Monthly Archive for March, 2010

New Hosting!

I’ve switched to RAM Host.  If you see this message, then DNS information has propagated.  :)

I will leave my existing hosting up for a few days before I replace it with a redirection message (for anyone who still tried to use my old domain to go to my website).  The old hosting will go away in July.  My stay with FodyHost has been pleasurable and I would recommend it to anyone who wants unlimited space and bandwidth in a shared hosting environment for a great price.

There shouldn’t be any loss of mail but if you have sent me something recently and don’t think it went through, feel free to send it to me again.

Staffen SRX Fountain Pen

I was feeling old-fashioned recently, so I decided to buy a fountain pen.  After a little research, I found xFountainPens, a retail site that promises high quality pens and ink for low prices.  For a grand total of $28 for a pen and a bottle of ink, I decided to take a chance.  I purchased a Staffen SRX Galaxie pen and a bottle of black ink.  I ordered it last week and it arrived, so the shipping was fairly quick (and free); it was also packaged well.  For $20, I wasn’t expecting too much; a pack of ballpoint pens costs almost as much nowadays.  What few reviews I could find for this pen were generally positive.

I was extremely impressed.  The ink flow is extremely smooth and even and the pen is a good weight–very comfortable to write with.  I’m a lefty (the curséd breed, I know), so my writing usually involves scratching up pages (because lefties have to push the pen across the paper and not pull it), but I had no trouble writing with it.  The ink is also quite nice: it flows smoothly, dries quickly, and doesn’t bleed.  One of the older reviews that I read mentioned a few weakness with the pen, including a loose cap, but I did not find any.  It was a $28 well-spent.

I decided to keep the pictures at their original 4000×3000 resolution to show off some of the amazing macro capabilities of my camera…

None of my classes this term really require writing…  The assignments are all accomplished via computer, whether they’re labs for my courses in communications and computer architecture, problem sets for my CS theory course, or the research paper for my class in urban history.  Yet, I still take notes by hand for the most part, because I find it’s faster.  And I also have lots of scratch paper in case I need to review my work later.

The other day, I got bored and tried to see what it would be like to write like a righty.  So, I did the obvious thing and started writing backwards (right-to-left with mirrored characters) with my left hand and I picked it up very quickly.  I’m still trying to develop the spatial skills that will allow me to mirror diagrams intuitively, but my right-to-left writing speed is now very nearly as fast as my left-to-right speed.  Yes, I do get this bored sometimes.

Anyways, the tl;dr is that this pen is really fantastic and I’m quite happy with the service from xFountainPens.

Photos from Memorial Dr.

Today was the first warm day in quite a while here in Cambridge, so I decided to go out (*gasp!*) and walk along Memorial Drive and shoot a few pictures with my camera.

For some pictures, I used my Tiffen Sky filter (blocks UV).  On others, I used my polarizing filter (also from Tiffen) to get bluer skies.  On some, I used both, but the vignetting was particularly bad…  I have to zoom in quite a bit (~3x) to prevent it, or I can just crop the picture later.

View the Full Set

Customizing MOC to Perfection

Every month, I take a screenshot of my desktop and post it to the Arch Linux forums.

I included a shot of my music player of choice, MOC, in the background.  But after looking at it for a few seconds, I realized that I have spent months using this music player without giving it a proper color theme (looks really ugly, doesn’t it?).  Furthermore, the default keymap for MOC isn’t very Vim-friendly.

So, after a little work, I achieved some nice results.  First of all, I remapped a bunch of keys to make things a bit more comfortable for Vim users like myself.  Then, I set to work building a nice theme that would work well with my particular terminal colors (MOC only supports the 8 terminal colors).  The result is this:

Perhaps others might find my configuration useful.  So, I’ve included the config files below.  First of all, I should note that my terminal colors do not support the “standard notion” of what they should be, primarily because I chose to get rid of “cyan” and make that color a dark bluish color.  The terminal colors are almost identical to the dante.vim Vim colorscheme, a theme I encountered a while back (I’m currently using a modified version of lucius.vim as my colorscheme, but it is very similar).  Here they are:

Color    Regular Intense
------------------------
Black:   #1B1D1E #343737
Red:     #F92673 #FF5996
Green:   #86B413 #B8E354
Yellow:  #FDB436 #FEED6A
Blue:    #55C5D6 #8CEEFF
Magenta: #8952FE #9C6EFE
Teal:    #465457 #899CA1
Gray:    #CCCCC7 #FFFFFF

Foreground: #FFFFFF
Background: #000000 (semi-transparent)

Here’s a quick table showing the resulting colors:

Colorscheme and Keymap

If you have similar kinds of colors, you might be interested in the MOC theme.  Download the following file and drop it in ~/.moc/themes.  Then, you can also added into your config file as the default theme.

http://jwcxz.com/other/mocp/dante

And, here is the Vim-like keymap:

http://jwcxz.com/other/mocp/keymap

You can just drop this file in ~/.moc and then edit your config file to use this keymap file.

Global Keyboard Shortcuts and Remote Status Display

I chose MOC over MPD because of its nice lightweight footprint and tidy environment.  MOC actually supports remote operations so you can easily bind your keyboard’s media keys so that they control the player.  I also want to be able to display the current song and progress in my Conky setup (see screenshot).  It turns out that this is also pretty easy.  I have been using the following configuration for a while now:

First, to control MOC, I bound these commands to my media keys:

Play/Pause: [[ -z $(pidof mocp) ]] || mocp -G
Stop:         [[ -z $(pidof mocp) ]] || mocp -s
Next Track: [[ -z $(pidof mocp) ]] || mocp -f
Prev Track: [[ -z $(pidof mocp) ]] || mocp -r

And to display the current song information, I used the following lines in my .conkyrc

${if_running mocp}${alignc}${execi 10 mocp -Q '%song\n%artist\n%album'}
${execbar mocp -Q '%cs/%ts*100' | bc -l}${endif}

This will display the song, artist, and album each on their own lines.  Below that, it will display a progress bar.

The Keyboard Saga

Short story: static electricity sucks.

Slightly longer story: static electricity really sucks.

Longish story: For about a month, I have noticed that the metallic rim around my Kensington keyboard is susceptible to ESD.  Furthermore, I realized that this rim is not grounded because occasionally, a shock would cause the keyboard to reset.  So, I’ve generally been careful about using it and have tried to touch something metallic before sitting down to type.

Inevitably, I forgot to do this and blew out the keyboard driver’s brains one unfortunate night.  So, I scrambled to find a new keyboard and came up with another Kensington keyboard.  I like scissor-switch keyboards (the kinds used in laptops) because of the low travel distance.  Kensington seems to be one of the few makers of scissor-switch keyboards nowadays.  This keyboard has no exposed metallic parts, so I was a little more confident about purchasing this unit.  Another option would have been to purchase the same keyboard that I had before and then connect the metallic rim to the ground port of the USB input.

Anyways, overall, I like the feel of it and I have gotten used to the significantly lower travel time, but I don’t know if my typing is quite as fast as it was on my previous keyboard yet.  The arrow keys are really small, which makes them hard to reach quickly if I’m in Insert mode in VIM and need to move quickly (so I’ve started to use ^O + movement more often).  The keys feel a bit flimsy compared to my last keyboard.

Unfortunately, the little plastic mat that is underneath all of the keys was not built to size and bulged up right underneath the CTRL key (which I consider to be extremely important).  So, I had to cut away a piece of the mat to make things work again.  Unfortunately, this now exposes the (surprisingly dirty) metal beneath it, so the keyboard is again exposed to ESD…  Hopefully this part is grounded (though I’ll probably try to add some kind of layer of insulation when I get a chance).

It’s clear that this keyboard just doesn’t have the quality of my last one.  The keys are thinner and feel much cheaper.  For comparison, I took off the CTRL keys.

However, I’m getting used to the slight differences in this keyboard and my typing speed has improved dramatically since I first got it.  The low travel distance isn’t really a problem for me; I haven’t accidentally hit any keys because of it.