Monthly Archives: December 2010

Reformatting The Time Machine Drive

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The backup drive that stored all of my Time Machine backups is going away today, with a little help from HFSExplorer. It’s taken me far too long to finalize my move away from a single platform, but instead to become one with the general concept of Personal Computing.

Of course, now I come back to try and figure out the One True Filesystem… but I think I’m going to just fall back on NTFS for now, seeing how there are hacks to read and write onto this thing, more so than ext3/4. (Wikipedia comparision)

It’s a good thing I kept notes back a couple months ago when I was desperately looking to getting a NAS. There are plenty of ideas cooking in the back of my mind for what I want, but then again, I’m just going to make do with Dropbox and other off-the-shelf programs.

I guess periodic cloning is all I need these days, especially with my media. All other important things should be backed up off site and all over the place. Thank goodness for all these lovely services offering 2GB of free space!

Android vs iOS: UI Responsiveness

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There is no question in my mind that one is superbly better than the other. If someone picks Android, they haven’t used an iOS device.

I don’t think Nexus S with a future version of Android will be as smooth as the original iPhone. There’s just a level of attention to detail that is only realized by the marriage of software and hardware.

The home/back paradigm, on the other hand… well, that’s up in the air.

XKeyCaps: ATM, My Favorite Thing

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Having recently purchased a Happy Hacker Keyboard Lite 21, I’ve only gotten even more crazier in trying out keyboard layouts. The removal of CapsLock (and replacing it with left control) is nice, but I could have gotten away just doing it software wise. The movement of the tilde still bothers the crap out of me, but I do like that the Backspace is now easier to hit.

But less about the HHKB Lite 2, but more so on the modification of the keyboard layouts.

I have finally found the program that will let me do exactly what I want on a Linux system: XKeyCaps.

Before, I had to use this program on the Mac called KeyRemap4MacBook to do this amazing thing for the grave/tilde key, so that if I pressed shift + grave/tilde, it would emulate “Escape.” This made it so that I didn’t have to stretch… but the problem is that I would lose the ability to use “Grave.” The problem with this was that it was a bit of a hack, and you really didn’t have much flexibility: it was a preference pane that enabled you to do certain things to certain keys. (I also ended up using the eject key for something, since near the end of my Mac ownership, I threw in an SSD in the optical bay. I also think I tried out vimkeys, but that required pushing down an additional modifier… but I know I can get there with the flexibility of Linux… oh, tmux…)

I knew of xmodmap a while back, but as with a lot of things on Linux, it scared the crap out of me. Thank goodness for semi-workable GUIs to make life easier for us that know a tiny bit of what’s going on. It really isn’t pretty, and it took me a bit of effort to figure out what was going on, but I finally made the changes I wanted.

I made it so that on my Asus 1015PEM (I bought it for the many trips I’m going to be having next year, and needing some kind of cheap computing on the go… wow, I really need to blog…), the Backspace and the backslash would be switched, so that it would be a bit closer to how the HHKB Lite 2′s layout. I also made the escape + shift to be tilde, so that when I do plug in my HHKB, I can access the tilde much more easily.

Summary? If you’re a normal Vim user on a normal keyboard on Linux, I’d suggest switching backslash with backspace, and maybe even doing the grave to escape switch as well. But yes, I know grave is used for bookmarking… Man, totally need to learn more Vim.

Seriously, Linux is such a time sink, but I love every… er… most every minute of it.

// Don’t really like this post too much. The tone is a bit too personal. Hmm… Gotta revisit that whole wiki idea for posting very specific step-by-step instructions…

  1. Whoa… can’t find it on Amazon anymore… hopefully they haven’t discontinued it… I really should have stocked up on, like I bought a duplicate of my video card.2 ↩

  2. Ugh. I already feel like a douchebag for using footnotes when I personally hate them myself. Absolutely hate links with targets on the same page. I guess a mouseover div would work better in my view. ↩

Dropbox on Jolicloud?

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Problems with installing Dropbox?

First, install the Dropbox Client from the App Center. Go to the settings “tab”, the little gear icon. Then select “This Device” on the right column. Click “Legacy Apps” and open up “Local Apps”. There, you’ll see that your device was waiting to finish the install device this entire time.

The current problem is that the icon on the main screen is still grey, and seems to not open up anything. In the very least, you can access your Dropbox.

Remember, alt+tab works, so leave Nautilus (the file explorer) open, and just hop back and forth.

// Ah, looks like you can access the Dropbox folder via clicking on the icon on the top taskbar.