9 comments

[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 27.0 ms ] thread
This is a really refreshing link in the HN feed, which is often dominated by the latest bloatware fashion trends (which includes most (almost all) chatbot applications).

One different preference of mine is to mount a remote directory via SSHFS instead of playing media via an sftp:// link.

I also prefer a clicky-clicky media player over MPV and have used VLC for many years.

Another feature of OpenSSH that facilitates this philosophy is port forwarding, both forward and reverse. This feature prevents having to open pretty much any other port in the firewall.

Its sad to see so many technically literate people still working under the feature poor yoke of windoze 8-( So many methods become instantly available when using a free unix system. Which also typically never require downloading binary executables from sketchy third party websites.

+1 for "all you need is SSH"

> I also prefer a clicky-clicky media player over MPV

Not sure what do you mean by that; if you compile mpv with lua support (in case your distro/whatever doesn't ship it that way, that is) you get a clicky-clicky little osd thing within the mpv window that suffices (back, forward, playback control, volume...)

Thanks for the reply! (I upvoted you)

I have used that UI in MPV, but it just wasn't satisfying.

VLC is a native GUI application and I just find the interface more easily usable.

Not just play/stop, etc, but all of the preferences, etc are via a GUI interface.

Totally personal preference, I just prefer VLC over MPV.

Somewhat counter to all of that, I do often use the hotkeys to control various features during playback (audio delay, that sort of thing).

I just feel that VLC is a more GUI oriented application, and in spite of being a mostly command line linux user, I do enjoy a floating window manager desktop (fluxbox is my long time preference).

Thanks again for the reply!

my 3 year old is not going to type

    mpv sftp://192.168.1.123:/home/remote-user/Films/Peppa_Pig_Against_Gerrymandering.mkv
she can't type yet...
When my son was about 5 years old, I set up a linux computer for him.

I used a very basic floating window manager and created about 6 or 10 large desktop icons to run the things I had installed for him (Hyperspace Delivery Boy was a favorite 8-)

One icon started a script which launched the media player in a specific directory.

I highly recommend giving (very young) kids exposure to a wide variety of desktop user interfaces. Failure to do this has led to an entire generation (2 or 3?) of windoze based computer illiteracy.

Computers really aren't all about right-clicking that thing that looks like a pineapple, then selecting Settings, etc...

Strangely no reference to "the most underrated configuration file" aka .ssh/config (reference is some internal docs I wrote) where you can name hosts whatever you want, define jumphosts to reuse to connect to different servers, specify different private keys and usernames for each host, and transform a monstrosity like

ssh -i ~/.ssh/key_A -o ProxyCommand="ssh -i /very/very/long/directory_name/hidden_somewhere/key_B user_B@jumphost -W %h:%p" user_A@192.168.1.5

into

ssh myserver

And how many knows windoze ships an ssh client (that yes supports .ssh/config) since years?

One other super-interesting feature is connection multiplexing and keeping connection alive with the ControlMaster and ControlPath directives in your ~/.ssh/config file.

The nice thing is that it makes opening a new ssh connection much faster, which if you make a lot of connections, it can be very handy.

See https://ldpreload.com/blog/ssh-control for some examples