Thinking about my ideal computer

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I am a big fan of The Setup, which is basically a bunch of people talking about what hardware and software they use to do their job. I sometimes think I should answer these questions a couple of times a year, just to track the changes in the way I work, but mostly I find myself thinking about my dream set up (the last question they ask everyone is about their dream set up).

I change my mind on this a lot, but what I basically want is a laptop that is thin, light and stylish, and that can perform at the level where I could use it as my only computer. The nearest thing I’ve come across is the 13″ Macbook Pro, although I’d be happier with something the size and weight of my 10″ Dell Mini with all the power and stylishness of the Macbook Pro.

I also wonder if having a desktop computer with two large monitors would make me more productive. I have a feeling that most of what I do can be achieved on a single small screen, but it would be nice to have the opportunity to experiment with these things.

Making more time

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Over the last few weeks, I’ve found myself running out of quality time to do things. It’s not that I don’t have enough time as such, it’s just that when I get to the point in the day where I’ve done everything I have to do, I find myself with very little energy to do the things I want to do.

This state of events does not surprise me. Every area of my life is at least as busy as I would like it to be, with some areas taking more time than they really deserve. And I actually think the fact that I’m fairly good at work-life balance is contributing towards my general feeling of not having enough time. As work gets busier, I think I subconsciously try and take on more outside of work to maintain the balance and the level of productivity I’m currently at. And while this is great in the short term, I think I hit the point last night where I realised I just didn’t have any energy left to devote to anything (be it work or non-work), and that what I really needed was to spend some time somewhere isolated and uncluttered to recharge my batteries.

I plan on doing very little this weekend, which should help a great deal, although I’m already feeling hot and sticky and it’s not even 9am.

GoogleCL

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I really like the idea of GoogleCL, and think it has a lot of potential to make my life easier, seeing as I use a fair few google products (specifically Google Calendar which I use to organise my whole life).

It’s fairly basic at the moment, but I think with a bit of development it could be a powerful tool. I particularly like the ability to add and remove calendar entries from the command line, the ability to query different calendars, and the fact that I could (should I wish) delete every entry on my calendar containing a specific keyword with one command.

For example, google calendar list today title gives me a list of everything I have to do today (times would be great, but I can’t seem to get that to work as yet), and google calendar add "Dinner with Steph tonight at 8pm for 2 hours" will add a two hour appointment to my default calendar. If I had a calendar specifically for dinner appointments (called Food for the sake of this example), I could add the previous command to it by typing google calendar add --cal Food "Dinner with Steph tonight at 8pm for 2 hours" instead.

I think I need to experiment further with this, because it has great potential.

Eurovision madness

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So yes, it’s the yearly evening to sit in front of the TV and encounter more dreadful music than I do in the rest of the year put together. I do like the Eurovison song contest though, although not for the reasons I like other music (any other music). It’s cheesy, it’s dreadful, but it also makes me laugh and makes me glad that for the rest of the year I get to listen to music that actually says something to me.

I may also be abusing twitter a lot tonight. Check out #eurovision for live commentary.

Corporate Records

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This week, I’ve been exploring Corporate Records, which offers music on a “pay what you want” model that I quite like.

Things I’ve downloaded so far include:

All of these are great in different ways, and are well worth a listen. I’ve also tracked down a few bizarre alternate arrangements of Indelicates songs, and a very strange band called Anal Beard who are amusing if nothing else.

Bulk resizing images with ImageMagick

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Another of those posts that are largely for my own benefit.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in various image editing programs recently (largely GIMP, but with a bit of Inkscape on the side). Yesterday it transpired that a folder of 24×24 images needed to be made slightly smaller as a matter of some urgency. I had a feeling ImageMagick would probably do the job (it usually does), but I couldn’t remember how.

It’s actually fairly straightforward. Navigate to the directory containing the images (via the terminal) and then enter the following command:

mogrify -resize 20x20 *.png

Which will resize all PNG files to 20×20 pixels.

This can obviously be altered to cater for different sizes and file types. So yes, ImageMagick saved the day again and I actually managed to leave work on time.

A week of doing nothing?

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My day job currently involves a lot of development work, and not a lot else. As a result I’d pretty much decided that I would try and do different things while I was on holiday.

So yes, apart from a day of testing beta versions of Ubuntu/Mandriva, an hour yesterday reading about the basics of Ruby (and making Hello World), and an hour this morning reading through the Rhythmbox bugs that are getting hugged tomorrow, I’ve done nothing with my computer above the level of just using it.

This has left lots of time for general relaxation (which I’m rubbish at), interspersed with shopping (I now have more than one pair of shoes again), cooking (which I never tire of) and the first part of the tiding/de-cluttering which needs to happen before our new kitchen is fitted in the summer. There was also some family-based socialising, a wedding, and a great plumbing victory which finally fixed the flood in our kitchen (involving the realisation that the plumbing in our house is ever weirder than we thought).

There was also the less wonderful realisation that Bennett’s Bar turns into a trendy disco on Thursday nights that directly precede Bank Holidays. I’m glad I won’t have to have this realisation again.

I’m back to work tomorrow, and I’m actually looking forward to getting on with things. I’ve got a couple of hard deadlines coming up in regard to the release schedule of what I’m working on, so the time between now and 21st June looks madly busy (apart from May half term which I have booked as leave). I should also get round to organising some sort of release/birthday party, as the two are so close to each other.

I should also make a concerted effort to write blog posts more often than once a month.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and Mandriva 2010.1

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Yesterday I spent a few hours testing the latest beta versions of my two favourite Linux distributions (Ubuntu and Mandriva). I often get torn between which one of these two I’m going to use, but generally plump for Ubuntu when some particular bit of software I want to use either isn’t available for Mandriva or I have to spend too much time making something work and not enough time actually using it.

So far my thoughts are:

  • Gnome 2.30 rocks, and has moved in exactly the direction I wanted it to.
  • Ubuntu’s version of Gnome is now a lot further from default than Mandriva’s, which makes swapping between the two a bit of a pain. BUT, with a bit of tweaking I can make them both almost identical (providing I use Clearlooks as a theme and do a lot of UI tweaking in Ubuntu).
  • I still try and make each new machine I install look as close to the default Gnome as possible. This is something I might have to reconsider, as both of these distros look a lot better when they look like themselves.
  • Epiphany 2.30 might possibly be ready to actually use as my default browser.
  • I don’t like dark themes. They give me a headache and just look wrong.
  • The way Ubuntu integrates social networking is miles ahead of anything else I’ve seen.
  • I really like Ubuntu’s default background, which is not pink.
  • The new Ubuntu theme does look a lot like Mac OS X, but I think the change was needed. Mandriva still looks like it did 4 years ago, which is not a bad thing but which makes it difficult to work out which version I’m using.
  • Both distros boot far more quickly that anything else I’ve used. Rebooting Ubuntu only took a few seconds on physical hardware.

I think that’s all for now. I do have a few screen shots which I might do something with later.

The new Ubuntu theme

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I’m not sure I like the new Ubuntu theme. But I should probably mention that since I started using Ubuntu in 2005 I’ve not used any default theme for longer than a day, and have instead largely stuck with the default Gnome theme (currently Clearlooks), or anything that is blue and doesn’t get in my way.

I’m a great fan of user interface, and think a good interface is integral to a pleasant computing experience. But I also believe in the freedom to make my computer look however it needs to look to be productive for me. I’ve had a play with the beta version of 10.04 tonight, and it took me about a minute to get it looking identical to what I’m used to.

This largely means that although the new theme is not to my taste, it will in no way make me less productive. And being productive is all I really care about because the quicker I can do what I need to do on my computer, the quicker I can be spending time doing the things that really matter.

New ways of doing old things

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This weekend I decided to try and use different tools to perform my usual computer-based tasks.

Yesterday, I tried to do everything in Mac OS X (Leopard), and also tested out Thunderbird 3. I reckon I could live with a Mac as my only computer, and the only thing that bugged me was the speed (my Mac is somewhat ancient now). I especially liked iCal, and how it integrates perfectly with the Google calendars that map out my whole life, and I love the way OS X renders fonts and colours. Thunderbird 3 was a nice surprise, and I love the way it integrates with Gmail. Maybe I’ll consider switching back to Thunderbird the next time Evolution does something to annoy me.

Today I’ve been using the daily build of Chromium on my netbook. It’s seriously faster than Firefox, and I’m finding that I can do pretty much everything I need to do without a plethora of extensions. This might be one to keep I think.

I’m also having monitor envy. Or possibly screen resolution envy. I think I may be nearly ready to consider spending my day looking at something larger than a laptop screen.