A decent RSS client is one of those must-have applications in my experience (if you value keeping up with anything on the Internet that is), something that let’s you quickly sort the wheat from the chaff, save time by not having to browse sites individually, and consolidate all that information flow into one place on your desktop / mobile device.

For the past couple of years I’ve been content with Newsfire on the Mac, and getting by using Popurls.com when I’m on anything else (including my iPhone).  This all changed for me though when Shaun Inman (of Mint fame) released Fever, an application that takes a fresh approach to managing large volumes of data that result from subscribing to numerous RSS feeds.

Read the rest of this entry »

My usual system of managing emails is pretty simple.  Anything that I need to follow up or reference in the near future lives in my Inbox.  If it’s something I want to save, it gets archived out of the way and I can search for it later.  Pretty easy, right?

This is straightforward when using Gmail’s web interface – you have your Inbox view by default, and a big ‘Archive’ button to move those emails out of your way.  When using most mail clients, such as Apple’s Mail.app, you achieve the same thing by dragging a mail from your Inbox view into Gmail’s “All Mail” folder (as it’s represented via IMAP).  Deleting mails works fine, assuming you have your Trash folder set up to be Gmail’s “Bin”.

However, performing this via mutt isn’t quite so straightforward because of how Gmail’s tagging system works and how it’s interpreted by IMAP.  By default, deleting a mail in mutt will move it out of your Inbox, but it won’t be stuck in Bin, so it’s effectively just archived.  You need to tell mutt that your trash folder is “[Google Mail]/Bin”:

set trash=”imaps://imap.googlemail.com/[Google Mail]/Bin”

All good so far.  So what about archiving?  In mutt, it seems if you manually copy a mail to “[Google Mail]/All Mail” it stays in your Inbox, which is of no use to me.  So instead, and after some experimentation, I use the following macros:

macro index,pager \Ca “<enter-command>unset trash\n <delete-message>”
macro index,pager d “<enter-command>set trash=\”imaps://imap.googlemail.com/[Google Mail]/Bin\”\n <delete-message>”

So now if I want to archive a mail I hit Ctrl-A in the index or in the pager, and if I properly want to delete a mail I just hit ‘d’ as before.  Problem solved.

So after some dicking about following the move from the old server (a decrepit IBM X330 complete with ATA/33 and other such nonsense) to the new one (a shiny Dell R200!) and reconfiguring my site I’ve also put my old gallery back online.  Anyone who uses Gallery2 will know that it can be a massive ballache to look after, to say the least.

So while I mainly update Flickr these days, there’s some amusing older stuff in there that I haven’t imported into my account.  For example, check out some really old riding photos, a random trip to the Strawbury Duck, and of course my first visit to San Diego.  All good times!

This is a cheap (and nasty?) hack for ignoring a DHCP server’s hostname suggestion when using Mac OS X. Add this line into /etc/hostconfig:

HOSTNAME=”deadline”

Obviously change the value to something other than the name of my laptop (deadline).  The comment at the top of this file concerns me, but it works for now – on 10.5.6 – at least.

Quick tip: If you’re suffering from annoying timeout issues when using mutt to read your Googlemail over IMAP then try the following setting in your .muttrc:

set imap_keepalive=5

This solved the issue for me.

The rumours you’ve heard are true – I’m not going to LA or San Diego this summer.  I haven’t had a change of heart per se but there’s definitely been a change of plan, as instead I’m off to Germany to work for the European Space Agency based in Darmstadt, near Frankfurt.

While there’s no doubt I’ll miss spending my days surfing and hanging out with some of my best friends over there, this role is too much to pass up and offers other amazing opportunities:  It means I can spend summer hooning round some of the world’s finest roads and drinking steins of decent lager instead.  Not at the same time, of course.

I feel pretty mixed having moved out of London, and for all the shit I’ve talked about living down there I think I’ll actually miss it quite alot.  A big part of that was being settled for a while I guess and that it had become my home, but as is typical for me lot of things seemed to come together right before I decided to leave.  Not to worry though, I feel like I’ll be back there one day but for now – Germany beckons!

My hate for Twitter is growing. It’s recently subsided following a lamer purge with me removing people like @bobbyllew (his idiocy has pretty much ruined the Kryten character for me), @stephenfry, @wossy and so on.  The daily minutiae of these people really don’t concern me, and once the novelty factor has worn off it’s just grating to see the dullness that they post about.  Of course, what I tweet is probably just as boring to most.

Anyway, some of the ’services’ that are popping up just seem beyond ridiculous.  I don’t understand ‘news site’ updates (surely that’s what RSS is for?), ‘radio station’ spammers, and so on but this one so far is the winner:

@yankcrime Nick, if you need an easy way to be reminded to keep hydrated, why not follow the water sprite and we’ll do it for you.

With a bio of:

When you forget to drink water, we’ll give you a friendly reminder.

Unreal.

After a couple of months without a camera (the D200 was sold to this chap!) I finally took the plunge and whacked a Nikon D700 + MB-D10 on my recently-cleared credit card.  That’s what it’s for after all, right?!  Anyway, it arrived yesterday just in time for me to rush out (literally) and shoot Young Widows at The Fly in Camden.

I was hoping that it’d be a decent test of the much-lauded low-light capabilities of the FX sensor, but Young Widow’s lighting arrangement would have been a stretch to say the least.  They provided their own illumination by way of just four lamps at the back, with the rest of the stage lighting turned off.  I pulled out the SB-800 and rattled off a few keepers:

The gig itself was fucking superb, with YW playing a blinding albeit short set.  Likewise the D700 although I haven’t really scratched the surface of what it can do yet.  More soon!

Last night, in what can only be described as a moment of technical sadism, I decided to reinstall a Linux distribution on my PC.  Actually truth is I pretty much despise using Windows but I’m bored of having to hook up my MacBook everytime I want to get on with something other than games.  So why Linux?  Hardware support, and I guess professional interest to a certain extent seeing as that’s what I look after for a living (amongst other things).

Anyway, here’s a quick aside and some background.  I also have an IBM X40 which runs OpenBSD.  There’s a lot of OpenBSD devs that use the same laptop so the hardware support is pretty much fucking spot on.  It’s slightly creaky now given that it’s only a 1.4GHz Pentium M with a single GB of RAM, but for what I mainly do when I’m not playing games – which is run ratpoison + xterms + firefox – it’s plenty.  So my idea was to have the same setup but on my bigger ‘main’ PC, but using Linux as the support for the newer hardware is there.  Oh, and the wireless works fine with this machine at home.

Wireless networking – even with WPA-PSK etc. – in OpenBSD is easy.  It’s done The Unix Way (i.e as you would expect) via options to ifconfig.  The man page does a fantastic job of explaining what you need to do, which is basically pass a few options and the key in a specific format (encrypted with another tool) and you’re away.  Plumbing this up so that it works on boot is also as just as easy.

So onto Linux.  Now I’ve dabbled with wireless networking before in Linux and it wasn’t pretty.  wpa_supplicant, ndiswrappers for Windows network card drivers (not Linux’s fault, but still), and so on.  The documentation is poor, there’s multiple disparate pieces and all in all it gave me a headache at the time.  Fast forward a couple of years and so surely now this should all be a little simpler?  Apparently not.  We’ve had time to create stupidly pointless wobbly window animations, drop shadow effects, and equally redundant boot splash screens though I see.

To be fair, after installing Fedora 10 my initial impressions were good.  All hardware was properly detected and worked out of the box, and I configured the wireless network initially via the purty and seemingly helpful control panel applet which popped up in Gnome.  It all worked splendidly.  I didn’t much care for the large amount of turd that the installer placed on my disk in the form of internationalizations galore, ‘games’ I’ll never play, printing systems I’ll never use, but still – minor things that I can clean up afterwards, right?  First things first though – install ratpoison, disable GDM, and let’s go!

But wait, now I’m in ratpoison I no longer have a configured network.  Odd.  It seems Gnome provides a little applet that works as a front-end to the omnipotent NetworkManager that enables your wireless network when you login.  That seems somewhat counter intuitive and goes against everything that an established Unix admin would expect – networking should be ever present, whether you’re in X11 or not – but not to worry, must be easy to fix that right?  Let’s have a look at the man page for NetworkManager(1):

The NetworkManager daemon attempts to keep an active network connection available at all times. The point of NetworkManager is to make networking configuration and setup as painless and automatic as possible. If using DHCP, NetworkManager is intended to replace default routes, obtain IP addresses from a DHCP server, and change nameservers whenever it sees fit, with the aim of making networking Just Work.

And that’s all of it, pretty much.  There’s a couple of references to nm-tool(1) and something else, but that’s your lot.  The man page for nm-tool is just as sparse.  No pointers to any configuration files, no word on command line options, nothing.  And this is supposed to ‘Just Work’?  After  digging around on various cretinous forums I found a some juju method of adding an undocumented option to one config file, rebooting, then pissing about with some system authorisation controls in Gnome, only to find that it still doesn’t work.

What a joke.

You’ve probably noticed that it’s been snowing a bit as of late, and with that comes the typical flood of news with an array of idiots weighing in on what we should or should not be doing.  Here’s one choice comment made a Margaret Morrissey, who represents the ‘Parents Outloud’ campaign group, when talking about the school closures on Monday / Tuesday:

“We are giving children the message that when things get difficult, you should just stay at home and have fun.”

I dunno.  That sounds like a pretty fucking great idea to me really.