How many years have you been making the tedious stretch for Ctrl and Esc keys? Maybe you’ve gone so far as choosing workflows that don’t require them much, maybe without even realizing it. That would be sad. You just can’t use vim or emacs (or even web browsers) without them.* I stopped the stretching a [...]
Apparently, we’re very close to having a low-power, affordable Linux media (er, audio) center, driven by a tiny wall-wart. It should only need to support networking, USB, ssh, external storage, and audio output. The candidate is called the Marvell ShivaPlug, and it features some of those, and maybe the rest can be satisfied.
2009 is a very important year for me. It’ll be the first where I am completely independent, in (nearly) complete control of my (earthly) destiny, i.e., not answering directly to a corporate authority. This is the year I lay the groundwork for a successful business or lose a lot of material things (or both, but [...]
This is a constraint-based exercise to force myself to do something quickly and imperfectly. I have a hard time discerning the right point at which to stop tuning things. It took me three years of searching for the perfect blogging tool before I finally bit the bullet and just forced myself to go with an [...]
Like many other hackers who sit in wonky chairs for 12+ hours every day, I have a bit of a “back problem”. And of course I’m an optimizer, AKA cheapskate (which surely contributes to the problem). Even so, I still end up dropping 50 bucks each month on chiropractic visits. How can I optimize that?! [...]
I just bought a brand new highly juiced Lenovo R61 laptop for $760. This post documents my selection criteria, and I hope it will help you with your next purchasing decision. Some guys over at Hacker News were recently discussing laptop criteria, so I figured I would add mine here. Some people really care about [...]
Geeks love to classify and name things. We like things to be tidy and well-defined. We like to put things in buckets and directories and tables, and we like to associate things with tags and attributes. What’s difficult, though, is recognizing and classifying situations and phenomena. But at some level we are able to categorize [...]
Contrary to the notion that books are dead, I’ve recently been making great use of my local library. While I agree that learning is best accomplished by doing, I still like to start exploring subjects by amassing a bunch of relevant dead-tree books. I like to prop back in an old La-Z-Boy and get real [...]