I am typing this post in Colemak. Very slowly.

A weird thing: in Firefox, text fields are working with Colemak, but keyboard shortcuts are still QWERTY. I'm effectively hitting cmd-G to open new tabs, instead of cmd-T. I wonder why that is.

Old school hackers do it in the 'more magic' position.

It's hard for me to code (or do anything that requires concentration) while listening to wonderful awesome distracting music. Especially if both the music and the activity use language (I can listen to singing and play solitaire, or I can listen to instrumental and write stuff; I cannot listen to singing and write stuff (and I get bored if I listen ( Read more... )

I've been reading the O'Reilly Learning Python book online. (I love institutional subscriptions!) It's an excellent book, but it can't seem to decide whether to be aimed at programmers or non-programmers. It goes into detail about really basic general-programming things like how a while loop works and where you might want to use one. Then it throws ( Read more... )

So I finally did get sick of just sitting around reading all day every day, and started learning Scheme. I didn't remember everything from the Scheme class I took in high school, but I thought I remembered enough to use a tutorial that didn't hold my hand. On Raffi's recommendation, I started with Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum Days. It's pretty ( Read more... )

I got Firefox 3 a while ago, and while I haven't really used the most-hyped features yet, there are a lot of little things I like ( Read more... )

[This was written by my good friend Raffi. Note that it takes place at U. of Western Ontario, not MIT. I'm reposting it here with permission, for a couple of different reasons -- see note at end.]

( Story below the fold. )

(1) I tried these about:config edits to make Firefox run faster, and they seem to have worked splendidly. I can't tell if the application opens faster, which was my original intent, but it certainly opens pages a hell of a lot faster -- LJ in particular is much faster, and even Gmail is a bit faster ( Read more... )

I have picked up a broken external hard drive. It is no longer intact, although it doesn't look like any parts are physically cracked or fried -- it's just been partly taken apart. I do not have the expertise to restore it to working order ( Read more... )

In-case link: http://youtube.com/watch?v=ipzR9bhei_o

I just ran across this really neat video of Bach's Toccata & Fugue in D minor. [8:34]

Click to view

What I find fascinating about it is not so much the actual technique used, although that's cool too. What I love is that this lets you ( Read more... )