I have an old netbook. Its hardware is old and slow. I also have no practical reason to use it when other devices like my PC or even my phone are better for pretty much anything I might want to do with it…

However, this old netbook has accompanied me throughout my entire time at university and I have grown emotionally attached to it. On top of that, there is something else I love to do every now and then: Fiddling with Linux distrubutions and customizing them.

And this is how we get to today’s topic: I’ve spent some time over the last weeks to keep the old netbook up to date and customize it (aka. “rice it”, in the Linux nerd jargon) by making my own desktop.

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This is not the first time I’ve done customizations but it is probably the time I went the furthest and felt like it might actually be interesting to share some insight into what I did.

For the past two years or so, I had been running a Fedora installation on it, using the Fedora Everything minimal net installer with KDE for the desktop. I generally like KDE a lot but it was also a fact that full-fledged desktop environments are causing heavy slowdowns on the netbook. Just idling after login was already consuming 1.3GB of the available 2GB of RAM. Starting anything, even just system settings was slow.

Then, recently, I had the sudden urge to try going much simpler, by abandoning DEs altogether and using a window manager. At first, I tried Sway but I did not like it all that much and ran into some issues. Idle usage was so much lower though that I immediately realized that I was on the right track. Next, I installed Hyprland. I have seen it before using Sway, but since it was advertising itself with fancy effects and animations, I was worried it would mean it has higher consumption and runs slower. I was wrong. It worked better than Sway for the same usage. Configuring Hyprland was straightforward and fun with immediately visible results. Hooray!

At this point, I may need to clarify some things for readers that are not familiar with the nature of a window manager. The differences between a WM and a desktop environment like KDE are that, while KDE comes with everything you know from a classic desktop, like a taskbar, app launcher, apps to change settings, font and theme customization, and more, a window manager purely does what it says on the can: manage windows. Hyprland provides a base layer that handles how new windows are opened and displayed. On top of that window managers are usually tiling. While a typical Windows or KDE desktop have floating windows that you drag around anywhere on a screen, a tiling window manager automatically sizes and aligns new windows in a grid. It is designed for power users that want to effectively manage their screen space with automation and use multiple workspaces in parallel. The first reaction of most people hearing about this for the first time is likely: “Ehh, that sounds strange and tedious.” Tiling window managers are a case of, you need to try it out for yourself to realize where its strengths are compared to floating windows. That being said, Hyprland also supports things like floating, pinned, and fullscreen windows, of course. It is just the basic paradigm that is different.

With Hyprland running as the underlying window manager and providing visuals and controls for and arranging applications, the question was now how to build an “actual desktop” and add features that the window manager does not offer. One key part that I wanted is a status and taskbar. At first, I went with Waybar for a while. Waybar is great in how simple it is to set up. With just two config files, one to specify what modules you want and what information you want them to show, and one stylesheet to customize the looks, it served my needs well.

Later on, I found out about Quickshell though. Quickshell is much harder to set up and requires programming in QML to use, but it allows for even more customization. With Quickshell, you get a QML framework using Qt Quick with which you can develop your own desktop shell to whatever extend you desire. Thus, I set out to build a lot of my desktop shell all with Quickshell. I created my own taskbar with several status indicators and buttons, custom tray menu styles, a logout/shutdown screen, and a custom application launcher.

Things like consistent fonts and consistent coloring are pretty important to me and this approach allowed me to get something I find both functional as well as visually pleasing. After spending some time on that and building things as far as I wanted to have them on my netbook, I am now in a spot that I am pretty happy with. And during idle time, this setup consumes barely above half of the memory that KDE did.

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For everyone with a more technical interest, here is a summary of the stack involved in my desktop at the time of writing:

• Hyprland: Window Manager (also using additional packages like Hyprpaper, Hyprlock, and Hypridle)
• Quickshell: Handwritten taskbar with status indicators, tray menus, app launcher, and logout screen.
• Mako: Basic notifications daemon
• Snappy Switcher: Alt+Tab workspace switching
• Zsh + Oh My Zsh: Shell
• Foot: Terminal client

Special note on Mako and Snappy Switcher: Indeed, I could also do notifications and an alt+tab display all with Quickshell. I just decided against re-inventing the wheel for these two when they already serve my needs fine at no noteworthy resource cost.

Special note on Foot: There are many, many Terminal clients out there. I probably would have used Alacritty or Kitty, but those are all GPU-accelerated and turned out to be a lot slower on my old netbook than a CPU client. Foot turned out to be blazing fast and a perfect fit.

Another side effect of working on this environment is that I have adopted Neovim (with LazyVim) as a primary editor, even using it through WSL on my Windows PC now.

My dotfiles for my configuration are available on GitHub.

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I hope this post could give some glimpse into the world of Linux ricing. I encountered some fun tools on the way that, maybe, you are inspired to check out yourself. The ability to make your system whatever you want is one of they key strength of Linux environments, in my opinion. If this sounds intriguing to you and you are inspired to experiment with these things on your own, then I wish you a pleasant journey.

This is a nerdy video game post. Or, to be more precise, I already made a nerdy video game post elsewhere but thought I should probably share it here too.

After almost 10 years, the Powerplay game mode in Elite Dangerous is about to be reworked and started as 2.0 with new rules and gameplay very soon. Since I have been involved in coordination of part of the community as well as spreadsheets and tools development behind the scenes, I felt it important to compile and share some statistics as the first version of this game mode comes to an end and people transition over to a new era.

The target audience for this is mainly people that are involved in the Elite Dangerous community. However, anyone is free to check out my massive post that goes through a variety of statistics with some explanations and commentary.

Click Here

Heya! It is time for a new blog post because everything is now new and fancy.

Okay, okay, the general structure of my website is the same and all old blogposts are still available unchanged too. Nevertheless, I took some time to rewrite the entire thing. Instead of using Jekyll and Twitter bootstrap for the static site generation, I have set up a codebase using Svelte and Tailwind CSS with TypeScript. Is it overkill to do a simple static website with all of these frameworks? Probably! But it was a whole lot of fun too and Svelte has impressed me a lot. And on top of that, it allowed me to implement some new toys alongside updating my page content.

What new toys? While you’re invited to browse the pages on the new website, I can share a few songs that I have added to the Music page since my last post. And to do that I can use some new features I wrote for this site! You can click on the song cards below and listen to them while you continue browsing around! Neat, huh?

Add all to queue

Inches of Mercury is a new project I started, which represents a fictional metal band in the Elite Dangerous universe. The name is based on an inside joke with a friend. We were talking about air pressure and noticed that the US use inches of mercury as the unit for that. I made the comment that it sounds more like a metal band than a unit for atmospheric pressure, which then planted the idea into my head of actually making this a thing. As such, I started working on a first track. Time will tell whether there will be more or not… 😉

When I Drink and The Queen’s Conservatory were tribute tracks to Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and the Night Far Covenant in World of Warcraft Shadowlands respectively, as I enjoyed their melodies so much that I had to make a tribute cover.

That’s it for my update today. I hope you like the redesign and new functionality!

Making music has always been a free time passion of mine. I do it because I love this feeling of creating something I have fun with. This is kind of true for everything I do, be it music, programming, or anything else. On top, I hope that maybe someone else enjoys it too, but that is never the driving factor for me. It’s a hobby and, despite some investments into it, I want to treat it as such and not imply any professionalism or feel compelled to meet any professional standards.

What matters to me is accessibility. That’s why I’ve always uploaded stuff to my YouTube channel. If you happen to like what I do, I want you to enjoy it freely. When it comes to my music, I dislike sitting on things for arbitrary reasons like compiling enough tracks for an album, then possibly worrying that my songs are too stylistically random to even fit together. When I finish a track, I usually just want to share it, and this is what I want to double down on more again. I’ve updated the Music page of my website to not just have free download links to my compiled albums but also to most of the (currently) standalone tracks I’ve created in the past few years. You want to listen to them offline on your favorite device or player - go right ahead!

For a while, I was considering to put a formal Creative Commons Attribution license on my music. I feel like if you enjoy it and want to use it for anything, you should be able to do so, as long as my name is credited. There should be no bar stopping you from worries about copyright and, hey, if you wanna remix me or so, why should I want to stop you? That’s pretty cool. I decided against formally declaring it creative commons content, for now. The license can come across as a bit specific regarding attribution and credit. Instead, I’m going with a more “common sense” approach, if that wording makes sense. I’m fine with people using my music as long as they reasonably credit me. It never hurts to have a simple communication, in any case. Just shoot me a note if you want to get a formal OK from me. Besides, I’m interested what people would like to use my music for. Maybe there are some cool project out here I wanna check out too!

If you want to listen to my music on a livestream, e.g. on Twitch, that is totally fine as well. There’s enough DMCA drama already - I’m honored if you want to use my music as a royalty free alternative. Otherwise, if you really want to support me with this hobby, you can just do so with a donation.

With all of this said, in case you haven’t already seen them already, I also want to share some of my latest songs here.

Time for me to talk about a new musical track I made. This track I want to talk about is one I am very proud to finally show the world now. It is called “House of Reminiscence” and is a musical score I composed last year for my friend Doobes’ fan-made world “Veelay Tsahvahn” for Myst Online URU Live. Veelay is a memorial age (worlds are called ages in the game universe) dedicated to all the people in the community that died over the years. The age pays a tribute to them and tells some of their stories. Yesterday marked the release of that world to the public. You can visit and explore it on Gehn Shard.

Naturally, when Doobes asked me if I would like to write music for it, I accepted. The concepts sounded great and he gave me a WIP copy of the age to visit it for inspiration. And inspire me it did! Even that earlier version of it impressed me and gave me some musical ideas as I walked through it. I took in the atmosphere and spirit for a while, then fired up my little home studio and got to work. The challenging part about it was to find a compromise in sating my needs for having some memorizable tune and a bit of an “epic character” but at the same time making sure it won’t annoy a player being in the age for a while. I had to make it long and build slowly because nobody wants to hear something like a two-minute theme on repeat in such a place. Besides, the music should do justice to all the people we want to remember without being too distracting from the experience, let alone annoying.

With the images of the age in my head and always trying to make something that captures the soul of it and blends with it musically, I worked out what I want the song to be. When a player first enters the world, they don’t know the place yet so as they start wandering around and explore, the music should not distract but be more of a more quiet background track. First, I started with that soft synth and the slow but emotional theme played by strings. Something reminiscent. This is a tribute to the dead so I chose a minor scale. However, the melody should not just sound sad but also convey hope and all the positive memories we have of people we lost.

As the music progresses after the first time the theme is heard, a horn picks up the tune and the strings evolve to create a chord progression. Then, of course, I had to bring in the Duduk. It’s such a lovely instrument, a traditional Armenian ethnic woodwind instrument that is used to great effect in the D’ni music of MYST and URU. In a way, we all have come to associate it with the D’ni by now. While a real Duduk still sounds much better, I think the one I have in my virtual instrument collection was sufficient enough to make use of it for this score. The duduk plays another melody alongside the theme to create some new blend until the song reaches the four minute half-time mark and goes quiet again.

Veelay is built around a structure with stairs that lead you the “peak of the age”, the top of the building where books with the names of the dead and their backgrounds are stored. While the final version has an amazing promenade along the water (my favorite part of the age now) that did not exist in the version I first visited, the entire world is basically driving you up those stairs. As you go higher and higher, feelings get more intense and I wanted to represent this driving force of the age design in my music. Ultimately, I wanted the entire song to build up from a soft sad mood to something more majestic and this is what happens in the second half of the song.

With only soft synths keeping up a harmony, there is a short “break of wonder and mystery” created mostly by vibraphones and pizzicato strings, trying to capture the aspect of curiosity and exploration. Then, percussive instruments start to kick in. Now, drums and staccato strings playing a simple three-note tune (that the vibraphones teased before) set a beat for the music. If the character of the age design itself hasn’t forced you up those stairs already, I wanted to make this soft beat my “siren’s call” that makes you go up there.

After several bars of that beat and a repetition with the vibraphones coming back in the song enters a bridge that diverges from the chord progression that has dominated the song so far. The Duduk is back with a solo melody full of pitch bends and drives “the beat” forward to something new. Finally, it all comes together and the main theme is heard with the full range of elements we have seen before. The full orchestra plays, including a very soft choir. Now, for the first time, the Duduk is playing the theme tune. I went for a little trick here that I think worked out really well: In the first part the horn played the theme and the duduk the second melody - now those two changed roles. The horn plays the second tune, more in the background but essential to give it some majestic flavor. When the percussion ends and leaves only the synth it all began with, the circle closes and the song is over.

As I worked on this composition and arrangement, I think I was so in the flow that I completed the entire 8-minute track in about two days. I sent it to Doobes and he loved it and as quickly as it had begun my contribution to the age was complete.

It has been a while but, yesterday, I could finally be there for the unveiling of the final version of the age and the release to the public on Gehn Shard. I think there was a peak of 40 players at the same time exploring the age. I was blown away by how much Doobes, and of course everyone else involved with conceptual and technical aspects, had improved and extended it since the first version I saw. Exploring it with everyone else was a special moment. I also got a lot of positive feedback for the music which tells me I did something right and makes me so proud in the end.

I am happy I got this chance and took it, but what makes me happy the most is that I could play my little part in creating a special legacy for all the souls this world is dedicated to.

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Before ending the post, I want to add that I also uploaded some music I made for the Prismatic Imperium, an Elite: Dangerous player group, in a playlist. The piano sheet for my arrangement of Kaydeen’s theme has been added to the music page on my site here as well.