Friday was a work-from-home day.
I could have gone into the office — on the one hand, I felt unproductive on Thursday, despite getting a great deal done, because the one project on my board that I knew would take multiple days was left unfinished; on the other, the office flooded last weekend and was still a shambles, with blowers to evaporate the water plugged into my office outlets — but I felt I would be more productive and more focused working remotely.
Plus, it would give me a chance to put Fedora 42 to use.
The new version of the operating system released earlier in the week, and I went ahead and upgraded. While I mainly use Linux Mint Debian Edition, I keep EndeavourOS (an Arch-based distro) and Fedora on my system as essentially “reference checks” for my remote set-up, to help me diagnose issues with the VPN connection to work, which I worked out myself. And they’ve come in handy, like with the FreeRDP 2 to FreeRDP 3 transition or with Kerberos authorization–why is this working in one but not the others? Nothing quite like being my own tech support.
Anyway.
So it was that I spent Friday morning in Fedora, connected to my remote desktop at Diamond, working on the first of two major Merchandise sections in the catalog. (In the catalog, they run as a single section. For production reasons, they’re split into smaller, more manageable sections.)
As you can see, that’s the GNOME overview. On workspace two, I have Rhythmbox open. I don’t recall what I was listening to at this exact point — I do recall that I listened to Mikel’s Middle-earth & Chill at some point during the day — but I was mainly interested in Fedora’s Bluetooth connectivity, which was rock solid with the cheap Bluetooth speaker I have in my home office. (LMDE is a bit hinky with it.) I haven’t done much to customize GNOME at all; I swapped out the wallpaper to an appropriately geeky piece of art appropriate for Fedora 42, and I changed the icon theme to the Tela icons. I later installed the Adwaita dark theme, so I could have an acutal dark mode.
The remote desktop was fairly sprightly at first, but after about two hours it became a bit sluggish. On Fedora GNOME, which is Wayland powered, I use xfreerdp, the X11 version of the remote desktop client, which runs fine, I guess under the xwayland compatibility layer, and far better than the Wayland version of FreeRDP. (The last time I used the Wayland version of the sortware, the remote desktop window didn’t have have a titlebar–it was just a borderless window in the middle of the screen!) In the afternoon, to change things up I switched back over to Linux Mint Debian Edition, and I wrapped work on the catalog section about 5:30. It was over 23,000 words, with 18,000 of them coming on Friday.
I received notification that another catalog section was ready to write mid-day, and I wrote the brand manager that I was likely to get to it on Monday. “Not in a hurry,” he replied. That’s fine for you, sir, but for me, PREVIEWS catalogs are that giant rolling boulder from the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark—gotta keep running, gotta stay in front, can’t slow down, can never ever get away, because failure will lead to disaster.
After writing a script to set workspace keyboard shortcuts for the Cinnamon desktop environment, I did the same for GNOME. First I set a few manually, ran a dconf settings dump, then worked out the gsettings for the rest. Cinnamon is a fork of GNOME, so the underlying principles were the same.
But GNOME required a little bit more effort. While in Cinnamon I had to turn off the ability to launch a program from the taskbar with the Super (ie., Windows) key and the number that corresponds to its position from an applet’s settings, in GNOME that’s actually a setting I can touch with code. GNOME also defaults to “dynamic worksspaces”–it starts you out with two, and if you put something on the second, then it creates a third, and then a fourth if you go to the third, and so forth. Super-Number didn’t work with that, probably (I’m guessing) because under the hood the workspaces aren’t hard-numbered, and the system rearranges them as workspaces are created and destroyed. That, too, was easy enough to touch with code.
#!/bin/bash
# Gnome Workspace Keyboard Shortcuts
# Defines i3-style keyboard shortcuts to move to specific workspaces
# and move windows to specific workspaces.
# Turn off dynamic workspaces
gsettings set org.gnome.mutter dynamic-workspaces fals
# Set number of workspaces
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences num-workspaces 6
# Clear use of Super key to launch applications from dock
gsettings set org.gnome.shell.keybindings switch-to-application-1 "@as []"
gsettings set org.gnome.shell.keybindings switch-to-application-2 "@as []"
gsettings set org.gnome.shell.keybindings switch-to-application-3 "@as []"
gsettings set org.gnome.shell.keybindings switch-to-application-4 "@as []"
gsettings set org.gnome.shell.keybindings switch-to-application-5 "@as []"
gsettings set org.gnome.shell.keybindings switch-to-application-6 "@as []"
# Move to workspace: Shift + Super + Number
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings move-to-workspace-1 "['
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings move-to-workspace-2 "['
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings move-to-workspace-3 "['
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings move-to-workspace-4 "['
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings move-to-workspace-5 "['
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings move-to-workspace-6 "['
# Switch to workspace: Super + Number
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-to-workspace-1 "['
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-to-workspace-2 "['
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-to-workspace-3 "['
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-to-workspace-4 "['
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-to-workspace-5 "['
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-to-workspace-6 "['
I don’t know that I will ever actually need this again, but just in case….
I had my best ever score in Super Star Trek.
Captain’s Log, Stardate 2200.0. Reports from Starfleet Command indicate that the Klingons have invaded Federation space in force. Enterprise is breaking off its survey mission in quadrant Pollux I to do what we can to end the threat. May fortune favor the bold.
Captain’s Log, Stardate 2215.2. The Enterprise’s supply of photon torpedoes depleted and our energy reserves dwindling, the fortuitous discovery of a starbase has resupplied the ship for battles to come. We have been fortunate; a solar storm took out our long range sensors for a brief period, and the library computer was down for a day as well, but Scotty has kept this ship running, as Mr. Spock might say, “with stone knives and bearskins.” This crew–and the Federation–are lucky to have them both.
Stardate 2227.2. Our shields inoperable due to a solar storm, the Enterprise was in desperate straits as we faced the final Klingons threatening the Federation–three in a single quadrant! Were the shields operational, I would opt for using photon torpedoes and take out one of the Klingons, reducing the 3-to-1 odds to 2-to-1, then ending the invasion with a phaser barrage. But would the shields hold against the Klingons’ returning fire? No, I would have to gamble that one phaser blast would be enough to take out all three Klingons, potentially leaving the Enterprise dead in space. I knew I was risking the lives of every man and woman serving on this ship. The order to fire phasers was one of the most difficult of my command, yet for the sake of my crew I had to utter it with all the confidence I did not feel. I did not exhale until Spock’s sensor reports came back that one ship, then another, finally the third had been destroyed. Scotty estimates another two days to repair shields. We will wait here as repairs are made, then redirect shield power back to the engines and report to the nearest Starbase for much needed repairs and shore leave.
32 Klingons! 33 days! 2 starbases! Yup, this one was going to be a challenge.
I was really fortuitous. Yes, some systems took damage, but nothing overly critical and not for long. No long-range scanners slowed me for two turns. Losing the library computer for a few turns was also bad, but not greatly so. I lost short range sensors at one point so I couldn’t see where the Klingons were, then warped into a sector where I had to use the library computer to navigate to the Starbase. It also helped that sectors with multiple Klingons were grouped near a sector with a Starbase. Had I lost warp drive, which slows the ship to a crawl–it takes four or five turns to cross a sector–the Federation would have been doomed.
Lucky, not good. Fortune really did favor the bold.