Alright, social time:
Why would one want to use last.fm? I'm sure there are reasons, I just don't know what they are.
But I'd like to. I've got a last.fm account, but no real idea why. I think I use it as a "junk I've listened to" list, currently; but I don't think that's a 'good' use of it/ think that's under-using it.
slock
I've been using slock1, from the suckless tools collection, to lock my computer recently. And I gotta say, it's really doesn't suck. Using it literally couldn't be any simpler: at any command prompt (ie, in a terminal emulator, awesomeWM's "run" box), you type "slock".
And that's it. Your computer is now locked. Mouse input is ignored, to unlock it you simply type your password at the blank screen. There's no password prompt, no screen saver, no options to mess with, nothing. Just your locked computer and a blank screen. If you're worried about burn-in, turn your monitor off---you should be doing that anyways.
1Getting slock: slock is part of suckless tools, from suckless.org. In Ubuntu, it's part of the package suckless-tools:
sudo aptitude install suckless-tools
It's probably in the same package for most Ubuntu or Debian derivatives.
I've recently been reading wiki (both pedia and C2[1]) on microkernels and exokernels, and... I'dun get it.
Moore's Law states, in paraphrase, that processing power as a whole doubles every eighteen months. Sometimes it's been clock speed, sometimes it's been number of transistors, but this seems to have generally held true.
The obvious corollary is that newer processors --computers in general-- are more powerful than older ones. This has consistently been born out, with extreme cases being the emulation of entire old systems on newer ones, even many at once, even without being emulated on the newest systems. (See: Linux to Game Developers: No More Excuses)
Based on this, I've thought up a potentially interesting, but probably wrong, corollary: Every eighteen months, it becomes possible to add another layer of emulation, without effectively slowing down the deepest layer. This means that, for example, I can have my MacBook Air emulating a Mac from a year and a half ago, emulating a three-year-old Mac, emulating a Mac eighteen months older than that, all the way down to the original Macintosh -- with the deepest Mac having an effectively indistinguishable user-experience (for better or worse).
Practically speaking, assuming an arbitrary six-month delay before full emulation of a system, this means that twenty-four months after a system comes out, it's possible to emulate it indistinguishably.
Of course, this is all armchair garbage. I have no numbers of any sort to back it up. I have no intention of going looking for them, although you're welcome to throw any you find/have at me if you want :)
I discovered today that I can't use the Mac effectively. I can kinda use it, but only the same way I can 'kinda' drive a stick shift: I can steer and stop, and even hit the gas, but ask me to change gears and we are done.
Thing is, all the problems have to do with the keyboard. First is the command key. Through long training, I have become accustomed to using the 'control' key. This one isn't really Apple's fault... much the same way it's not the carmaker's fault if they put the turn signal controls in the middle of the dash instead of on the stem, or Ford's fault that the Model T doesn't even have turn signals. I don't blame them for it, I just hate it.
Then there's the keyboard itself. I might have more success with macs if I used Mac keyboards. All Macs these days have those chiclet laptop-type keyboards, though. When I'm at a desktop, like our Mac, I really prefer the old-style key-travel 'klacky' keyboards. They feel better. And no, my older Mac keyboard won't cut it. It doesn't have quite the right feel to the keys.
The real insult, though, is emacs. I'm used to the Alt key sending emacs' `meta`, but for the life of me I can't seem to find the `meta` key on the Mac. This forces me to use `Esc`, a real problem because just about everything I love about emacs is on the `meta` key. Those of you who've never used the power of emacs might feel this is a little like complaining about a car not having a steering-wheel cover. Which is true as far as it goes, but it's more like complaining about a car not having a steering wheel.
Choosing an operating system is kinda like buying a car.
When you get a Mac, you walk into Toyota dealership and say "Ooo, that one looks nice." And they say "good choice. Do you want it with 4, 6, or 8 cylinders? Stick-shift or auto?" You say which, pay your money, and leave. You're pretty happy with it until a new one comes out in six months, but in the meantime you're confused by the steering 'wheels' on other cars.
With Windows, you spend a lot of time fiddling and debating and comparing Ford to GM, and the various options, and eventually you decide on one with 75% of the options, an entertainment system you can only use half of, 18 cupholders and two seats.
Using Ubuntu is like deciding "Hey, I need a car," so you go on craigslist and spot a car that looks good and it's in your price range. You end up getting it, and it does 93% of what you want it to do, but sometimes you have to turn left three times before you can change the channel on the radio and it has to be in reverse to open the trunk.
Using arch Linux is like saying "Well, I should get a car," so the first thing you weld together a frame and then you go down to NAPA for a couple of pistons...
Buried within the docs for the Festival text-to-speech system for Linux is a mention of Klingon. Apparently, the system could be used to read things in Klingon, if only they could get a good sample of Klingon to work with. There's an honest-to-goodness request for a "Klingon continuous speech" corpus.
So, if you feel like translating something into Klingon and reading it out loud into a microphone, drop them a line.
Y'know what would be cool? It'd be cool if we could rewrite emacs to use common lisp instead of emacslisp, and then combine it with the window manager.
There are already window managers in common lisp. (For example, StumpWM. I can't say how good it is though, since I haven't bothered to get it to play nice with kde-greater.) And common lisp is a full programming language on the order of C/Java/Javascript. Furthermore, emacs already tries to do ninety-nine percent of everything you could ever want to do anyways. Why can't we just universalize that?
Back to the Future is a very good movie.
Dvorak is a lovely keboard layout, and a vast improvement over Qwerty.
Dasher is great fun, admittedly probably a lot better than Qwerty, and certainly much better than not being able to use a computer at all. However, I'm not to certain about Dasher in and of itself.
I will of course grant that it's both the best alphabetic interface I've ever seen (okay, it's the only real alphabetic interface I've seen), and vastly better than anything I think Icould have come up with.
In related news, except for the latter addition of some newline characters (to make my markdown work right), this post was writen entirely in Dasher, despite haveing to go back and fix some parts. Explaines the non-sequitor of an opening surprisingly well, doesn't it?
Oh, right. Dasher is a lovely little program that provides a number of alternatives to a traditional keboard. The most ~~notable~~ obvious is the one where you dynamically zoom in on the letters you want, eventually building up words and paragraphs until you have however, long a string of text you decide you want. It's not replacing my trusty Dvorak anytime soon, but it seems like a great alternative for people for whom typeing is not an option.
Two cool and important things I learned the other day:
First, I learned how to use byobu/screen, most importantly to let a process such as irssi run on a tty and in a GUIterm.
Second, I learned that GUI programs WILL FAIL if you don't own some X for them to run on. Thus, it is impossible to start a GUI program, log out of your GUI session, log back in to your GUI session, and have your program still running -- even if you use something like screen.
Also, you can alias aptget="sudo apt-get". On Ubuntu-likes at least, this saves you about six keystrokes every time you want to install/remove something. You could alias aptget="sudo apt-get install", of course, but then you can't use it to remove stuff.