genehack.org

Dear LazyWeb –

I need a terminal emulator for MacOS X. I’m an Emacs user, and my forearms think that the key immediately to the left of the space bar is the Meta key. One of the frequent key combinations I use is ‘M-Q’, to reflow paragraphs and other text. The silly Mac persists in thinking this keystroke means “quit the current program”.

I used to run X11.app and just use xterms. Leopard apparently got the eff’d up juice all over the X11.app, so that currently doesn’t seem like a good option. I just quit iTerm for the last time before starting to type this post. I won’t get into the details at the moment, but suffice it to say that it also makes the baby Jesus cry big tears of pain. (Randomly garbling control characters is not an acceptable behavior.)

Is there anything else that’s going to suck less than Terminal.app? (Ideally, something that doesn’t involve the phrase “and then I installed Ubuntu”).

Thank you O Great Lazyweb. May your surfing always be free of content filters.

• Emacs/Spotlight integration
• Emacsy OSX
• Some Emacs color themes
• Emacs for Mac OS

So, SixApart made some incredibly stupidunfortunate business decisions about Certain Types of content yesterday. Lots of blowback all over the place; I first saw stuff on Warren Ellis’s site (this is his final word as I write this) and then Elf Sternberg posted (and there have been subsequent posts from Elf on the same topic). From what I can see standing on the edge of the community, seems like a lot of people are poised to up and move elsewhere.

Here’s the thing: this is the downside of the “user-generated content” “revolution” — it’s way too easy for somebody else to pull the plug on you with little to no notice. It has its own set of issues, but the next step up the Internet food chain — buying your own domain and getting it hosted somewhere — is a lot more resilient to this particular type of disruption. The problem is that the feature set of LJ isn’t, as far as I know, really available in a form you can use in a “hosted” fashion.

That’s where we come to the idea. It seems to me like, given that OpenID is mature and getting some traction, it should be possible to come up with some reasonably simple CGI that ties together some basic blogging functionality, some RSS pull/display capability, and a bit of access management, and bicketyBAM, instant distributed LiveJournal-ish-like thingy. The key here is that there aren’t any centralized servers where this runs, you’ve just got a whole bunch of people with CGIs on their own hosted domains and all the community interaction happens from the CGIs talking to each other, using OpenID to handle all the authentication/authorization issues. The real beauty is that, since LiveJournal supports OpenID, taking your existing LiveJournal community with you shouldn’t be a big deal — which was a concern for Elf and I bet for a lot of other people. Pair this with a tool that scrapes your old content out of your LiveJournal and dumps it into the new system, and you’ve just made it possible for people to jump off the LJ wagon.

One of you crazy college kids that just got out of school for the summer pick this up and run with it, okay? First version doesn’t have to be all that pretty, just has to be good enough to spread around and demo the idea for people; once that happens I don’t think you’ll have a big problem with contributors.

Maybe it’s just the tail end of a long, not-yet-over day, but UselessAccount.com is the funniest damn thing I’ve seen in a while. I especially love the “slightly more useful than twitter” banner.

This is probably something with too small a target market to be viable, but I know that I’d pay for it, and I imagine a number of people I know would too, so I’m throwing it out here. If somebody happens to run with this, please let me know where to sign up.

I want a web site that lets me put in all my demographic information, set up a series of preferred usernames, and provide a default password. Then I want the people who run that site to watch — nay, scour — the online world for new and upcoming services, and I want them to register me for those services, using my preferred username(s) and password(s). I don’t want to have to worry about finding out about things in time to get my preferred handle, I don’t care that all the sites will be using the same password (because I’m already using the same password when I register for them myself), and I don’t particularly care what the master registration site does with my demographic info as long as my spam load doesn’t go up appreciably and as long as nobody, you know, jacks my credit card or something.

Oh, and I’ll pay money for this service. I’ll quite happily take the money I was giving Flickr for a Pro account and give it to whoever sets this up. Please.

(And yeah, yeah, OpenID blah blah blah, but until that gets to be part of the landscape, it’s not doing me any real good. I’m not looking to do the Right Thing here, I’m looking for a cheap technological fix for this particular pain in my ass.)

In related news, stalkers may wish to know that twitter.com/genehack is now active. Shiny.

That sound was me unsubscribing from all my tag-based del.icio.us feeds. (I’m still keeping the person-based ones.)

Noted as yet another medium being overcome and/or failing to deal with the spam problem; I don’t need to hunt through dozens of pr0n and health care links in the ‘lifehack’ category, thanks much.

Based on this screencast, ECB is well worth checking out — the code introspection features seem like they would be quite useful. Unfortunately, based on some early research, the documentation may be a bit on the minimal side. Anybody out there have pointers?

… Mark Pilgrim’s great, snark-filled Essentials 2006, listing his critical pieces of software after switching from Mac OS X to Linux. My faves:

5. digiKam + Kipi plugins. It’s just like iPhoto except it calls albums “tags”, exports to Flickr for free, exports to HTML that validates, stores my important metadata in a SQLite database, can be operated entirely with a keyboard, and doesn’t suck
6. amaroK. It’s just like iTunes except it automatically fetches lyrics from Argentina, automatically looks up bands on Wikipedia, automatically identifies songs with MusicBrainz, and its developers are actively working on features that don’t involve pushing DRM-infected crap down my throat.

The M-x yow command (aka Zippy the Pinhead mode) is being removed from Emacs.

(Via a comment on and a small aubergine…, on a post outlining a way to use M-x yow to provide more interesting template boilerplate than the traditional Lorem Ipsum.)

TaskAnyone looks like it could be potentially useful, but $5/month seems steep for something that puts a pretty face on cron and a pile of Template Toolkit.

I’m probably pretty outside the target demo, though.