jmtd → drafts

consider looking at your rss app or whatever and look at what info sources you get useful information from. if you cut down your subscriptions to just those sources, how busy would it be-- would you find yourself short of information, or just noise?

read a book sometimes 1/100? you get one you can't put down, you utterly devour

wouldn't it be nice if more information could be consumed so vociforously

trying to read academic papers (for example) requires long immersion in the culture (I think)

do we need to drown in more info to pick out the good stuff?

harry potter series (or was that 2009?) charles stross - halting state charles stross - accelerando cory doctorow - little brother cory doctorow - eastern standard tribe william gibson and bruce sterling - the difference engine william gibson - neuromancer iain banks - a song of stone greg bear - blood music

grand theft auto 4 bioshock dead space

Tags: ?books

• /private/var/mobile/Media/iTunes_Control_2/Music/ ¬*¬/private/var/mobile/Media/iTunes_Control_2/iTunes/iTunesDB

Switchtunes which seems fairly bust

• /Applications/SwitchTunes.app/SwitchtuneS.sh

gtkpod/libgpod 0.6.0-6 cannot create even fresh itunesdb folders that iphone 2.2 understands.

alternative media platyers

dTunes - pulls in a lot of crap :(

'Player' aka PwnPlayer - looks like the ipod app; can parse the ipod library in read mode (slowly); doesnt include 'filesystem' in this DB access, displayed separately (w/o metadata?) ; search feature works nicely for filename matches only (not metadata on filesystem at least); filesystem location is /var/mobile/Media/Music; embedded art is displayed; refresh in FS view doesn't pick up new stuff in subdirs; need to hold-kill the player app to restart it properly, hangs about in bg (urgh, is that permanent?); seeking is erratic; play appears to be ok

bits to back up

# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/disk0s1          500M  441M   55M  89% /
devfs                  25K   25K     0 100% /dev
/dev/disk0s2           15G   13G  2.4G  84% /private/var

Guessing / contains no personal data; /private/var is big but I don't need to (separately) back up my music due to having it elsewhere in primary store

CRITERIA SCARTS (dvd player) 1+ built-in freeview OR another SCART (built-in preferred) 1+ HDMI (Xbox) phono audio out DESIRED VGA D-SUB in decent sound

TVs joes samsung 26" nice le26r88bd (r) seems to do 1080i?

SAMSUNG 26"
LE26A456C
hd ready
327GBP currys
5000:1 contrast ratio
720p
digibox
"DNIe + image technology"?
3 HDMI Connections

LG 32"
350 @ B&Q
350 @ currys
720p only
sound issues?

samsung 32"
LE32A456C
hd ready
720p

Samsung LE27A57C1DXXU 26" Series 4 LCD TV 1366x768 5000:1 Gloss Black
3xHDMI
ebuyer
£307.81inc vat£267.66ex vat
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/145215
HD ready?  yes: 720p

http://direct.tesco.com/q/R.205-3203.aspx
32inch
2 scart, 3 hdmi 
KDL32U4000

currys
samsung
32
LE32A456C
http://www.currys.co.uk/martprd/store/cur_page.jsp?BV_SessionID=@@@@1949900547.1230231281@@@@&BV_EngineID=ccdjadefmhdkdlhcflgceggdhhmdfnm.0&page=Product&fm=12&sm=0&tm=1&sku=725233&category_oid=
wow!
sound reviews mixed

computer use (g35 chip): http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/96509133/m/902007873931

Backups are something I don't do well.

New approach: try and identify classes of data and the backup requirements for them; identify sources of data, and identify locations to backup to.

classes

sources

• phone

  • important stuff
  • personal data
  • photos
  • text messages
  • contacts (synced to exchange)
  • purchased apps
  • not important stuff
  • music (only copies)
  • cydia apps

locations

• yatima - mirrored RAID, live discs, running quite hot. SSH via Internet, depending on ISP availability. Slow for CPU work.
• forelli - online VM, Internetworked, backed up to yatima. Limited storage, metered bandwidth (high caps though). Not suitable for very sensitive info.
• konishi - desktop computer, available when online via SSH/Internet (look into WOL via router?). 500GB main disc, no automatic backups. Second disk?
• exchange - work email server. backed up (raid, remote site, tapes, the lot). Accessible via the Internet.

Recently I wrote a piece of software to help me manage my Debian bug workflow called debgtd. At the time I announced it, debgtd did little more than display a list of bugs you have submitted, let you remove some entries from the list and sort them by severity or package name. This is the version that will be in Lenny.

Being able to work through a list and bin things that do not need your attention is important, but it's only one part of the "triage" process. According to David Allen's GTD philosophy, what you really need to do is establish what the next action for each bugs needs to be. (In the case of bugs we bin, nothing).

The versions of debgtd since the lenny release feature two major differences:

• the main view now only displays bugs which have a "next action" defined -- which, for new bugs, is none of them.

• A "Triage" window has been introduced.

The new triage window presents one bug to you at a time and lets you either sleep, ignore or provide a next action for the bug. (Or close the triage window).

For the triage window, I've purposefully not sorted the bugs in any way. The idea is, you should be able to decide the next action (or to bin the bug) in a minute or less per bug. You need to triage every bug, so sorting them does not achieve much, and perhaps distracts from triaging them adequately.

I am now in a position where I can sit down and define a next action for myself for all of the 100 or so bugs I have reported in a short amount of time, and then present those bugs and their next actions in a list form.

Still to do before I make this post "public" is to thaw bugs after an amount of time.

The next Debian release draws ever closer with the general freeze happening this weekend.

I find freeze-time to be both exciting and slightly disappointing. On the one hand it's a time when Debian developers normally working on dispirate packages and projects pull together under the common aim of preparing the release and improving the quality of Debian.

On the other hand, speaking from a desktop perspective, if you consider the state of sid at any point in time, there are lots of bugs in it that are not serious enough to hold up a release or to be exempted from freeze: Lots of niggling little issues that on their own are of little consequence, but on aggregate add up to give you (or at least, me) the feeling that the overall desktop experience is not quite as good as it could be.

Freeze-time means that the quality that you perceive right now may well be much the same in the final release, and remain the same for the 18 months or so to come until tne next one.

Google Chrome is an open-source web browser for Windows platforms released by Google in the last month. It features a webkit backend, a new javascript engine called v8, and a relatively light weight UI.

On a Windows machine, I find Google Chrome to be infinitely more pleasurable to use than Firefox. It starts up faster, renders more quickly and generally feels a lot less sluggish. Pop-up and password handling is pleasant; The UI does not look too cluttered. I can use it in many-windows mode rather than many-tabs mode without it fighting me.

There is a bit of buzz around the future release of Chrome for Linux. I am not too excited about that prospect, because most of the advantages that it brings over Firefox I've already enjoyed in the Epiphany browser. Epiphany had, until recently, tab/window merging and splitting. Epiphany is fast and clean (and integrated) relative to Firefox. Epiphany is moving towards the webkit backend which will bring a speed boost similar to that experienced by people migrating from Firefox to Chrome.

One criticism of Chrome is that extending the browser is more difficult than Firefox. Epiphany supports python-powered plugins, which I find infinitely preferable to the esoteric, mozilla-specific extension schemes. It also has a greasemonkey plugin which lacks some of the polish of the Firefox version but is perfectly usable.