abe@debian.org //at 23:58 //by abe

On Wednesday I got DAM approval and since Saturday late evening I’m officially a Debian Developer. Yay! :-)

My thanks go to

• Christoph Berg (Myon) whom I know for more than a decade since we studied together, and who’s career in Debian was way faster than mine, but who on the other hand probably knows me better than nobody else in Debian — which made him the perfect advocate;
• Bernd Zeimetz (bzed) whom I know from my times at DaLUG and who was the friendliest Application Manager I could imagine — he’s probably also one of the fastest (8 days from application to AM report :-);
• Luca Capello (gismo), who was the most demanding but also most inspiring sponsor I ever had and who became a very good friend after we found each other over my package conkeror.
• Arne Wichmann (Y_Plentyn) for being my first drop-in center for Debian questions (like “can I directly dist-upgrade from 2.0 to 3.0?” :-);
• Martin Zobel-Helas (zobel) who was always encouraging me to continue exploring new sides of Debian;
• Gerfried Fuchs (Rhonda) just for being there (and for being a package maintainer with good relations to upstream ;-);
• my coworkers at the IT Services Group of the Department of Physics at ETH Zurich, who always found new challenges in Debian for me to solve;
• … and all those others who offered to also advocate me (e.g. Otavio Salvador) or sponsored my packages so far (or at least offered to do so), e.g. Alexander Wirt (formorer), Martin F. Krafft (madduck), Robert Jördens (jordens), …

As Bernd cited in his AM report, my earliest activity within the Debian community I can remember was organising the Debian booth at LinuxDay.lu 2003, where I installed Debian 3.0 Woody on my Hamilton Hamstation “hy” (a Sun SparcStation 4 clone).

I wrote my first bugreport in November 2004 (#283365), probably during the Sarge BSP in Frankfurt. And my first Debian package was wikipedia2text, starting to package it August 2005 (ITP #325417).

My only earlier documented interest in the Debian community is subscribing to the lists debian-apache@l.d.o and debian-emacsen@l.d.o in June 2002.

I though remember that I started playing around with Debian 2.0 Hamm, skipping 2.1 (for whatever reasons, I can’t remember), using 2.2 quite regularily and started to dive into with Woody which also ran on my first ThinkPad “bijou”. I installed it over WLAN with just a boot floppy at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage. :-)

Anyway, this has led to what it had to lead — to a new Debian Developer. :-)

The first package I uploaded with my newly granted rights was a new conkeror snapshot. This version should work out of the box on Ubuntu again, so that conkeror in Ubuntu should not lag that much behind Debian Sid anymore.

In other News

Since Wednesday I own a Nokia N900 and use it as my primary mobile phone now. Although it’s not as free as the OpenMoko (see two other recent posts by Lucas Nussbaum and by Tollef Fog Heen on Planet Debian) it’s definitely what I hoped the OpenMoko will once become. And even if I can’t run Debian natively on the N900 (yet), it at least has a Debian chroot on it. :-)

A few weeks ago, I took over the organisation of this year’s Debian booth at FOSDEM from Wouter Verhelst who’s busy enough with FOSDEM organisation itself.

Last Monday the organiser of the BSD DevRoom at FOSDEM asked on #mirbsd for talk suggestions and they somehow talked me into giving a talk about Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. The slides should show up during the next days on my Debian GNU/kFreeBSD talks page. I hope, I’ll survive that talk despite giving more or less a talk saying “Jehova!”. ;-)

What a week.

Still happy with the ASUS EeePC 701 //at 18:32 //by abe

Recently Eric asked on the LUG Vorarlberg mailing list about netbook experience. I wrote a lengthy reply summarizing my experiences with the ASUS EeePC 701. And I thought this is something I probably should share with more people than only one LUG:

I ordered an ASUS EeePC 701 (4G) with US keyboard layout at digitec in Spring 2008, got it approximately one month later and posted a first resumé after one month in my blog.

I’m still very happy with the EeePC 701, despite two commonly mentioned drawbacks (the small screen resolution and the small SSD – which I both don’t see as real problems) and some other minor issues.

What matters

• Very robust and compact case. And thanks to a small fan being the only moving part inside, the EeePC 701 is also very robust against mobile use.
• Very pleasing always-in-my-daypack size (despite the 7" screen it’s the typical 9" netbook size) and easily held with one hand.
• Black. No glossy display. Neither clear varnish nor piano laquer. Short: No bath room tile. Textured surface, small scratches don’t stick out and don’t matter.
• Debian (previously Lenny, now Sid) runs fine on it, even the webcam works out-of-the-box.
• Despite all those neat features, it was fscking cheap at that time. And it was available without Windows.

Nice to have

• There’s power on the USB sockets even if the EeePC is turned off but the power supply is plugged in.
• The speakers are impressingly good and loud for their size. (But my demands with regards to audio are probably not too high, so audiophiles shouldn’t run to ebay because of this. ;-)
• It has three external USB sockets.

What doesn’t matter

• The small 7" 800×480 screen: I like small fonts and do most things inside a terminal anyway. And even with 800×480, those terminals are still much bigger than 80×25 characters. Only some applications and webpages have no heart for small screens.
• The small disk size: Quite a lot of programs fit on 4 GB of disk space. Additionally I use tmpfs a lot. And music and video files are either on a external 500 GB Western Digital 2.5" “My Passport” disk (which I need quite seldomly) or much more come via sshfs and IPv6 from my home server anyway. :-)
• The small keyboard: I just don’t have any problems with the size or layout (right shift right of the cursor up key, etc.) of the keyboard. Well, maybe except that any standard sized keyboard feels extremely large after having used the EeePC exclusively for some weeks. ;-)
• The to 630 MHz underclocked 900 MHz Intel Celeron: It’s enough for most of the things I do with the EeePC. Also the original 512 MB RAM are somehow ok, but for using tmpfs, but no swap space at all, 1 GB or 2 GB are surely the better choice.
• A battery runtime of 2.5h to 3h is fine for me.

What’s not so nice

• The “n” key needs to be pressed slighty stronger than other keys, otherwise no “n” appears. So if one of my texts in average misses more “n” than other letters, I typed it on the EeePC. ;-)
• Home, End, Page-Up, and Page-Down need the Fn key. This means that these keys can only be used with two hands (or oe very big hand and I have quite small hands). This is usually no problem and you get used to it. It’s just annoying if you hold the EeePC with one hand and try to type with the other.
• What looks like a single mouse button is a seesaw and therefore two mouse buttons below one button. This makes it quite hard to press both at the same time, e.g. for emulating a middle mouse button press. It usually works in about half of all cases I tried it. My solution was to bind some key combination to emulate a middle mouse button in my window manager, ratpoison:

  bind y ratclick 2

  And that mouse button bar already fell off two times.
• The battery reports only in 10% steps, and reporting in percentage instead of mAh is an ACPI standard violation because reporting in percentage is only allowed for non-rechargable batteries. It also doesn’t report any charging and discharging rates. But in the meanwhile nearly all battery meter can cope with these hardware bugs. This was quite a problem in the early days.
• Now, after approximately 1.5 years, the battery slowly fritzes: When charging there are often only seconds between 10% and 40%. Rigorously using up all power of the battery helped a little bit. Looks like some kind of memory effect althought the battery is labeled Li-Ion and not Ni-MH and Li-Ion batteries are said to have no memory effect.
• The SD card reader only works fine if you once completed the setup of the original firmware or set the corresponding BIOS switch appropriately. No idea why.

Similar models

Technically, most of this also counts for the EeePC 900SD (not 901) which only differs in screen, resolution and disk size as well as CPU, but not on the the case. So same size, same robustness, same battery, same mainboard, bigger screen, resolution, disk and faster CPU. (The 901 has a different CPU, a different battery, and a different, glossy and partially chromed case.) See Wikipedia for the technical specifications of all EeePC models.

ASUS’ only big FAILure

Stopping to sell most EeePCs with Linux and cowardly teaming up with Microsoft after having shown big courage to come out with a Linux only netbook. Well, you probably already know, but it’s better without Windows…

So basically you no more get these really neat netbooks from ASUS anymore and you get nearly no netbooks with Linux from ASUS in the stores anymore. It’s a shame.

Would I buy it again?

Sure.

Well, maybe I would also buy the 900SD or 702 (8G) instead of the 701, but basically they’re very similar. See Wikipedia for the differences between these EeePC models. And of course I still prefer the versions without Windows.

But despite the low price, the EeePC 701 is surprisingly robust and still works as on the first day (ok, except battery, the mouse button bar and the “n” key ;-), so I recently bought a second power supply (only white ones were available *grrrr*) and ordered a bigger third party battery plus an adapter to load the battery directly from the (second) power supply without EeePC inbetween.

What desktop do I use on the EeePC?

None.

I use ratpoison as window manager, uxterm, urxvt, and yeahconsole as terminal emulators (running zsh with grml based .zshrc even as root’s login shell :-), wicd-curses as network manager and xmobar (previously dzen2) with i3status as text-only panel. Installed editors are GNU Emacs 23, GNU Zile and nvi. (No vim. :-)

And of course a netbook wouldn’t be a netbook if it wouldn’t have a lot of network applications installed. For me the most important ones are: ssh, scp, autossh, sshfs, miredo, conkeror, git, hg, and rsync.

Daily Snapshot .debs of Conkeror //at 01:58 //by abe

Keeping track with packaging software which is under heavy development can be time-consuming. I noticed this while packaging Conkeror, because there was quite a demand for up-to-date packages, especially from upstream themself.

So recently on the IRC channel #conkeror the idea of automatically built Debian packages came up. After a few hours of experimenting and a few days of steadily optimizing, I can proudly present daily built snapshot packages of Conkeror for currently Lenny and Sid, ready to be included in your sources.list:

deb     http://noone.org/conkeror-nightly-debs lenny main
deb-src http://noone.org/conkeror-nightly-debs lenny main

deb     http://noone.org/conkeror-nightly-debs sid main
deb-src http://noone.org/conkeror-nightly-debs sid main

The binary package conkeror-spawn-process-helper is currently only built for the i386 architecture, but other architectures may follow.

The packages probably work also on any other Debian based distribution (e.g. Ubuntu) which includes XULRunner version 1.9.

Surely they are not of the usual Debian quality, but they should do it for staying up-to-date with the Conkeror development just by using your favourite APT frontend.

The script which generates those packages is also available in the Conkeror git repository at repo.or.cz.

The APTable archive is generated with reprepro. Packages and the repository are signed with the passphrase-less GnuPG key 373B76B4 which is used only for the Conkeror nightly builds. (If anyone knows a better solution for automatic builds than a passphrase-less key, please tell me. :-)

P.S.: I really like the new keybindings “<<”, “>>” and “G”. :-)

MBC09: The Day Before //at 08:39 //by abe

Helped my parents moving the first half of the week. Left there at Thurdays around 9am. Drove 45min to Zurich. Removed everything bicycle related from my daypack. Left the TomTom at home. (Google Maps on the E51 has to sufficed and sufficed so far.) Crammed cloths for three days in.

Was at Zurich Main Station around 11:40am. My plan was to take the direct ICE train from Zurich to Hamburg Dammtor. Bought a Rivella for the journey.

First suprise at the platform: No ICE train. Instead a Swiss InterCity. The staff told us due to a defect in the ICE train, we have to go to Basel SBB with this train, then switch trains there. No carriage numbers and reservations valid here. Hrmpf. For luck, there where not that many people in the train. No power sockets though.

Next surprise at Basel SBB: No ICE train here either. We’re advised to switch to a German InterCity and then switch again a few kilometers later at Basel Badischer Bahnhof (aka “Basel, German Station”).

There then finally waited an ICE labelled as the initially expected ICE 72 from Zurich to Hamburg Altona. Even the reservations were displayed, departure was though 20min later than the original ICE 72.

The voice from the speakers told us that this is a replacement train which came empty from Zurich. WTF? The next time the voice explained the situation, it was a replacement train coming from Interlaken… Ok, DB is not as insane as I believed for about half an hour. ;-)

Worked though the git tutorial and the git glossary on the train since in future I’ll use git in some of the OSS project I’m working together with — Conkeror beyond others. Also had a conversation with some doctor from University Hospital Zurich who has chasing as hobby. (WTF?)

The train arrived about 45 minutes late at Dammtor, so I first checked in in my hotel (“Hotel am Dammtor”, very close to the MBC09 venue) and then walked to Hamburger Botschaft where the twitter reading was already running, hoping to meet someone I know and having dinner afterwards. Guided by Google Maps on my Nokia E51 it took longer than expected to walk there. And it was windy and raining.

The twitter reading venue was quite full, but I still found a place where I saw most of the screen. At least the reminder of reading was quite funny: #famouslasttweets. They closed with a tweet similar to “And then there’s also identi.ca”. :-)

I was told it wasn’t that funny at the beginning. Didn’t find anyone I really knew, just sticked to a group talking about being hungry. When we met @igorette on our way to some restaurant and he recognised me, I found out that @muhh was also in the group I’m heading though Hamburg.

We had a nice dinner at Schmitt Foxyfood, I had GrillGold (Pommes Frites) with WuchtBrumme (Currywurst) and Fritz Cola.

After dinner, @moeffju drove me and some other guy to our hotels.

So the first evening was already very interesting despite the usual lateness of Deutsche Bahn.

How I use my virtual desktops //at 14:09 //by abe

Many months ago I stumbled upon this German written meme about how users use their virtual desktops. I use virtual desktops since my very early Unix times (tvtwm on Sun Sparc SLC/ELC/IPX with greyscale screens running SunOS 4.x), so in the meanwhile I use them nearly everywhere the same way.

Short Summary

3x5, no overlapping windows, either tiling or fullscreen, keyboard navigation, xterms, yeahconsole, FVWM, panel for systray.

Window Manager of Choice

My window manager of choice is FVWM since more than a decade. I tried others like Sawfish, Metacity and Compiz, but I couldn’t get them behave like the FVWM I got used to, so I always came back.

Since I hate overlapping windows, I use FVWM a lot like a tiling window manager. FVWM has this nice function to maximize windows so that they occupy as much space as available, but do not overlap other windows. This function was also often missing when I tried other window managers. I though do not want to use real tiling window managers since I have a few sticky windows around (e.g. the panner with the virtual desktops and xosview) and they shouldn’t be overlapped either.

Virtual Desktops

Switching between virtual desktops is done with the keyboard only – with Ctrl-Shift as modifier and the cursor keys. The cursor keys are usually pressed with thumb, ring and small finger of the right hand. Which hand presses Ctrl and Shift depend on the situation and keyboard layout, but it’s usually either ring and small finger of the left hand, or pointer and middle finger of the right hand. So I’m able to switch the virtual desktop with only one hand.

I have always three rows of virtual desktops and usually four or five columns.

The top row is usually occupied with xterms. It’s my work space. The top left workspace usually contains at least one xterms with a shell and one with mutt, my favourite e-mail client since nearly a decade. At home the second left virtual desktop in the top row usually contains a full-screen Liferea (my preferred feed reader) while at work it contains the GNU Emacs main window besides two xterms. Emacs and the emacs server are automatically started at login.

This also means that I switch the virtual desktops when I switch between mutt and Emacs for typing the content of an e-mail. Did this already during my studies. (At home mutt runs inside a screen, so there I just switch the virtual terminal with Ctrl-A Ctrl-A instead of the virtual desktop. Not that big difference ;-)

The other virtual desktops of the the top row get filled with xterms as needed. Usually one virtual desktop per task.

The middle row is for web browsers. One full screen browser (usually Conkeror or Opera) per virtual desktop, often opened with many tabs (tabs in Opera, buffers in Conkeror) related to the task I’m accomplishing in the xterms in the virtual deskop directly above.

The third row usually contains root shells for maintenance tasks, either permanently open ones on machines I need an administrate often (e.g. daily updates of Debian testing or Debian unstable machines), or for temporary mass administration (Linux workstations on the job, all Xen DomUs of one Xen server, etc.) using pconsole.

yeahconsole

Additionally I have a sticky yeahconsole running, an xterm which slides down from the top like the console in Quake. (It’s the only overlapping thing I use. :-) My yeahconsole can be activated on every virtual desktop by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Z (with QWERTY layout, Ctrl-Alt-Y with QWERTZ layout). It’s the terminal for those one-line jobs then and when, e.g. calling ccal, translate, wget or clive.

Changes over time

Of course the desktop usage changes from time to time:

At work I have more than one monitor, so in the meanwhile the second row with the web browsers “moved” to the second screen – with independent virtual desktops (multiple X servers, no Xinerama). The second row on the main screen at work is now used the same way as the third row with a slight preference for the permanently open shells while the third row is more used for mass administration with pconsole.

At home I used XMMS respective Audacious for a long time (my FVWM panner and xosview are exactly as wide as WinAmp2/XMMS/Audacious, guess why:-) which usually was sticky the same way as the panner and xosview are. But when I started using last.fm recently, I moved to Rhythmbox (after testing some other music players like e.g. Amarok) which I use in fullscreen as I do with web browsers and the feed reader. So it occupies a complete virtual desktop, usually the second one in the middle row – below the feed reader because I don’t need a corresponding web browser for the feed reader. (Just found out that there is a last.fm player for text-mode, so maybe that will change again. :-)

Another thing which changed my virtual desktop usage was the switch from a classical tabbed web browser (Galeon, Kazehakase, Opera) to the buffer oriented Conkeror. With a tabbed web browser I have either no overview over all open tabs (one row tab bar or truncated tab menu) or they occupy too much space of the browser window. That was another reason for more than one browser window and therefore more than one virtual desktop with fullscreen web browser windows. With Conkeror tabs are optional (and not even enabled by default), Conkeror uses buffer like Emacs and if you want to switch to another buffer, you press C-x b and then start typing parts of the buffer’s name (e.g. parts of the URL or the web page title) to narrow down the list of buffers until only one is left or until you have spotted the wanted buffer in the list and choose it with the cursor keys. So the need for more than one browser window is gone.

For a long time I didn’t need any task/menu/start/whatever bar on my desktop. But since neither NetworkManager nor wicd have a comand-line interface (yet) and bluetooth seems also easier handled from the system tray my laptops also use either gnome-panel (big screen, long sessions with FVWM) or lxpanel (formerly used trayer; use it on small screen, short sessions with ratpoison or matchbox) on my laptops. It’s sticky and always visible. (No overlapping, remember? ;-)

The panel is usually at the bottom on the screen as by default with Windows or KDE, not at top as with GNOME and MacOS. Only on the OpenMoko, I have the panel at the top to be close to what I’m used from Nokia mobile phones.

Things I tried …

… but didn’t survive in my setup:

• Desktop icons – nearly always covered if you use a tiling window manager. (I though use root window menus – mostly for starting applications later occupying that space where I clicked. ;-)
• A button to minimize all windows. Only sissies without virtual deskops need that. ;-)
• Automatically scrolling logfile content on the desktop (root-tail, root-portal, etc) – the space was too precious to not use it for xterms or web browsers. ;-)

Systems without Virtual Desktops

Anyway, there are systems where I don’t use virtual desktops at all. On systems with a screen resolution so small that there’s not enough space for two non-overlapping, fixed font 80x25 xterms on the screen (e.g. on my MicroClient with 8” touch screen, the 7” EeePC or the OpenMoko) I do not use virtual desktops at all. On such systems I use all applications in fullscreen, so switching between applications is like switching virtual desktops anyway. My window managers of choice for such systems are ratpoison for systems with keyboard and matchbox for system without keyboard. With ratpoison you treat windows like terminals in GNU screen, so there are no new keybindings to learn if you’re already used to screen (which I use nearly daily since more than a decade).

Conkeror in the Debian NEW queue //at 21:39 //by abe

I already mentioned a few times in the blog that I’m working on a Debian package of the Conkeror web browser. And now, after a lot of fine-tuning (and I still further new ideas how to improve the package ;-) Conkeror is finally in the NEW queue and hopefully will hit unstable in a few days. (Update Thursday, 03-Jul-2008, 18:13 CEST: The package has been accepted by Jörg and should be included on most architectures in tonight’s updates.)

Those who could hardly await it can fetch Conkeror .debs from http://noone.org/debian/. The conkeror package itself is a non-architecture specific package (but needs xulrunner-1.9 to be available), and its small C-written helper program spawn-process-helper is available as package conkeror-spawn-process-helper for i386, amd64, sparc, alpha, powerpc, kfreebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64. There are no backported packages for Etch available, though, since I don’t know of anyone yet, who has successfully backported xulrunner-1.9 to Etch.

Interestingly the interest in Conkeror seems to have risen in the Debian community independently of its Debian packaging. Luca Capello, who sponsored the upload of my Conkeror package, pointed me to two blog post on Planet Debian, written by people being fed up with Firefox 3 already and are looking for a more lean, but still Gecko based web browser: Decklin Foster is fed up with Firefox’ -eh- Iceweasel’s arrogance and MJ Ray is fed up with Firefox 3 and its SSL problems.

Since my previously favourited Gecko based web browser Kazehakase never became really stable but instead became slow and leaking memory (and therefore not much better than Firefox 2), I can imagine that it’s no more an candidate for people seaking for a lean and fast web browser.

Conkeror has some “strange” concepts of which the primary one is that it looks and feels like Emacs:

• The current location is shown in a status bar below the website, where Emacs usually shows buffer names. All input, even entering new URLs to go to, is done via the mini-buffer, an input line below the status bar.

• Instead of tabs it uses Emacs’ concept of buffers. So no tab bar clutter and though easy access to all currently open pages.

• It has no buttons, menu-bar or such. And except the status bar and mini-buffer, it uses the whole size of the window for the displayed web page. This is the main reason why I prefer Conkeror on the 7” EeePC: I don’t want to waste any pixels for buttons or menu bars and still have a fully functional web browser.

• It of course has Emacs alike keybindings (with a slight touch of Lynx). While this may seem awkward for the vi world (Hey, they have the vimperator^*, also in Debian since a few days!), as an Emacs user you just have to remember that you web browser now also expects to be treated like an Emacs. It just works:

  C-x C-c

  Exit Emacs -eh- Conkeror

  C-x C-f

  Open File -eh- web page in new buffer

  C-x C-b

  Change to some other tab -eh- buffer

  C-x C-v

  Replace web page in this buffer and use the current URL as start for entering the new one

  C-x 5 2

  Open new frame -eh- window

  C-x 5 0

  Close current frame -eh- window

  C-x k

  Close tab, -eh- kill buffer

  C-h i

  Documentation

  C-s

  Incremental search forward

  C-r

  Incremental search backward

  C-g

  Stop

  l

  Go back (Think info-mode)

  g

  Go to (Open web page in this buffer)

  (Hehe, I like the faces of vi users having read these keybindings and now wondering how to remember them. SCNR. Well, sometimes vi key bindings are a mystery to me, too. :-)

  There are of course many more and nearly all are the same as in Emacs, even the universal argument C-u and the M-x command-line are there. E.g. C-u g lets you open a web page in a new buffer, too.

• Conkeror also has very promising concept for following and copying links with the keyboard only. Opera is very inefficient here since you have to jump from link to link to get to the one you want. In Conkeror you just press f for following or c for copying links and then all links on the currently shown part of the page show a small number attached to it. Then you just enter the number (and additionally press enter if the number is ambigous) and the link is either opened or copied to the clipboard.

  A funny anecdote about how this concept grew over the time: Early versions of Conkeror (back in the days when it just was a Firefox externsion as vimperator) numbered all links on the page, not only the visible ones. On large pages with many links or buttons (e.g. my blog ;-), this took minutes to complete. The idea to just number the visible links is so simple and important – but someone first needed to have it. :-)

Footnotes

*) I just noticed that there is now also muttator, making Thunderbird look and behave like vim (and probably also mutt), too. Wonder into which e-mail client the Emacs community will convert Thunderbird. GNUS? RMAIL? VM? Wanderslust? What will it be called? Wunderbird? Thunderslust? (SCNRE ;-)

Bath Tub, Rubber Keyboard, Ratpoison and Opera //at 22:23 //by abe

I recently noticed that a very good way to safely read webcomics in the bath tub is an old laptop with a big screen (e.g. a IBM ThinkPad A-series like my 15” A31 which has a nice 1400×1050 resolution), a water proof keyboard, the screen-alike, keyboard only driven (hence the name) window manager ratpoison (other keyboard driven window managers like wmii or awesome probably will do as well as ratpoison) and a good keyboard driven web browser which can bind or by default has bound a key to follow <link rel="next" ... /> tags.

Like Opera. Opera has bound the space bar to scroll one page down and if you reach the bottom of the page to go to the next page as labeled in the link tag. Additionally the full screen mode is helpful, too.

Or the dream browser of all Emacs addicts, Conkeror, which has bound the function browser-follow-next to ]]. (Conkeror packages will hit Debian Experimental quite soon.)

Or the GNOME feed reader Liferea which has bound Ctrl-Space by default to scroll down the content by one page and if you reach the bottom of the content go to the next unread item.

With that equipment I can read my favourite web comics like Questionable Content (whose content seldomly is questionable :-) or Ozy and Millie (Think of a mixture of Calvin & Hobbes, Peanuts and Kevin & Kell) in the bath tub without drying my hands before reading the next comic or fearing water or health damage by the combination of water and computer. I just press one or two keys on the keyboard floating over my lap and have a good time.

BTW: I’ve got a blue, non-branded one (packaging reveals it as “AirTouch Keyboard”, probably manufactured by SanChuan Electronics, China) with swiss-german layout from ARP Datacom (whose website offers no permanent links and insists on session cookies *puke*), but those from Keysonic or from ROCK seem to be very similar — nowadays they are also available in illuminated, miscellaneous colors and wireless, but only IP65, probably because of the necessarily accessible battery compartment.

But this kind of having fun still has optimisation potential: non-flexibel water-proof keyboard (IP67 recommended, so those IP66 keyboards and mice recently posted at UF LOTD are probably not tight enough), flat screen mounted above the bath tub, etc. ;-) Or maybe a completely water proof laptop if such thing exists — Does it?

One more note: In Debian Sid and Lenny recently a new tool called keynav has been added, which allows you to control the mouse quickly using the keyboard only. So with Sid or Lenny, I don’t even need an waterproof mouse or trackball if an application insists on mouse usage. ;-)