Shallow and Pedantic

Whatever happened to black & white LCDs?

I had a Game Boy once. I could play it just about anywhere, and battery life – for the time – was great. I lost it at one point, and replaced it with a Game Gear, which sucked the life out of 6 AA batteries rather quickly. The Game Boy Color was actually decent on battery life, but since it didn’t have a backlight, you had to play it at very specific angles.

For gaming, I can appreciate the need for a color screen. My point has to do with cellphones. True, most cellphones today come with cameras, are able to play video, and are rather capable mobile gaming platforms (when compared to the Game Boy, that is). All this does, in fact, require a color screen. However, I believe that there is a market for cellphones which do not support these features, but do support neat things like 3G internet connectivity (GMail and RSS on the phone is a major Win, in my opinion), and have a comfortable SMS interface. These features actually suffer from having a color screen: Battery life (for the powerful backlight), viewing angle, and screen resolution take a hit. While it’s true that color LCDs have come a long way since the Game Gear, so have black & white display technologies (E-Paper, anyone?).

Of course, my wish for a modern B&W-screen cellphone will likely never come true. The simple reason is that they would be totally unmarketable. Even business-types like color screens nowadays. So I’ll just keep holding out for a folding E-Paper mobile browser.

Another SSH trick

Ever have a machine you can only ssh into through another machine? It’s a very common situation in the Technion. Here’s one way to get around it: Assume you can directly ssh into alpha, and from alpha you can ssh into beta. Have the following code in your ~/.ssh/config:

Host beta
	Hostname 1.2.3.4  # IP Address of beta
	ProxyCommand ssh alpha nc -w 1 %h %p

This requires you to have nc (netcat) installed on alpha. Once you do that, you can run ssh beta directly from your own box.

Automatically starting rtorrent within screen

These days I don’t stay at home often, but I do have an RSS/BitTorrent combo fetching me all kinds of neat stuff for me, so I can have it ready for me on the weekend. I love rtorrent, especially due to the fact that I can run it in screen, ssh home and see how things are doing (or add more torrent to the download). However, sometimes my net connection breaks down, computers gets shut off, or things like that. This week my router broke down, so I can’t even ssh home to manually start up rtorrent. My solution: A small script, which checks whether rtorrent is already running, and if not – runs it in a detached screen session. Run this with your favorite cron software.

#!/bin/bash
# A simple script to make sure I am running rtorrent in a screen

if ! ps -o uname -C rtorrent | grep -q `whoami`; then
	screen -d -m rtorrent
fi