I installed Ubuntu on the kitchen laptop this week, and haven't touched anything (in order to see how well it works without checking out my dotfiles or editing stuff by hand), so whenever I go to put on some tunes or consult a recipe I get a standard GNOME desktop. How does the rest of the world manage to use computers? I feel lost without

• Emacs keyboard shortcuts in text boxes (I don't know where you turn this on if not in a custom RC file)
• A middle mouse button (I have no idea why emulating it didn't happen, I couldn't manage to configure synaptics)
• Focus follows mouse (this one's easy to find and set, though)
• A Control key I can reach without contorting my wrist (this is also quickly settable, but not as dead-obvious)

I wouldn't be able to get any serious work done here. Just moving some text between two windows takes ages.

I guess if the rest of the world asked me why you would want these things I wouldn't have a good sound byte explanation. They are, after all, mostly habits I acquired years before GNOME was even in Debian. And anyone switching to your favorite system is going to wonder how the hell you work without X, Y, and Z.

At work, my users who are pretty good at this unix thing use vi, presumably because when the department's sysadmin, who still uses Solaris, told everyone to use PINE, also told everyone to use vi ("here's a manual! have fun! hahaha!"), and that got passed down through the years. So whenever I'm looking over their shoulder I try to tell them one new trick to save them from going arrow-arrow-arrow-arrow-arrow backspace-backspace-backspace-backspace-backspace, etc.

That's sort of how I feel on user-friendly computers. arrow-arrow-arrow-arrow-arrow. I must be doing this wrong. arrow-arrow-arrow-arrow-arrow-arrow-arrow-arrow-arrow-arrow. ESC ESC :wq

Doing. It. Wrong.

Today's wiki page: Fighting is boring.

Russel notes a discussion of the problems with embedded media. I've been using a Greasemonkey script for a while to linkify EMBED tags for easier non-embedded downloading, but this doesn't help much on Flash sites such as YouTube. I haven’t installed Flash in years, but I got sick of slinging URLs around and/or giving up and being the unpopular kid, so I took some other Greasemonkey code I was hacking on and mushed it all together:

http://www.red-bean.com/~decklin/userscripts/unembedtube.user.js

(I get a perverse sort of nostalgia out of bringing back the "puzzle piece" for links, and mocking people with it.) YouTube embeds will appear to work like any other, but the URL is changed from the Flash wrapper to the FLV file, which can be opened in MPlayer/Totem/whatever. Since we can figure out this URL, it is also, of course, possible to make such the link back into an embed usable by mplayer-mozilla or a similar plugin.

Unfortunately, I don't have time to look up how to add a configuration menu, but this line of JS does have a certain charm to it:

var evil = 0; // need to make this user-settable

You know what to do. If you want true evil, there are some pointers in the comments. For YouTube videos embedded from other sites, the best I can kludge for now is link to the video's original YouTube page. If someone would like to write a routine to snarf that page with XMLHTTPRequest and yank the necessary arguments out, I would love to add it.

(Insert five-page “think piece” here about the lost dream of MIME and the sad fact that the rise of “Web 2.0” has been driven more by the fact that native installation is irreparably broken and pointless anyway on most PCs than it is by the fact that JavaScript actually works now and the implications of this for the Free Software movement especially in light of the fact that we are still human beings who occasionally do social things like sign up for Twitter even though they're running on some proprietary code base.)

I logged in this morning and noticed that my XFCE weather applet had disappeared. I moved the pointer over to see what was up, or at least open the menu to add a new one...

A tooltip appeared that said, “fog”.

Wikipedia Brown and the Case of the Captured Koala

This is seriously the best thing I have read since the local librarians were on a first-name basis with my mother.

So, I haven't blogged in almost a year. I am a horrible, horrible, horrible person. But at least I've been on LowThresholdNmu. Barely.

Since I still read a blog or two so that I can pretend to be informed: I really like this post. I would make a comment about the bumper sticker on the Prius normally parked around my part of ye olde Prospect Hill, but then people might think I was actually talking about politics or oil or cars or gentrification or something like that. It's a violent world out here on the interweb. One can only be oblique.

When did I get so old? Did I fit in at some point? I really don't know.

I just wasted half an hour (mostly finding a dead motherboard and bending wire) making one of these:

I then threw out the cap to my USB storage device. Why doesn’t anybody sell them? Why are the holes for your keyring always on the part you use (thus weighing it down, particularly if it's sticking out of the front of a tower) and not the part that comes off? It's not easy to unplug by accident (I did squeeze it a bit removing some of the metal).

I think I’m just not looking in the right place. I can’t be the first person to have been annoyed with this. Lazyweb, please tell me where to go.

(Yes, the only thing I use it for is my SSH key.)

I’ve been meaning to put up some old (recent) stuff from Cat and Girl. One, two. I know the latter is supposed to be the funny one but it really gets me for some reason. I guess you had to be there. (See subject line.)

Best lawyers ever.