Category Archives: Linux

Enough With The Tool Sharpening Already

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I think Linux let’s me do this a lot more. And I think to some extent, a lot of web devs that favor Macs are doing this out of sheer ignorance (which is totally okay… it let’s you focus on the parts that should be getting the focus, like shipping stuff) or having been bit in the butt with this tool sharpening process before.

// This isn’t to say I wouldn’t mind using Linux (Ubuntu) or Mac OS X. But no, no Windows for web dev. Ever.

In my early days of vim, after learning how to get around in documents, I started diving into the world of .vimrc’s and plugins. This would be the start of a very dark time, since nothing would ever get done in this tool, other than me just poking around all the wonderful lovelies of the text editing software.

Unless I was going to start a compendium on how to become even better at vim (yes… there’s a project somewhere in my head for this…), this wasn’t going to cut it. I wasn’t getting anything done.

Another example: window management. I still want to learn tmux like a crazy person. I want to be able to move windows with as few keystrokes as possible. And all the while this desire grows, my desire to sharpen my skills on vim grows just as fast.

Ugh. Stop it. I know you want to be super productive, but seriously, what’s the point of being super productive, Balkanizing time and space to make it super neat and organized if nothing ever gets done.

And so marks the glorious return of the all-too-pensive JK.

And I guess, that’s what all this down period was supposed to be for: To sharpen the tool known as English, to be able to construct better blog posts at a faster speed, to talk on subjects that interest me all the while that list of interest grew and grew…

This need to sharpen my mind to categorize those topics… too much was done on this front and too little was done on the diving into the topics themselves.

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!

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. ↩

Linux on Laptops: Yeap…

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It’s interesting to always see a post on a particular subject you’ve been meaning to write on (but only for the past day), especially the state of Linux on laptops… in my case, a netbook.

I never thought I’d be in this position, actually owning a crapbook, but for less than $400, the ability to do everything I can on a normal computer, albeit slower but with battery life, was quite interesting to me.

After hours upon hours trying to figure out why my wireless didn’t work (BCM4313, I hope to never ever have to type those characters again), scouring the Ubuntu forums and wikis, I’ve come to realize that maybe the drivers are just not existing in a current form that works easily.

I could, of course, learn the ins and outs of the ndiswrapper, or try to compile from source with the right flags… but really?

System76 is definitely an option, though. Their Starling NetBook seems inexpensive enough… but the included battery life is atrocious…

At this point, why not just get a MacBook Air? Yes, I ask myself this question, too… Definitely more expensive, but definitely will hold its value over time (since I’ll probably be switching again in six months or so). But the thing is, this machine would only be used for when I’m away from my awesome desktop, running an Ubuntu VM on top of Windows 7.

Which brings me to another point: Virtualization is the hotness. Just buy more RAM. I’m looking forward to upgrading to a 16GB in the future if I keep this up.

// Definitely need to clean up this WordPress installation to bring things back to a tip top shape.