blog.fogel.ca

I ran across this sweet new form of bike rack yesterday in Palo Alto.

I really, really like the concept – not because it’s that much better from a utility standpoint (although that half-roof is a nice touch). It’s awesome because it takes the bicycle from something pushed to the side and in the way, to something that is the center of attention – on display, worthy of celebration. The mere presence of this rack is one big advertisement: “ride your bike!”

Learn more about these awesome racks at BikeArc.com.

gsynaptics gives you a nice little GUI in gnome to control the options on your synaptics touchpad, like the one my T61p came with. It’s easy to set up on a default debian install, you just need to add a few stanazas to your xorg.conf

Here’s the edits I needed from a default install xorg.conf:

1. Make a backup of your current xorg.conf
2. Remove the “Generic Mouse” section. You don’t need it anymore.
3. Add a section for your touchpad like so:
   

   Section "InputDevice"
  Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
  Driver "synaptics"
  Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
  Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
  Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
  Option "SHMConfig" "true"
EndSection

4. And add a line in your “ServerLayout” section referencing your new synaptics section. I didn’t have a ServerLayout section so I had to add one, mine looks like this:
   

   Section "ServerLayout"
  Identifier "Default Layout"
  Screen "Default Screen"
  InputDevice "Generic Keyboard"
  InputDevice "Synaptics Touchpad"
EndSection


Now save everything you’re doing and then restart X11 by hitting cntrl-alt-backspace. If X won’t start back up, you can hit cntrl-alt-f1 and log in at a command prompt, restore your xorg.conf from the backup you made earlier, then run /etc/init.d/gdm restart.

In the event that things just aren’t working, your friend is /var/log/Xorg.0.log. That log file contains the results of your x-server’s parsing of your xorg.conf.

First, for anyone out there that’s pretty quick with vi, I’d recommend you check out the vimperator extension for FF if you haven’t already. It speeds up my sessions quite a bit.

It turns out vimperator sets the browser option browser.startup.page=3 for you every time you fire up your browser. You can see this in your vimperator’s options.js:

// start with saved session
storePreference("browser.startup.page", 3);

This ain’t my cup of tea for a few reasons and I’m not nuts about vimperator overriding what I’ve set in my about:config without asking or telling me. Anyway, you can override vimperator’s override.

In your ~/.vimperatorrc:

set! browser.startup.page=1

I had to remove a few hard drives from a few laptops this morning to do some swapping.  Some of them went really easy, others, not so much.  For quick comparison, here’s the basic stats on the hard drive removal process for each.

Mac PowerBook G4:

• Tools: #0 & #1 Phillips, 1.5 mm Allen wrench
• Screws: 34
• Connectors: 5
• 4 Keys
• Battery, ram cover, keyboard, front cover, hard drive casing
• 90 min
• High probability of inflicting cosmetic damage to laptop
• You need a guide, and plenty of organization and patience

HP OmniBook 9000:

• #1 Phillips
• 3 Screws
• 5 minutes

IBM T61p:

• #1 Phillips
• 5 Screws
• 5 minutes

IBM wins as having the most user-friendly design, followed closely by HP. Apple… uh, yeah right.

Apple’s products tend to be very user-friendly as long as you fit nicely into one of their predefined use cases… hard drive replacement apparently isn’t one of their use cases.