Linda Holmes for NPR:
If “well-read” means “not missing anything,” then nobody has a chance. If “well-read” means “making a genuine effort to explore thoughtfully,” then yes, we can all be well-read. But what we’ve seen is always going to be a very small cup dipped out of a very big ocean, and turning your back on the ocean to stare into the cup can’t change that.
The urge to not miss anything is so strong that I miss important things.
It doesn’t take much for me to completely reverse direction. Not long ago I loudly proclaimed that the command line and I were going our separate ways. “I’m too old to remember all of those damn commands!” I said. “Tweaking my Vim and bash settings are nothing but a waste of time!” I snorted.
Do you know what I did yesterday? I switched my shell to zsh, installed Janus, and moved my blog back to Octopress. It was so much fun I didn’t know when to quit, so I didn’t.
Octopress is a very nice wrapper for Jekyll, but anything ruby related tends to cause me grief. It was no different this time. Of course I didn’t have rvm configured so I started there. Xcode was somehow either too old or otherwise broken and so I would get errors when running bundler. Gave up and updated the ginormous Xcode install and then ran this…
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…which allowed me to finish installing Octopress. There’s something wrong with the combination of having system ruby at 1.8.3 or whatever and new Ruby apps wanting some other version. Rvm is supposed to fix this, but for someone like me who only dabbles in Ruby these days, it’s a pain in the ass.
Converting the posts from my Wordpress blog was made possibly by exitwp which converted each post to Markdown and added appropriate YAML front matter to each file. I know, I’ve gone through this before but this time it coincides with my newfound love for the terminal and text files. Besides, I love having everything I’ve written on this blog since 2000 safely stored in 1700+ portable markdown files sitting in a folder on my computer. I’m using the default Octopress theme with a few tweaks to the header and I like it.
The last thing someone who’s sworn off the terminal should to is change their shell. I did it anyway. After hearing so many good things about Z shell I have been tempted to try it, but up until yesterday had backed away slowly. While tinkering, I ran into oh-my-zsh, which makes getting a fully configured zsh install easy. I just did this…
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The tab completion in zsh alone is worth the price of a ticket.
The urge to tinker with Vim’s configuration can chew through most of a developer’s life if left unchecked. It’s fun and addictive, though. I love finding some obscure setting that suddenly makes one task or another easier. I’ve got a few years into my configuration, and just threw most of it out due to Janus. Janus is a distribution of plugins, key mappings etc. for Vim and MacVim. It pulls in the best of thousands of plugins and configures them in a consistent, simple way. Anything can be overridden, so it works as a nice clean head start. Installation is a matter of running one command…
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I still symlink my dotfiles into a dropbox directory so changes on one machine are automatically included on the others. I could use Git for this, and probably should, but so far the Dropbox sync works pretty well. Plus, I don’t have to remember to push anything.
All of this has been a great deal of fun, and of course I keep learning things each time I go through the process. Onward!
The email geekery continues this weekend.
After using Mutt with Gmail’s IMAP for the past week or so, I’m finally getting comfortable again. It’s been a long time, but Mutt is just really fast and fun to use, once everything is configured nicely. The slow link in the chain now is the network lag when accessing IMAP mailboxes remotely. To work around that, I configured OfflineIMAP and it’s now syncing all of my Gmail locally.
This is great because it kills another bird: Archiving. I don’t know about you, but I get a little twitchy thinking about all of my emails sitting out there on Gmails servers, just waiting for some excuse to prevent me from getting to them. With OfflineIMAP running, every single one of those emails becomes a text file on my local machine. I find that comforting.
Once it’s done syncing I’ll be able to access everything locally using Mutt, and have every change made reflected back up to Gmail. There are a few stray gotchas still in my way, like dealing with Gmail’s annoying Priority Inbox handling, and the All Mail duplicate problem, but I have some ideas there that I will try once things are running smoothly.
A few links to pages that helped me through this process…
http://offlineimap.org/
http://pbrisbin.com/posts/mutt_gmail_offlineimap
http://www.h4ck3r.net/2011/03/13/gmail-backup-imap/
Remember a few months ago when I said that I had permanently deleted MacVim from my machine(s) and was going BBEdit/GUI forever? Yeah, about that.
My recently renewed fascination with Mutt reminded me how truly nice it can be editing text with VIM. So I’ve installed MacVim once again and spent some time tweaking my .vimrc file. I know, the urge to tweak the .vimrc file is one of the reasons I decided to stop using VIM in the first place. I contain multitudes, no?
I’ve tried keeping things to a miniumum this time, but there are some plugins I can’t live without. Here are the ones I’m running this time:
I haven’t used Mutt for email since sometime around 2004. At some point I tired of dealing with attachments and links and too many HTML-only emails and started using a normal GUI email client like everyone else.
This past weekend I was becoming terribly annoyed by how slow Mail.app had become. Every click meant a lag before what was supposed to happen happened. For the hell of it, I thought I’d play with Mutt again, even though I knew that it would probably be a complete pain. I was wrong.
Things have gotten easier in the nearly 10 years since I last installed it. A simple “brew install mutt” and a few gmail IMAP and SMTP settings and I was in. No MTAs or Fetchmail or Procmail or OfflineIMAP. Everything just worked with one quick install.
And then the tweaking inevitably began. I’ve got my keybinding configured to match Gmail. Added lbdb to search Address Book for email lookups. Added some VIM-specific config so that wrapping and highlighting do the right thing. You know, tweaking.
I don’t know how long I’ll stick with it, but Mutt is damn fast and damn powerful.
Since I’ve finally gotten into the Squarespace 6 beta I thought I’d use it to create a proper photo blog. Or try to. It’s still new and may or may not stick around, but why not?
I don’t cook very often. You can tell by the contents of my recipe box. Most of the recipes were given to me by my mother many years ago and have only been used once or twice since. Even so, this ugly wooden box is precious to me. Those cards were handwritten by someone I love and who loves me. They’re permanent and meaningful, and I’ll always know where they are.
I realize that it would be more convenient to use an iPad to store recipes, but I’m not going to do that.
One of my favorite cameras ever is a beat up Olympus OM-1n I picked up on Craigslist for next to nothing. It’s compact, nicely built, and the OM lenses are terrific. I love that camera.
When Olympus started the recent retro fad with the E-P1 I fell in love and bought one. The E-P1 was a nice camera (is a nice camera, I still have it) but lacked a viewfinder. I need a viewfinder. Also, the focus was quite slow. When the E-P3 finally came out things had improved quite a bit, so I bought one along with the very nice electronic viewfinder. I prefer optical viewfinders, but the EVF on the E-P3 is very good. What’s not so great is that it uses the hot shoe, and looks silly.
Enter the OM-D E-M5.
This one ticks almost all of the boxes. If the AF is as fast as they claim, I may just pick one up. I have a couple of really nice m4/3rd lenses already, plus the M-mount adapter for the Leica lenses.
I suppose this means the E-P1 and E-P3 are for sale.
“Technology lets us do things faster and more efficiently; why would we use that newfound free time to do more and more of the same old thing? I’m not just talking about smarter consumption of content like Johnson is– I’m also saying, fuck consumption.”
I’ve been thinking along these lines a lot lately. Something’s gotta happen.
In 2004, during one of my many film-digital-film waffle sessions, I picked up an old Stylus Epic for use as my “every day carry” camera.
Many of the cameras I buy for specific reasons turn out to have been wishful thinking. Not so the Epic. I still carry it in my jacket pocket every day. Most of the lettering is worn off, but it still works great. And it’s still the easiest and fastest pocket camera I’ve every used. It has a very nice lens and would be quite cheap to replace. I see no reason I won’t be carrying one of these indefinitely.