Shallow Thoughts : : Sep

Y is for Yunque

Dave was browsing through satellite imagery and noticed what looked like an old bridge across the Rio Grande just north of Española, near the Ohkay Owingeh pueblo.

In the Days of COVID, one cure for the stir-crazies is to get in the car and go for a drive. So we ventured forth to check out this bridge.

Sure enough, just west of where County Road 56A crosses the Rio, there's a little stub of a dead-end road called Yunque that leads to a footbridge.

The name Yunque sounded vaguely familiar, but neither of us could pin down why.

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Pho 1.0, Belated Release

I was doing some disk housekeeping and noticed that my venerable image viewer, Pho, was at version 1.0pre1, and had been since 2017. It's had only very minimal changes since that time. I guess maybe it's been long enough that it's time to remove that -pre1 moniker, huh?

Of course I couldn't leave it at that. There were a couple of very minor bugs I'd been ignoring, when you delete from the end or beginning of the image list. So I fixed those, bumped the version, updated the web page, tagged the git tree and made a release. Pho is now 1.0. About time!

Resizing Images for a Twitter Stream

In the LWVNM, we're promoting our new non-partisan state-wide online Voter Guide, Vote411.

I got roped into doing the Twitter side of this, using a bunch of images the communications team got from the national LWV.

The problem is, the images are square, 1500x1500 pixels. Turns out Twitter won't display square images: according to most references I found, it crops any image you tweet to 600x335 (16:9).

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Key Bindings for Copy and Paste Under X11

In the previous article I wrote about how the two X selections, the primary and clipboard, work. But I glossed over the details of key bindings to copy and paste the two selections in various apps.

That's because it's complicated. Although having the two selections available is really a wonderful feature, I can understand why so many people are confused about it or think that copy and paste just generally doesn't work on Linux -- because apps are so woefully inconsistent about their key bindings, and what they do have is so poorly documented.

"Why don't they all just use the standard Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V?" you ask. (Cmd-C, Cmd-V for Mac users, but I'm not going to try to include the Mac versions of every binding in this article; Mac users will have to generalize.)

Simple: those keys have well-known and very commonly used bindings already, which date back to long before copy and paste were invented.

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X is for the X Selection: Copy and Paste on Linux

There's so much confusion about copy and paste in Linux. Many people, coming from the Windows or Mac worlds, complain about copy/paste not working right. And while it's true that some apps don't handle copy/paste very well (Firefox in particular is notably flaky in this area), usually the problem is that nobody has ever told them about one of Linux's best features: the two types of selection, Primary and Clipboard.

The Primary Selection

When you sweep your mouse across some words to highlight them, or double-click to highlight a word, or triple-click to highlight a line, whatever you've highlighted is now in the primary selection.

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