I’ve been a vi guy since I first touched Linux in ‘91. Every few years, some bit of news or tip I run across causes me to load Emacs and attempt to wear out my fingers finding the right sets of sequences to do something that comes naturally to me with vi. The visit to Emacs tends to be short-lived and I return to the land of the home-keys.

Recently, I’ve been concerned with keeping better track of discoveries and activities. I currently use a mix of tools, most of which depend on a third-party to maintain a web-service. For instance, tasks are dumped into Toodledo and my research goes straight to Evernote. These are both fantastic tools I plan to continue to leverage but they don’t fulfill a need I can’t quite define. Essentially I want a way to take notes, highlight tasks with their contexts both within real space and within their relevant documents, and be in a form I wouldn’t mind sharing with others. Arguably there are a number of cloud tools that nearly do this, in fact either of the two mentioned above almost achieve this. However, I want something very cross-platform and also with me in the absence of any cloud.

Fortunately, Carsten Dominik and numerous others apparently have had similar needs and have developed Org-mode. Org-mode is a mode within Emacs that I couldn’t begin to outline in a post. Countless others already have and many are linked at the official site. I just want to set a trap for anyone that might be stumbling across this site by mentioning a tool that has been known to cause people to switch editors. I am simply amazed by the amount of thought and design put into the art of editing plain-text hierarchical documents. I’m fairly certain my visit to Emacs this go around will last much longer. Although, I may need to look into a more appropriate keyboard.

Another day, definitely at an earlier time of day, I may go into my history of examining the “cloud” related to the storage of photos for sharing and secondary backup. For now, I just want to express my pleasant surprise at a Google announcement that came nearly two weeks ago. In a post at their official blog and cross-posted on the Picasa team’s blog, Google announced that they were providing “twice as much storage for a quarter of the old price.” So, from $20/year for 6GB to $5/year for 20GB or under a full utilization standpoint, from just under 28¢/GB/month to to just barely over 2¢/GB/month. This change dramatically shifts Picasa Web Albums rank in my internal cloud storage rankings. I haven’t yet decided how it’ll impact my workflow but it does require me to reach out to a number of friends and update my recommendations. I wonder how I missed this news initially. I may need to revisit my feed reader practices.

In my end-of-day RSS reader catch-up, I stumbled across an article outlining some new YouTube services. Essentially, YouTube/Google is now applying automatic speech recognition technology they’ve been perfecting withing Google Voice, to close-caption YouTube videos. They’re also a providing mechanisms for “auto-timing” self-provided captions uploaded as simple text files. These are exciting new features that will greatly enhance the ability to find appropriate video content as well as become more accessible in general. I hope to see some of these technologies made reasonably available for implementation outside of YouTube. I know in the school systems, YouTube is often entirely blocked. It would be fantastic to see sites such as TeacherTube able to leverage the technology to increase their reach. Be sure to read the full post at Google as there are a few other tidbits such as caption translation that are demonstrated.

I ordinarily open way too many tabs. I see a link that I might be interested in, I control/command-click it to open in the background and continue on the current page. Before long, I may have dozens of tabs that need follow-up. CoolPreviews will eliminate many of those by providing the smoothest implementation I’ve seen of popping up an embedded, scrollable window of any given link. A quick mouse over, scan and I can move on or continue with my ingrained research path.

That’s not all the extension accomplishes. You can create stacks of sites to step through as well as do preview searches of highlighted text at any number of differ sites.

CoolPreviews during post edit

So, for those of you that haven’t seen it, consider taking a look.

OMG! UBUNTU!: Install Picasa 3.5 In Linux

Hopefully leaving Linux behind won’t become a trend for Google.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Tomorrow, I’m book’n it to an annual meeting in DC. This will be my first trip with my Lenovo S10 netbook. Well, actually, it’s my second trip but the first since I loaded it with Ubuntu and extra memory and really got the machine setup for use. The S10 is a decent netbook, meeting a number of criteria I perceived I might require in such a small machine:

1. Hard drive – SSD would be best suited for day to day use but I’m constantly finding myself wanting to try other operating systems. I needed enough space to have multiple boots and load up crazy applications I can’t seem to avoid, such as GRASS.
2. Usable keyboard – I don’t want to share the number of times I’d handled netbooks of friends and in the stores trying to find one that felt good enough for more than occasional use.
3. Webcam – I do a number of H.323 video conferencing calls. I’ve also been known to use Skype on occasion.
4. Inexpensive – I’m cheap.

About a month ago, I ran into a couple of interesting folks that had S10s, in fact they were running OSX and were actually getting things done. So, when I ran across a great deal, I figured it must be destiny.

As soon as I received the machine, I placed an order for a 2GB stick of RAM, and quickly became frustrated with the installed WinXP. So I created a USB thumb drive Ubuntu installer via usb-creator on my desktop and made backups of the installed WinXP and recovery partitions with Partimage. As much as I envied folks running OSX on netbooks, I couldn’t imagine dealing with some of the issues I’ve had with utilizing the full screen in Mac software. For instance, even with the Safari 4 beta, I can’t count on being able to maximize and utilize all the screen real estate. With netbooks, 1024×600 is a precious amount that shouldn’t be wasted.

Between the small screen and the tiny trackpad, navigating is highly sensitive. Pulling up menus, especially those that cascade, quickly became a frustration. Luckily, I recalled hearing about the Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR). It didn’t take long for me to find their wiki and dive in.

Essentially, UNR is a set tools/programs and configuration changes to make the most use of the small screen and interfaces on netbooks. The specific list goes into more detail but at its core, it moves menus to a launcher on the desktop, runs a daemon that automatically (and smartly) maximizes all windows and improves individual window selection. It doesn’t sound like much, but it dramatically enhanced my appreciation for the melding of software with hardware, Ubuntu with S10.

Here I am, on the eve of a trip with a very usable netbook running almost 100% open source software and feeling great knowing that I’ve eliminated a significant amount of weight from my shoulders without reducing much of what I can accomplish.

I’ve been so torn lately. I’ve been a die hard Firefox supporter since it began. Unfortunately, lately on my Mac, the particular mix of extensions that I think I must have, cause enough CPU use to have the laptop’s fans spin up to jet engine level. About the time the noise and heat became too much for me, the Safari 4 beta was released. So here I am, for weeks, loving the performance and features of the new Safari, especially history interaction and Chrome-esque tabs. But, several times a day, I find myself missing my extensions. I can’t count the number of times I’ve searched for an extension that would allow me to profile the source of my CPU woes. I suppose I should stop being lazy and do a thorough step-through, turning on individual extensions. It’s just with 41 extensions, that’s a painstaking task. I often revisit this issue and would love to hear any suggestions.