the village buzz

as most dorky little personal information horders do,i spent a good deal of time trying out different GTD and turbo powered checklist things to keep track of my life.

Here at Red Red Design were i spend my days, we have been using mediawiki to keep track of all sorts of information that needs to be tracked and remembered. this works well, and the keen part is that anyone and everyone can take a peek at at from anywhere.

alot of times, there are things i would LOVE to put on a wiki, but they really don’t fit anywhere on our company wiki.. thinks like:

• lists of books i want to read
• lists of records i want to buy
• lists of movies i want to see

most of the time, i think of these things, and would rather write them down quickly than log into a wiki and mess with all the interface of it.

i have tried a few desktop wiki solutions (which were web based), but they didn’t seem to fit the bill very well. they suffered from the same interface problems as every other wiki i tried.

i tried muse mode with emacs, a mode that planner-mode makes heavy use of, but i found that wiggling around with this mode seemed like alot of extra steps, and lots of extra learning curve. to be fair, i put a half hour into using the mode, but i needed something much more natural.

i think i have finally found something.

voodoopad is just a basic text editor with the ability to understand CamelCase (it does more, but the reason for its being is to serve as a wiki.) after using it for just a few days, i think i might have found something i can use.

although i REALLY would like to stay os agnostic and use emacs, i think i might give this a whirl for awhile.

if you have been looking for a quick and usable personal wiki, you might want to try this. let me know if it works for ya…

at first, it seemed like a great idea. moving all my email handling online.. into one easy to use system. i gave it a good solid try, for a month, but as of yesterday, i am using mail.app again, rather than gmail. there are a few solid reasons:

• there are times when i need to see an email right away. when someone is sending me something mission critical, or i am waiting for some sort of confirmation. gmail checks your pop account every now and then, but you have to jump through some hoops to get it to check it right away.

• managing multiple signatures is a pain. yes, there a greasmonkey script that lets you do this, but it’s not quick and natural.

other than that, i really liked gmail. my favorite parts were:

• check your email from anywhere… even from your phone!

• tagging - google has tagging hooked up. tag and archive.. and your mail is there, and easily indexed.

• indexing - gmail mail searching is VERY fast. searches give results in a blink. mail.app takes awhile to check through mail. this very well could be because i have had mail.app running for years, and there is alot more to index, but i am not sure.

so, here i am.. back on mail.app.. and we’ll see how it goes…

okay, i am officially back on mac.

for those of you following along, you will know that i have spent the last few days once again trying to make a go using linux on a laptop. there are a few reasons why i have decided to ditch this idea. sure, i did my time and figured each of these out, but there were some HUGE annoyances that i didn’t want to spend any more time dealing with.

they are as follows:

• printing - we use a ricoh networked printer here at work. my mac saw it, and just started using it without any problems. ubuntu couldn’t find the right drivers, and after awhile, just flat out gave up. i am sure i could deal with this if i threw more time at it.. but well.. time IS money.. and screw that..

• sound - thanks to a few great websites, i recompiled alsa, and got my sound working correctly, but there were still a few things that were major annoyances. when you put headphones in, it was a crap shoot that the laptop speakers were gonna turn off when i wanted them to. fiddling with the volume was a HUGE pain.

• no quicksilver - okay, this is something that is kinda wussy, but i have grown to rely on quicksilver. i cannot do without it. period. i refuse. i know this is not a real OS thing, but this is a tool that helps me get stuff done quickly, without thinking much about it… and breaking my train of thought.

• no textmate - i absolutely love emacs. for lots of things. but there are things that textmate just does WAY better. rails development, blogging, and quick edits here and there. there is just no match for textmate when you need to get shiz done quickly and easily.

• display - at work, i run a big display. when i get to work with my powerbook, i just plug it into the big display, and whatever i was doing snaps right back to life on the new machine. no problem. with ubuntu, i had to reconfigure X a few different times to get the correct resolutions to work. not that it was horrible, but there is no possible way that a newbie could do this without sharting himself. when i got it running, the screens ran in mirror mode. getting them to switch was a nightmare. i also had to restart X every time i needed to attach the new screen. it was easier to just reboot.

• ipod - i was TOTALLY shocked out how great the ipod support was. it could play all the files, but i couldn’t get it to give me a random playlist while excluding podcasts. that was kind of a deal breaker in that i listen to TONS of podcasts and TONS of random playlists.

• other display issue - this is no slight on ubuntu at all, but my display on my powerbook rocks. the display on my lenovo sucks. i can’t stand looking at it any longer. it does look okayish in ubuntu, but when you plug in a real screen, you can really tell how lacking it is.

• The automator - yeah, all of us real programmers know that the automator is gay. it’s not programming. but for programmers, we get paid to get stuff done, not just to write code. the automator has saved me HOURS millions of times. enough to make it worthwhile.

• Simplify Media - for those of you who run itunes and like to share playlists, this allows you to share them across the internet. i just discovered this a few weeks ago, and was having major withdrawals.

• Hibernate - no matter what i did, it was a crap shoot as to what was gonna happen when i shut the book. with the powerbook, it just quietly goes to sleep, and when i open it up, it wakes up. with ubuntu, it would either wake up correctly, or the battery would be dead. i messed with it for awhile, and it seemed to work, but i was never SURE that it would open up where i left off. the whole week i used ubuntu, my powerbook was shut off in my purse. this morning, when i officially came back, i hooked up the power (battery was dead) and it sprung back right where i left off.

All that being said, there are a some things that i LOVE about ubuntu. i will keep it on this laptop (and probably upgrade to ubuntu studio via some scripts a guy posted). i have not used linux as my sole OS for a year or so (i do this alot) but i was impressed at all the new stuff:

• wireless networking - laptops are tricky, but there was a ton of info on how to get my wifi working. it took about ten minutes, and it worked great.

• sound - sound was always a big pain. not anymore. even running a laptop, i had no problems. i had to recompile alsa, but that wasn’t horrible.

• music programs - there are a ton of great players now, even native last.fm players that ran without a hitch.

• browser issues - this was always the deal killer for me. i could never get two things i always use to run consistently: rhapsody and sirius. rhapsody ran fine (although i had to google a bit to get it to work), but sirius was still a no go. there is a program called sipie that lets you play sirius through a neat little interface, but i think the source may be based on an older version of the sirius website, and it’s broken.

• emacs - since emacs is so embedded into linux so deeply, i ended up using it really heavily and learning a bunch more about it.

• Support - at this point, any problem you run into has been solved a hundred times and is one or two gooles away.

• multimedia - plays dvds, sound files, and runs like a full on jukebox with no glitches, hiccups, or delays like the old days.

anyway, i am keeping ubuntu on this machine, but i am not going to be using it as my main work machine. it will be a music production (hobby, not pro) machine.

okay, so i have been running simplify media’s itunes sharing system for a few days, and i have only had one friend on there who was never online. i have no idea who this person is, as the system doesn’t allow messaging.

today, i got another buddy request from someone named ’spleenrock.’ whoever this person is, they have the coolest taste in music.

although i am TOTALLY open to taking anyone on as a buddy, i would really like it if they dropped me an email, and comment on my blog, or an IM.. just so i know who you are…

so, spleenrock.. if you are out there, drop me a line..

and for all others, feel free to drop me ’sergio101′ a line and be a buddy.

Interesting find - Simplify Media

One of our biggest pastimes throughout the day is listening to each others’ itunes lists. Unfortunately, this only works for people on your network.

In the past, I have set up my machine at home to be able to access our net, and have access to my home itunes, but the problem has always been that this is a pain to set up. The other pain is that the folks with the wherewithal to set up such a server usually don’t have very interesting playlists (100 hours of nine inch nails is only tolerable for a fraction of that… okay.. a small fraction)..

Simplify Media makes it easy for less tech oriented people to allow others access to their media. Now this is something I can dig. It would be interesting to see how this aligns with the ITunes TOS. I am half afraid to check.

I now have it set up and running, and I need some buddies!

If you are running this, drop me a line, and we can hook up.

My username is: sergio101

for a little more info on this, check out boing boing’s take.

ADDENDUM!

for those of you looking to find some share buddies, you can add the following to get a good start:

sergio101

spleenrock

citykitty

if you would like to have your name added to this list to get more buddies, drop me a comment, and i will put you on here..