portability and progress

[da]

I've been having some success with new software. And hardware, for that matter.

A comment from dr_tectonic got me thinking about portability and being tied down to one computer. One of the things I'm tied to is browser preferences and bookmarks.

At the same time, my neighbour D. has loaned me a mac G4 tower to experiment with, and when I logged in, the homepage was his del.icio.us page. delicious seemed a bit premature the last time I investigated it, but it's gotten much better. Now it can import from your browser's bookmarks file, plus you can have private bookmarks that aren't open to the world. These were just the two things that kept me from adopting it earlier.

So, at work, I imported my pile of bookmarks, most of 'em private since they're internal links; and I'm importing some of my home bookmarks. So far I think this is a good system. Much better than writing bookmarks to a static web page, or even to a password-protected wiki, because of the usefulness of the tags (plus auto-tag-suggestions based on others who bookmarked the same thing). If I can work with the tags system, I might be able to reduce my dependence on keeping so many tabs open at a time (say, give myself a "current-projects" tag and a "think-about-later" tag).

...Does anyone use delicious and have much to say about it? My bookmarks are here just in case you're bored/curious.

I read a tip today that Firefox 1.5 was faster than 1.07 (the version I've been using at home). And WOW is it; at least under Ubuntu Linux on my creaky old 800mhz P3. It feels just as snappy as the 1.0x version on a 2.4ghz P4 at work. Definite progress there.

As for trying the mac: the verdict is still out. Things I like: it's sleek and of course everything Just Works. Things I don't like: I miss Klipper, the multi-clipboard manager in kde (do any mac users have advice there? I want: quick, with customizable keyboard shortcuts to pull up the list of clipped items, bonus if I can select one without mousing.) I'm also just not familiar with the keyboard shortcuts, which just comes with practice. Anyway, I'll keep playing with it.

Comments

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

I have basically trained my brain to remember how to make the easy ones (it's Option-something, followed by the main letter, so for example, ï is option-u, followed by i). It's only happened two or three times that I've needed to call up the table of all unicode characters to make an insertion.

You can change the keyboard shortcuts; I think that may be under "keyboard"? You can make global changes, or application-specific ones.

Have fun. (Why does D. have an extra mac?)

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

It was sort of for his brother, but his brother didn't want it, and so on. It was in the basement for ages, apparently.

He offerred a pile of Suns and a 19-inch monitor, but I respectfully declined.