Through The Brier

Aug 10

“When he set a compass upon the face of the deep.”
William Blake’s Ancient of Days“When he set a compass upon the face of the deep.” William Blake’s Ancient of Days

Aug 08

[video]

Poor man's Quicksilver -

Squee! Danny O’Brien is my hero.

Since the Great PowerBook Disaster of 2007, I’ve been casting about for a way to approximate Quicksilver’s combined application launching/window switching in Linux. About 3 seconds after I discovered Quicksilver, having one key combination to always focus an application (whether it had been previously started or not) became so ingrained in my muscle memory that I’m still, 9 months later, disoriented without it.

Well, no more! Danny O’Brien points to wmctrl which, with a little GNOME glue as demonstrated by Danny, does what I need, at least for the 5 or 10 applications I used constantly. A few adjustments to the way I title gnome-terminal and emacs windows, and I’m golden.

I still miss Quicksilver, but this little hack makes my fingers feel like they are home again.

Aug 04

Urban legend: don't end sentence with preposition -

What began as a guideline to promote clarity in certain contexts was misconstrued as a blanket rule which has engendered an onslaught of awkward sentences, contorted to avoid breaking the “rule”.

The Stumblng Tumblr, who provided the linkage, enjoyed the post primarily for it’s first two comments, which are funny enough to offset a lot of the previously mentioned awkward sentences.

Jul 30

Re: Cephalopod by Matthew Baldwin -

Now that Congress has approved domestic wire-tapping, no one can prevent the U.S. from becoming a surveillance state. No one, that is, except for cathym17@zipmail.com.

Jul 27

Impact events -

It turns out that asteroid impact events like Tunguska aren’t so rare:

The late Eugene Shoemaker of the U.S. Geological Survey came up with an estimate of the rate of Earth impacts, and suggested that an event about the size of the nuclear weapon that destroyed Hiroshima occurs about once a year. Such events would seem to be spectacularly obvious, but they generally go unnoticed for a number of reasons: the majority of the Earth’s surface is covered by water; a good portion of the land surface is uninhabited; and the explosions generally occur at relatively high altitude, resulting in a huge flash and thunderclap but no real damage.

I think I’ll be looking up quite a bit more often from now on.

Jul 25

From The Big Picture: Jupiter’s moon Io floats above the cloudtops of Jupiter in this image captured January 1, 2001. The image is deceiving: there are 350,000 kilometers - roughly 2.5 Jupiters - between Io and Jupiter’s clouds. Io is about the size of our own moon (NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)From The Big Picture: Jupiter’s moon Io floats above the cloudtops of Jupiter in this image captured January 1, 2001. The image is deceiving: there are 350,000 kilometers - roughly 2.5 Jupiters - between Io and Jupiter’s clouds. Io is about the size of our own moon (NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

[video]

Jul 24

A certain robot sure has his eye out for the awesome.A certain robot sure has his eye out for the awesome.