Controls: Clearlooks, Window borders: Mint-X, Icons: Gnome

While at it, fix the file manager preferences:

• View new folders using: Compact View
• Compact view defaults, Default zoom level 66%
• Uncheck All columns have the same width

With the latest update pack for LMDE, many application started to display the following warning when run in a terminal. I frequently launch emacs from a terminal to edit files, then the message clutters up the terminal.

Fontconfig warning: "/etc/fonts/conf.d/53-monospace-lcd-filter.conf", line 10: Having multiple values in <test> isn't supported and may not work as expected

A quick fix to get rid of this annoyance is to comment out line 10 of the offending file:
<!--  <string>Bitstream Vera Sans Mono</string> -->
I figure this might change something, but it looks that the file was broken anyway as it was shipped.

Storage system for wrapping paper

Gift wrapping paper has always been a pain to store. Inspired by several similar arrangements on Pinterest, we made our own gift wrapping organization and storage system, on the inside of a clothes cabinet door.

For storing rolls of gift-wrapping paper, we used one of the (in Finland) ubiquitous Lanka & Muovi bathroom shelves, which consist of metal wire covered with a softer white plastic. We removed the lower parts of the two upper shelves with a wire cutter. The leftover wire stubs were smoothed down with a Dremel.



The result was two square ring-like supports over a deeper shelf, good for an almost infinite number of paper rolls!

Next, we used two Lanka & Muovi bars to make a holder for gift wrapping ribbon rolls. The bars (I really don't know what they're meant for in their original form) needed to be separated from the wall to make space for the ribbon rolls, we did this with some pieces of wood we had lying around.



We sawed off one end of the metal bars, and put in a hook for that end to rest on. This makes the ribbon rolls re-arrangeable without having to remove the entire thing!

Another bathroom shelf serves as storage for other gift-wrapping miscellanea: scissors, tape, gift bags, cards, markers...

Color mixes for pastel beads

I wanted to make colored translucent beads from Fimo polymer clay. I think the ready-made colored 'translucent' Fimo is too strongly pigmented, and not so translucent. The idea here is to reduce the amount of pigment, by mixing in unpigmented (i. e. 'white') translucent polymer clay.

Unpigmented clay is very soft, almost too soft to form into beads with any precision. The unpigmented clay in the reddish-violet beads above on the left was a bit dry, which made it much easier to control. But when baking, the dry clay produced a lot more of whitish flakes or stripes you can see in the picture above. I don't mind so much though, it looks a bit like some kind of stone.

I played around a bit with mixing different colors with varying intensity and lightness, to get the shades I wanted. The glass beads in the picture below served as inspiration and goal, to keep the colors subtle and counteract the temptation to create super-bright shades.



It's impossible to get an accurate idea of the color of these low-pigmented mixes while actually mixing them. Unbaked (in the upper half of picture above) they look almost completely white, since they get translucent only during baking. That's why a color chart comes in handy!



To read the chart: '1 blue + 1 violet + 32 white' means that I mixed 1 part translucent blue, 1 part translucent violet, and 32 parts 'translucent white' (i.e. unpigmented) Fimo polymer clay. In practice, I used one stripe (one eight of a packet) of unpigmented clay, and one 32th of a stripe each of the blue and violet clays. So one part is here just a tiny amount - unless you want to end up with piles of pastel clay.

The conical turquoise beads are made with a bead roller, the other ones I formed by hand. They were all sanded and polished after baking.

For the brownish ones, I mixed in a bit of green, as you can see, to get the saturation down. The result it a bit too reddish for my taste. My favorites are the darker turquoise and the bluish violet. Most of these semitransparent pastel colors would probably look nice layered with opaque white!

Boxing the 'Berry

The raspberry router of an earlier post turned out to work well, but it definitely needs an enclosure. The fast & easy solution - put everything inside a plastic Smart Store box! (The same kind of box we modified for storing Legos.) The box contains a USB hard drive, as well as the Pi and GSM modem, so we can use the Pi as a file server.

The Pi, the network switch, the USB hub and the hard drive each has its own power supply, so we included a power strip in the box. The many power sources take up a lot of space in our current system. If all the devices could share one, the system would shrink considerably.

Each machine has its own LED, and at night, the whole thing looks like a box of holiday decorations.

The box is kept slightly ajar for the cables going into the box, which seems to provide enough ventilation as well. Measuring the raspberry's CPU temperature with

cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp

consistently reports around 46 C.

This setup turned into a surprisingly nice media player as well, once I connected our old TV set to it. We have no keyboard connected to the Pi, so we just ssh to it and run the omxplayer. I plan to give XBMC a try later, but getting it set up on a standard raspbian systems seems rather involved.

The current setup is somewhat temporary - in the future, I hope to put everything inside the case of a desktop PC, to function as a power conserving and silent always-on server, independent of the main PC.

Circle Stickers - Lots of Dots

One great thing about Germany is the abundance of small, inexpensive round paper stickers - supposed to be used for archiving, I guess, but in my experience, they're also great for super-fast artwork creation, and for arranging nicely on a table.





On a side note, this company has a very impressive sticker repertoire. I haven't yet seen a shop that would sell all of these, not even in Germany.

Printable Wall Calendar For 2013

Time for printing a new wall calendar for the coming year 2013. This one is similar to the one for 2012 - I made the days a bit bigger, and interwove the months to a continuous flow of days, to save some space. To identify the months, I gave each month its own color. Not sure how happy I am with these changes, but I'll just have to try it in real life and see what improvements I can come up with for 2014...

The calendar is on two pages, with January to June on the first and the rest on the second. The weeks begin with Mondays. Weekends are marked by a less bright white than the week days.

Download the pdf and print it on a regular printer. (The Google Docs viewer doesn't seem to understand transparency, so it doesn't show the month names or the weekend day boxes, but they'll be there when you print.)

The calendar is made in Inkscape, my favorite free vector graphics editor. The correct date/weekday arrangement for 2013 comes from Inkscape's Extensions -> Render -> Calendar function.

Lego Storage

Organizing Lego bricks has always been something of a problem, if you're inclined to categorize. We took a clear plastic lidded box, a SmartStore Classic 31, and cut clear plastic sheets into the proper shape, to divide the box into sections. The sheets are polycarbonate Lexan sheets, 1.5 mms thick, just thin enough to be cuttable with household scissors. Five sheets were used in one direction, giving one compartment for each of the six traditional Lego colors. Compartment width was chosen to match the relative frequency of each color.



Where the sheets cross each other, we cut out a thin rectangle from both sheets, from the top to the center in one sheet, and from the bottom to the center in the other, to form a cross halving joint. It was helpful to drill a 2 mm hole at the inner edge of the rectangle, and then make two parallel cuts from the side to the hole. We fastened the plastic sheets with hot glue to the box. One long sheet was placed perpendicular to the six shorter ones, to stabilize and to separate thin and thick bricks.



Here is the box with the divisions in place and filled with our supply of bricks.

New Legos

From the wonderful Pick a Brick machine. Adds to the old stash.

Salmiak

Salmiak-shaped candies of, well, salmiak. They make nice mosaic blocks as well.  Unfortunately the angles are slightly off: I thought three fat or six thin corners would fit together, that would have given more pattern options.

Still life

Folder Reduced

I've never managed to find a slim A5 folder - it seems one can have only one special property per item, either slim or A5. So I sacrificed a slim A4 folder, and cut it to hold a sheet of folded A4 paper. If I punch holes at the open end of the folded sheet, and make two cuts from the edge to the holes on one side, then I can fold out the A4 sheet without opening the rings.

The reduced folder compared to one in the original size.

Printable Wall Calendar for 2012

2011 is almost over, and since it's so hard to find a simple and non-hideous wall calendar that one can write on, I made my own. The basic layout is "inspired" by the Bold & Noble calendars.

My calendar is a pdf, two pages, meant for printing on two A4s and sticking together as shown on the right. Download your own and print it on a regular printer. It should work also in gray scale.

The calendar is made in Inkscape, my favorite free vector graphics editor. The correct date/weekday arrangement for 2012 comes from Inkscape's Extensions -> Render -> Calendar function.

Marker Spectrum

My collection of Copic markers. They are alcoholic pigment ink double-ended felt-tip pens, which come in a lot of colors. I have some of the original square ones, and some Sketch (oval). The plastic boxes are from Muji.

Hama Charts

The present collection and categorization of Hama beads. Also a Photoshop exercise for me. The complete set of available colors on the manufacturer's web site.

Painting the Wardrobe

"Before". Very shabby MDF board.

White latex paint, 2.7 l bucket was just enough for two layers on the surfaces of the double closet - that surface was very absorbent. The closet had a convenient height for this project...

All done, including new suspension for the clothes rack.

Medicine Cabinet

Small not-too-clean medicine cabinet, found on a junk market in Tel Aviv.

Stash

The collection, aligned on grids according to color and size. Note the SINGLE gray two-by-four on the right.