almost-post-vacation software playing/lazyweb/misc.

Posted on by Luis Villa

I still have one more week of vacation, which means I’ve been starting to play a bit with software to get my brain off law for a while. Some notes:

  • lazyweb: as previously mentioned, I’ve got a remote control which, to the computer, looks like a keyboard. For an upcoming project I’d like to remap the keys (make the current pgup button ‘n’, pgdown ‘p’, etc.), ideally from a script (so that I can easily turn it off and on) or perhaps from a hotplug event. Still need to figure out how to do that; any pointers welcome.
  • firefox: for a while I’ve been using Kiwi Cloak to modify my web-surfing habits (Greg, you might want to check it out) I’ve spent a tiny bit of time modifying it; it is now an XPI (so I can activate/deactivate it separately from the rest of greasemonkey) and forwards to my tasklist when I try to enter a verboten site.
  • Tracks: I installed Tracks trunk on my server. I’ve been using the last stable release since some time before law school, and like it a lot. Trunk is more of the same goodness, now with a tickler, which is spectacularly awesome. (Reminder: if you’re working on an alternative file manager, you should really read Getting Things Done and build something that works like that.)
  • opensearch: spent a couple hours (during the Clemson-UNC game) yesterday figuring out how to add opensearch to altlaw.org. Still not very discoverable, even in FFox 3, but hopefully will be a nice touch for altlaw when it goes live.
  • apple: I went to apple store yesterday to buy a new computer for my mom. The store was packed. It is mindblowing how good their industrial hardware design is- the new keyboard will probably end up following other Ives work into MOMA’s design collection. How is it that no other PC manufacturer has figured out that people want good design and are willing to pay a premium for it? Are they really all that margin obssessed that they can’t figure out that there is a luxury business out there waiting to be seized? (Leopard was unimpressive, other than Time Machine; have already had to hard reboot once in less than a day’s use.)

Back to law a week from today, after (with?) a one-day stop at the Princeton Cloud Computing Workshop. Schedule for the semester looks to be Corporations, E-Commerce, Privacy, Advanced Copyrights, and Telecommunications, but I may tweak it.

Published by Luis Villa

10 thoughts on “almost-post-vacation software playing/lazyweb/misc.”

  1. John (J5) Palmieri: D-Feet 0.1.7 released  – Jan 7, 2008 Seth Vidal: yum based createrepo  – Jan 7, 2008Luis Villa: almost-post-vacation software playing/lazyweb/misc. – Jan 7, 2008 David Woodhouse: 7 Jan 2008  – Jan 7, 2008 Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay: List of points  – Jan 7, 2008

  3. I re-re-discovered chandler during my vacation and was surprised to find that it was being designed around GTD.

    I had tried it like 2 years ago and didn’t think it was going anywhere; the client is still pretty rough but it has some interesting ideas in there. Worth a look.

  4. Jorge: damn you for making me care whether or not Chandler succeeds. Here all this time I’d been able to blisfully assume they were going to fail and be completely unconcerned.

  5. The Shuttle PN31 remote control acts like a USB keyboard and mouse. There are some problems with the mouse (depending on your kernel), but the keyboard keys work just fine. I haven’t found a good way to remap them without messing up my real keyboard, but Multi-Pointer X might help with this (in x.org 7.4).

    What I really want for GTD is a web frontend to my todo.txt system, so I can still use good old vi for bulk editing.

  6. Just look at any of the crapola that Sony makes. Sure they are unreliable, come loaded with bloat, put money in the legal coffers of big media, promotes jobs outside of the US, has had some of the lousiest tech support in the industry for 10+ years, and looks pretty slick on a Columbia student’s desk. You know, the ones who wear armani to class. They also cost more than most other laptops at their performance point.

    Apple is just one big marketing firm whose waste products are computers and mp3 players.

    /me takes foot out of mouth

  7. loup: not sure I follow… we definitely agree that Sony sells overpriced crap, and we agree that Apple is a massive marketing machine, but I think(?) we disagree about Apple’s hardware.

    To clarify, yes, they are a massive marketing machine, but they also make hardware that looks and feels a large notch above what anyone else makes. They are building Porsches (or perhaps Ferraris, given the long-term maintenance problems); I guess my question is ‘where is Mercedes?’ or perhaps more to the point, ‘where is Lexus’, since it would logically spring from a large maker (Dell, HP) as Lexus springs from Toyota.

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