“Getting Things Dumped: A First Principle in GTD”
A good overview of the causes of stress, and how using GTD deals with them.
“What to Fear”
You don’t need to worry about rare and exciting problems like terrorist attacks. The odds are that mundane and boring things like not eating right or getting enough exercise will kill you.
Taming the Wild Rodent: Unintended Double-Clicks
You’d think that with three cats in the house, we’d have no problem with mice, but for some reason they completely ignore the kind that plug into the computer. I should fire the lot of them. š
I have a really nice wireless Logitech mouse. Just a simple one, but it gets the job done, and I only have to replace the batteries maybe every five or six months. I’m extremely happy with it, except for one thing.
Late last year, I started noticing that left-clicks on it were occasionally being interpreted as double-clicks instead. Only maybe one time out of every twenty or thirty clicks, but enough to be irritating. After installing the latest Ubuntu (9.04, or “Jaunty Jackalope”), I decided to find a fix for it.
[EDIT: If you’ve got the same problem, read the comments below this article before trying this solution. It helped, but not enough.]
There were several reports of similar problems, and the recommended fix seemed to be to modify /etc/X11/xorg.conf, adding "CorePointer" to one of the mouse-configuration lines. Which would be great — except that this version of Ubuntu moved the handling of mice to a component called HAL (I’m assuming that’s for “Hardware Abstraction Layer”), and completely removed all the configuration lines in xorg.conf.
I’ve spent many hours over the last week, trying to figure out how to translate that option to HAL. And when that failed, trying any other option I could dig up or think of. So far as I can tell, there’s simply nothing you can do through HAL to solve this.
As of last night, I was ready to give up on it, but my stubborn determined nature wouldn’t allow me to. Like it or not, I had to solve it, even if I had to dig into the source code for the mouse driver and change it there — logically the fix is simple enough, if the system sees a double-click that’s too fast for a human to have made, simply ignore it. Enough people seem to have had this problem that somebody must have thought to add that option into a mouse driver, and if it was available anywhere, it would be in Linux.
Well, as the saying goes, it’s always darkest just before the dawn. I had the idea to search for:
linux "minimum double click"
That led me to someone talking about an option in a program called btnx (which apparently didn’t work in the previous version of Ubuntu due to a bug in the X-server, but does in this version). I downloaded it, followed the instructions for setting it up, and configured the left button to be interpreted as the “key combination” BTN_LEFT, with a “repeat delay” of 100 milliseconds. Then I started the btnx daemon, took a deep breath, and started clicking the title bar of one of the Firefox windows on the screen, one click per second, using the faint but audible ticking of my wall-clock to time them.
Not once in five full minutes — that’s three hundred clicks — did the window maximize itself! Previously it would do so after somewhere between five and seventy clicks, as the system saw something it erroneously interpreted as a double-click. Problem solved!
Now if I could just find a similar program for my occasional forays back into Windows… š
“33 Rules to Boost Your Productivity”
There are three parts to this article. The first two are sensible and productivity-enhancing. The third one is simply fun, in an evil sort of way. š Here are some selected items from it:
5.Voodoo. Display voodoo replicas of your boss and co-workers on your desk, labeled with their names. Whenever you overhear someone complaining of health problems (headache, upset stomach, runny nose, etc), stick a pin into the corresponding part of their doll. Then call them over to your workspace for some unrelated reason.
6.Scooby snacks. Grab a bowl of your favorite snacks, such as grapes, tamari almonds, or Trader Joeās Oriental Rice Crackers. Eat one piece for each microbial piece of work you complete. One bite per sentence. One bite per line of code. One bite per email. Ranks, Raggy.
17.Blockade. Slide a heavy piece of furniture in front of your office door. When drop-in visitors complain they canāt get in, tell them youāre refactoring your office for greater productivity.
20.Quagmire. Fill out and mail a generous assortment of business reply cards in your bossā name, checking the ābill me laterā boxes. A few dozen magazine subscriptions and some Franklin Mint collections ought to slow him down a bit. A new Civil War chess piece every month means heāll be playing chess in under 3 years.
21.End run. Suggest to your bossā boss that your boss is overworked and needs more help. If you implement the previous tip, this will likely be true.
29.Anakin. Would your problems be easier to solve if you turned evil? The dark side beckonsā¦
30.Spammer. Sign up for a free email account, and subscribe to every e-zine, e-newsletter, and mailing list you can find. The shadier the better. Once youāve completed all the double opt-in processes, set that account to forward to your bossā email.
31.Steve Jobs. On the rare occasions you actually do manage to get something done, talk it up like a madman. Say āThis is huge!ā to everyone you meet. People will assume youāre 10x as productive as you are.
(I’m sure you’ll love the label on that last one, Ploni.) š
Newspapers in the Internet Age
I recently fielded a nuisance telemarketing call from one of our local newspapers, trying to convince me to buy a subscription. This is a fairly regular occurrence; “no” seems to translate to “try again later” to them, and the calls seem to be getting more frequent… probably because newspapers are in dire financial straits. I told the guy that I didn’t have time to read the newspaper, which is true, but that isn’t the whole story.
The whole story is that newspapers are irrelevant to me. When I lived near Washington DC, there were occasionally-interesting articles on what the federal government was doing (or rather, what they were doing wrong š ), but even then the only section of the paper that I read regularly was the comics. If something happens that will affect or interest me, it’s almost certain that I or my wife will hear about it through our usual Internet news sources, and probably faster than a newspaper could tell us about it anyway.
What’s worse, for the newspaper industry, is that newspapers are increasingly irrelevant to everyone else too. They started out as soapboxes for the rich and politically-minded, picked up advertising to subsidize their costs, and added some actual news (inevitably bad news… “if it bleeds, it leads”) to keep people entertained. Actually keeping people informed has always played third-fiddle to editorials and advertising, and what news does appear almost always has a political slant to it.
(There are exceptions to this, but they’ve always been few and far between, and have gotten even fewer in the last twenty or thirty years.)
Like the music industry, the newspaper industry is a dinosaur. It survived by having exclusive (or exclusively-fast) access to information that people wanted. The Internet has destroyed that exclusivity, and it has been flailing around for the last decade, trying to find a new reason for itself. It’ll be interesting to see whether it succeeds.
“Echo vision: The man who sees with sound”
A fascinating article. I didn’t realize that humans could do this sort of thing.
doihavepigflu.com
There was an interesting article on BoingBoing recently. The title was “doihavepigflu.com”, and the text consisted only of this link. Intrigued, I clicked on it… and laughed aloud for a good five minutes. š Give it a shot yourself.
“Spanish Flu of 1918: how bad was it?”
Some useful statistics on “one of the most lethal flu outbreaks in recorded history.” Reading that should calm all but the most germophobic people.
“GNOME vs. KDE: The Final Smackdown”
A very amusing look at the two major Linux desktop environments. It’s so well-written that I could actually hear it in my head, as if it were live commentary on a real boxing match.
(I don’t have a favorite in this fight. I’ve used GNOME for the past few years, but that’s solely because it’s the default on Ubuntu, and I haven’t been annoyed enough by it to check out alternatives. I think I also used KDE for a short while, back around the turn of the century when I made my first exploratory foray into Red Hat Linux. KDE is said to be better-designed internally, that’s about the only technical difference I know.)