the reality tunnel

For reporting, I often need to fill in my notes with a recording I made of an interview.  This means I need global hotkeys so I can start/stop the player while I’m in my word processor or note-taking program (tomboy or zotero). VLC has native support for global hotkeys, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t [...]

Update: Photos of my planner! Mine is on the left, next to a moleskin to give you an idea of the relative size.  Below is what each day looks like. I use Sandy for most of my calendaring, but don’t have a PDA or mobile phone with a convenient calendar app (and can’t afford one).  [...]

I got Rich’s old notebook from work and installed Xubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) see update below on it. I’m tracking issues I’m having with the distro/platform here. Spell Checking in OpenOffice Writer – FIXED After having this machine for a while, I just noticed this issue.  I followed some instructions I found here and tried [...]

Extracting from a vimball From http://vim.sourceforge.net/scripts/script.php?script_id=1502 Users of a vimball archive simply need to :vim something.vba :so % and the contents of the vimball will be extracted and placed into the proper directories, no matter where the user opened up the vimball. Furthermore, the helptags command will be automatically and transparently used to make any [...]

I finally got off my butt and fixed a few things that had been driving me nuts with the settings on my workstation. Weird KDE copy/select behavior First, I use KDE, and the copy and paste behavior was driving me nuts.  If I copied text in an application with ctrl-c and then selected text with [...]

Port forwarding from http://www.openssh.com/faq.html#2.11 $ ssh -f -L 1234:server.example.com:6667 server.example.com sleep 10 Backing up files over SSH $ ssh remote_host “tar -zc -C /path/to/parent/directory -f – some_directory” | cat > some_directory-`datestr`.tar.gz Backing up a postgres database over SSH $ ssh remote_host “pg_dump –username=db_user db_name” | gzip > db_name-`datestr`.sql.gz

I’ve been using the unix screen command a lot lately, and enough to want to learn more. I used to just scroll through windows with CTRL-a n and CTRL-a p, but now I have a ton of windows in my screen session, so I want to be able to navigate easier. List to windows: CTRL-a [...]