Infrequently Noted

So I've been spending ever more time working on my laptop at work (including time on the train both to and from the office), and a couple of days ago, my forearms started to ache when I left work. Something similar happened years back before I moved to an ergonomic keyboard on my desktop box, and so I figured it was time for an ergo keyboard for the laptop when at work. Yesterday, I stopped by Frys (half a block from the office) on my walk from the train station and was dissapointed to find that the only wired ergo keyboards of any quality that they had didn't have USB connectors. My laptop is a Mac, so that wasn't gonna fly.

The next-best option was a pseudo-ergo wireless thinger. I'm not entirely sold that it's the right tool for the job yet, but it beats the heck outta the built-in keyboard on the PowerBook for extended hacking.

I also picked up the new iLife and iWork packages yesterday, and in my brief usage, I'm very happy with the new version of iPhoto. It finally adds a lot of the oft-needed "fixing" controls which kept me constantly going to the Gimp to clean things up. It's also noticeably faster and better laid out. The new version of Keynote looks nice enough, but I so rarely use the old version that I'll have to wait a bit to find out whether it was worth the entry price. I'm more unsure about "Pages", the new word-processor app. I was kind of hoping for something that more easily lets me mess with the templates, but I haven't spent enough time w/ it to know if it's PEBKAC or a real limitation. Time will tell.

For my own future reference:

%> cat > caps.xmodmap
remove Lock = Caps_Lock
keysym Caps_Lock = Control_L
add Control = Control_L
%> xmodmap - < caps.xmodmap


Ahhhh. That's better.

So I'm posting this from a pre-release build of Opera 8, which I'm happy to say sucks much less than Opera 7. Perhaps it'll finally be stable enough to do serious app work with (7.5 was getting close). We'll see. Most of nWidgets functions correctly on Opera 8, but there are some parser issues which I haven't delved into yet (and I'm not entirely sure how much I want to).

In other news, Dojo has finally rendered its first widget from markup. Big thanks to Dylan and Mark for all their help and code. I'll open up some demos of widgets once they are doing more. Wouldn't want to scare off the competition with our fearsome button widget ;-)

My new employer (Jot) has just unveiled the Jot Blog. Huzzah!