Category: Legacy

Posted on by lhl
Posted on by lhl

I’ve switched pretty much exclusively to using Apple’s Mail.app for day to day mail reading. For the most part, it’s a pretty good experience. It definitely handles both Courier and Sun IMAP better than Mozilla (only Courier gotcha is manually setting the INBOX prefix). There are a couple things that really bug me however:

  • Not being able to filter by unread, custom flags; this is incredibly useful in Moz/TBird
  • No advanced search; pretty lame
  • No keyboard shortcuts for lots of things (err, expand all maybe?)
  • Doesn’t remember my preferences, for thread expansion, source viewing, etcc.
  • Can disable image loading, but can’t disable HTML rendering completely

Some tools that may help:

Posted on by lhl

reBlog – hacking a simple metablogging system out of Feed on Feeds. I’ve been kicking around the server-side Aggregators that I could find. Feed on Feeds certainly kicks the stuffing out of rNews (and is cleaner as well: all the code isn’t in one big file). I’m in the process of making some changes, including republishing (either as a post or linklog format) and some interface changes that I’ll hope to send upstream soon.

Things I’m working on:

  • Multiple category filtering and visual grouping
  • One-click link-logging (w/ via), reposting
  • Entry diffing/updates
  • Ability to parse invalid feeds
Posted on by lhl
Posted on by lhl

Cory Doctorow has published his second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe. Like his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory’s made his book freely available for download under a Creative Commons License.

Cory has a write up of what he’s trying to do:

The future is my business, more or less. I’m a science fiction writer.
One way to know the future is to look good and hard at the present.
Here’s a thing I’ve noticed about the present: more people are reading more words off of more screens than ever before. Here’s another thing I’ve noticed about the present: fewer people are reading fewer words off of fewer pages than ever before. That doesn’t mean that the book is dying
— no more than the advent of the printing press and the de-emphasis of
Bible-copying monks meant that the book was dying — but it does mean
that the book is changing. I think that literature is alive
and well: we’re reading our brains out! I just think that the complex
social practice of “book” — of which a bunch of paper pages between
two covers is the mere expression — is transforming and will transform
further.

(The comments are also quite worth reading.)