Speed up your typing on the mac with the free Textpander. Chances are pretty high that there are blocks of text you type repeatedly and frequently, say for example your name or street address. Long time Mac users may already have discovered Typeit4Me, which has been around since at least the System 8 days. If you haven’t tried it, it’s well worth a look. If you haven’t already licensed Typeit4me, Textpander is donation ware, distinguishes itself from Typeit4me with a much nicer interface for adding macros, has the ability to mix in binary data with macros (so, for example, insert your email sig and then a gif or jpg of your actual signature), and can import your existing library of typeit4me macros if you’ve decided to switch for some reason. Both programs are worth a look for those looking to speed up their text entry.

This is for geeks only, but if you’re one of those people who gets calls from friends/family/acquaintances/the guy who puts your groceries in the bag asking for help with their computer, you’ll find the Ultimate Boot CD pretty handy. It’s a bootable CD that contains a host of useful diagnostic and maintenance tools for computers. Next time you go out on a service call, bring along this cd. Free, mostly useful to windows/x86 hardware folk.

I’ve mentioned tiddlywiki, the single page javascript-based wiki engine, a number of times. If you want to experiment with a simple little wiki it’s hard to find a simpler way to do it – download, tinker with it, use the file menu to save to your local machine. It can’t get much easier. Meanwhile though folks are doing all kinds of interesting things with the basic code, including turning it into a server-based service. If you’ve played around with the basic premise but want a more robust solution with more features, check it out. It’s free, at least for now.

Of course as I’ve mentioned in the past, there are also ways to do this on your own server if you’re geeky enough to know how to do it – check the main tiddlywiki site for links to a variety of solutions.

Quicksilver has solved this problem on MacOS, but if you’re on Windows and like me have 1.6 gajillion different applications, utilities and games installed across a collection of hard drives, you probably struggle to find applications you’d like to launch and have such a proliferation of icons on your desktop that you can no longer distinguish between them. Enter Quickrun, another file launcher for Windows. It’s free, very small at ~300k, and super easy to use. Just install it then right click on the quicklaunch area to the right of your start menu and begin customizing. It’s nowhere near as elegant as Quicksilver but it gets the job done, especially if you’re partial to hierarchical file management, and you can’t beat the price.

Check out the steve’s digicams review of the Sanyo Xacti C5, a tiny solid state video camera. You can get these for just under $400 if you import them. This would be perfect for my hikes with Soolin, especially if I could find a way to head mount the thing and do a ‘First Person Hiker’ cam thing. It records for about an hour per battery charge, saves out to mpeg4, connects via USB so you can dump the video onto your computer for editing, and is tiny, it will fit in your shirt pocket. I’ve been watching this class of camera for a couple of years now. This is the first worthwhile device to come out. I’d need to get at least one spare battery and a couple of 1GB SD cards to store the video on, adding about $200 to the final cost, but for $600 I could be fully equipped to shoot a couple of hours of video while I’m out in the field. This goes onto my list of stuff I want once I can pull together the money for it.

Ok, so for now the site is wide open for commenting. I’m discovering a number of issues with running wordpress under PHP 5.0 and one of them seems to impact wordpress’s ability to send email, for things including registration, hence why registration wasn’t working when I had that turned on. I’ve got a clue on how to fix this and will post an update if I manage to get it resolved. I have managed to resolve a host of other issues related to these bugs – kudos to the wordpress trac instance as far as that goes.

Hopefully the spammers won’t go nuts on me while I work this out. If they do I’ll have to bump up anti-spam extensions in the queue of things to get installed and running.

Running your own apache webserver, and confused by the breadth of possibilities for htaccess files? Check out htaccesstools.com, a collection of forms-based tools to help you generate htaccess files for some of the most common uses, like error pages, redirects, and password protection. If you need more detail, or you’ve grown comfortable with some of the easier stuff and are ready to tackle more complicated tasks, check out this exhaustive list of resources on brainstormsandraves.com.

Now here’s a handy little extension to Apple’s Safari web browser – downloadcomment adds the URL of your downloads to the file info meta data of files you download with Safari. When you think about this in the light of what Spotlight can do with that meta data it becomes really useful. Free, mac osx only.

I love Azureus, I really do. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s the java-based bit torrent client with enough bells and whistles to satisfy even an attention deficit santa’s helper, and it’s got a really great GUI. But it’s also got that ponderous JVM overhead and a voracious thirst for ram. If you’re on windows and you want a simple, lightweight alternative, check out utorrent. None of the bells and whistles of Azureus, but your system load will drop by an order of magnitude.

[update] – for those of you who’ve arrived here via my RSS feeds – the summary is: I moved my website to a new server and made a variety of architectural changes while so doing. Use the links on this page to update your RSS reader subscriptions – going forward the old feeds will remain static and simply point at this weblog entry. So that you have them handy, the feeds are:

RSS – http://www.metamusing.net/weblog/?feed=rss2
Atom – http://www.metamusing.net/weblog/?feed=atom

[end of update]

Complete in the sense that the old box is powered down, the content is all migrated, and my domains have been pointed over to the new server. Much remains to be done. In terms of what I did exactly:

I migrated my movabletype weblog data in its entirety to wordpress. I cannot believe how smoothly this went, it is a credit to the wordpress developers, huge kudos to them.

I migrated over my photo gallery, 700 MB of photos, tarred up. This also went super smooth. I did not yet migrate to Gallery 2, I’m still using the 1.5 series of their software for now, though upgrading to 2.0 is next on the list after I clean up the remaining 404′s, put some of my old content back in place (like, say, the homepage), and settle on a template for wordpress.

I (finally) got a publicly accesible wiki installed, something I have been procrastinating about for about 2 years, which is here. If you want an account, let me know and I’ll hook you up. Right now it’s wide open, we’ll see if hackers manage to deface my site before I get around to finishing off the configuration and locking it down. I have an interesting project in mind for the wiki which I will bring to light as soon as things have settled down.

I have officially migrated to www.metamusing.net as the domain of this site. The old domain is pointing at the new machine, but all the software tools (ie the wiki, weblog and gallery) are configured for metamusing. This is in part because I am going to go public with this site, again as soon as things have settled, and in part because daves-place is mostly a legacy – I’ve owned metamusing for over 2 years now, and the transition to the new box was the excuse I needed to finally move over to my ‘real’ address. This means you should update your bookmarks accordingly.

A few words on how I ended up with WordPress: I’ve been intending to upgrade this site for at least a year and a half. The old daves-place box is over 4 years old, and it was well used when I got it and has been running its operating system on the same drive for the whole time I’ve had it. The box has been literally running 24×7 for over 4 years. The only time it came down was when I moved from Maine to NY last summer, when it was down for about a month. To say I was living on borrowed time was an understatement. I do have to give credit to abit though – the board is a dual cpu BP6 running two celerons. The cpu fans haven’t worked in years, yet the thing runs like clockwork. I haven’t decided what I am going to do with it yet, if anyone has an interest in it or an interesting idea for it, speak up.

Anyway as soon as I settled into life in NY I started experimenting with toolsets. I wanted a couple of things out of an upgrade – an integrated wiki and better image management. After some early experiments I preliminarily settled on Blog::CMS which bundles a set of tools into the base weblog engine. But after some time working with it I concluded it had a set of issues – inferior image gallery and a clunky weblog engine being my chief complaints. At the time wordpress 1.5 was out and I had hated the previous version, but when 1.5 shipped I clicked with it, and started using it at work as an experiment. Gallery 2 also shipped during this timeframe and I basically worked out that I could use Gallery 2 as an image database with WordPress and Mediawiki using Gallery 2 as their image storage system, which both provided me with what I had been looking for and provided for a relatively seamless transition, and (aside from me not yet updating to gallery 2) that’s where I am at today.

I did consider one other system – Typo, the ruby on rails powered weblog engine. I’ve mentioned here repeatedly how awesome Ruby on Rails is, and it was very tempting to move to a system based on it. But the bottom line is it is early days for Ruby on Rails, despite how quickly they’ve grown so popular. There isn’t a robust ruby image gallery system, nor is there the breadth of developer support surrounding Typo that you find with WordPress. So, for now, it’s WordPress, with an eye on RoR as they evolve. Will it be another 4 years before I switch? And if it is, it will be really interesting to see what this marketplace looks like as compared to now.

To close, a historical footnote – this weblog has migrated through a variety of platforms, though most of you are only familiar with its movabletype incarnation. I started with Trellix of all things, WAY back when, at least 7 years ago. Then I moved to the still available Greymatter for a time. Next came the Movabletype based system that lasted for four years, until today’s migration to WordPress. WordPress is the first time where the previous incarnation’s content migrated into the new system, though interestingly while archiving things on the old server I found a tarball of all the old Greymatter content, which I might port over to WordPress depending on what all is in there (it’s been 5-6 years!).

In terms of hardware, this is the third computer to host my web content. I started with a creaky pIII running windows, then moved to red hat linux after I discovered I’d been hacked by benevolant intruders- they left me a note and a collection of video codecs after raiding my anime collection, assuming incorrectly that I was trying to play the files on my server (I wasn’t, I was sharing them with my friends, back when anime wasn’t playing on the cartoon network). Then I moved to the Abit BP6 dual cpu celeron I mentioned above, and today I moved onto a Biostar small form factor IDEQ 210 running the latest ubuntu beta, which I am also using as a desktop system (and really enjoying, I might add. If you IM me in the evening these days, chances are you’re talking to my ubuntu linux box). I should also mention that I came within a hair’s breadth of moving all of this over to a mac mini, and sometimes I wonder if I shouldn’t have, but career wise keeping it on linux was the better move since it helps me keep my skills sharp.

If you use an ATI video card on win32, check out ATI Tray Tools and take control of your video card. This free utility exposes all of the hardware settings of your card, most of which are normally hidden away in registry settings. It’s got tons of other features as well – game profiles, a plugin architecture, comprehensive overclocking utilities – and is definitely worth installing if you’re a PC gamer using an ATI card.