I’ve just purchased a new toy: the Wacom Bamboo tablet. Without any modifications, the tablet behaves in X like a (very slow) touchpad.
Luckily, kernel and xorg drivers are available, though support is not mature yet (I was expecting some gnome configuration tool).
Installing a Wacom Bamboo on Debian testing: A. Install the following packages:
Packages that should be already on your system:
1. xserver-xorg-input-wacom (version 0.7.9.3-2)
2. linux-image-2.6.24-1-686 (or possibly 2.6.23, 2.6.22, YMMV)
Packages that you probably don’t have yet:
3. wacom-tools (version 0.7.9.3-2)
B. Tweak your /etc/X11/xorg.conf:
1. Add the following sections.
C. Configure the touch ring to act like a mouse wheel (i.e. scrolling).
1. I put the configuration in the in file /etc/X11/Xsession.d/80wacom-config_scrollpad, for lack of a better place.
Its contents:
xsetwacom set pad AbsWDn "5"
xsetwacom set pad AbsWUp "4"
We’re talking about tin whiskers, single crystals that mysteriously grow from pure tin joints but not generally from tin-lead solder joints. Nobody knows how or why these whiskers grow and nobody knows how to stop them, except through the use of lead solder. Whiskers can start growing in a decade or a year or a day after manufacture. They can grow at up to nine millimeters per year. They grow in any atmosphere including a pure vacuum. They grow in any humidity condition. They just grow. And when they get long enough they either touch another joint, shorting out one or more connections, or they vaporize in a flash, creating a little plasma cloud that can carry for an instant hundreds of amps and literally blow your device to pieces.
TMB (Too Many Bookmarks) is my homepage script. It is intended to give quick access to my most frequently used bookmarks, from any computer I may be using. I used to have a wiki page that did this, but now TMB allows me to easily add bookmarks, assign their category, and (roughly) order them.
It is very very basic, but it works, it’s fast, and I love it.
BTW Instapaper is a great tool for bookmarking pages that you want to read later. You can flag pages as read/unread, add pages to your list with a press of a button (I might add this to TMB), and the registration is really simple.
We used to write important information on the back of photographs. Today they are digital, but we would still like to remember, years from now, where who and what is in those photos we took.
Wrestling the information into the filename might be a good idea. It assures us that the metadata (descriptive info) is copied along with the data (the file). However, it’s not an elegant solution for most common filesystems, since they place restrictions on the length of filenames and character sets used. Ideally, a block of descriptive metadata should replace filenames altogether.
Most modern file formats include an internal metadata format (JPEG has Exif, MP3 has ID3), and maybe the solution is to use several metadata implementations (de facto standards). But what I need is to be able to take a piece of text, an image, or a web page snapshot, and associate it to an arbitrary file. I also want the associated data to accessible from the context of that file, be it that of a text viewer, media player, or file manager.
Is there a metadata standard, or is that just an oxymoron? I mean, metadata can be, by definition, all types of data. So writing such a standard would mean to anticipate all future kinds of data.
The Room (imdb) is a movie in the “so bad it’s good” category. Not having seen it yet, just reading the reviews in imdb and seeing the clips on Mahalo Daily got me giddy with excitement. I love how the interviewer managed to keep a straight face throughout the interview, except at the very end.
Comment excerpts:
So Independent it’s Cinematic Masturbation!
– Mroussele
The centerpiece of this filmic holocaust is Mr. Tommy Wiseau himself. Without him, it would still be the worst movie ever made, but with him it is the greatest worst movie ever made. Tommy has been described as a Cajun, a Croatian cyborg, possibly from Belgium, clearly a product of Denmark, or maybe even not from this world or dimension. All of these things are true at any one moment. He is a tantalizing mystery stuffed inside an enigma wrapped in bacon and smothered in cheese.
– Brickyard Jimmy
Bookmooch had a search engine for books, using a single table that indexed each word in a book’s title/author/etc. This system was very efficient for searching (one query per word). The problem was that adding new books to the index was very costly (the more popular the word was, the longer it took to update). It was up to the point where the disk writes took as much as 20 seconds out of their alloted minute.
In short, the solution was to have two tables for the index instead of one. One table was optimized for queries (faster searches), while the other for updates (adding new books quickly). These tables would be synchronized periodically.
IMHO, the guy in charge did nothing wrong with the initial design of the search engine. There are certain characteristics of a system that are hard to predict and even then, one needs a lot of experience to correctly optimize things in advance (like the problem in the second paragraph). As in the Twitter story, profiling saved the day, but don’t forget to monitor your logs!
Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is the alleged molecule that the brain produces during REM sleep that causes us to dream. Rogan claims in the video below that sleep is a psychedelic experience and that taking DMT allows you to experience that. One side-effect is that, just like regular dreams, you quickly forget the experience once it’s over.
Another day, another ordeal getting Linux to work in a Windows world. And after spending one trying to configure L2TP to work in Israel, I felt the need to collect the knowledge I gathered in one place, so that future souls may save some time.
