Category: Uncategorised

That TV series pilot we released last week? With the $6000 budget and the cast of unknowns? More popular than True Blood and Doctor Who combined.

yeah, ok, some obvious caveats apply

Yet another linux trick I keep on forgetting…

To display a notification on the desktop from the command-line:

# apt-get install libnotify-bin

$ notify-send “hello world”

obv. “from the command-line” really means “from a script”, unless you’re in some Evil Dead situation of independently-mobile hands

[reason for looking: trying to get xmonad+dmenu to notify me when I mistype a command, rather than just failing silently]

Since I’m spectacularly dim, it never occured to me that I can run markdown from

within

vim. Select your text, run !markdown, and wham! bam! everything is replaced by its technicolor HTML twin.

I’ve been trying to find (for entirely legit reasons*) a decent keylogger for linux. The pickings are surprisingly slim – as one upstart option puts it:

Novice users, however, are usually limited to a narrow set of the following tools:

lkl

from 2005,

uberkey

, which appears dead,

THC-vlogger

, made by a renowned group of hackers, and

PyKeylogger

. All these tools have their pros and cons. Lkl, for example, sometimes abnormally repeats keys and its keymap configuration is rather awkward for a range of users. Uberkey, which is just over a hundred lines of code, also often repeats keys and what is worse, it makes your mouse move abruptly, loosing any sense of control. PyKeylogger, on the other hand, while very feature rich, only works in X environment. Finally, there is vlogger, …umm…, about which I cannot say anything specifically, only that it is receiving low score all around the web and it only logs shell sessions.

I’d add that lkl managed to crash my system within 5 minutes of using it, requireing a hard reboot to get things back up. So I’m currently deep in thinking

surely it can’t be *that* hard?

• reason: I find it useful to have statistics on my activity. Counting keypresses is pretty useless as a direct way of measuring productive work — but it’s a pretty good early indicator of when I’m getting too sleepy or too hyper.

Modern Arab/Arabic fiction — any recommendations? Ideally not something too downbeat or unrelentingly political, and available in translation.

Habermas and Europe — Crooked Timber:

A very considerable part of Habermas’ intellectual project over the last few years has been exactly to come up with a form of patriotism which is distinct from nationalism. Habermas dubs this “constitutional patriotism” – and while it is not intended to overcome existing forms of nationalism, it is intended to temper them, and to make them non-exclusive.

& back to Henry F as himself:

he moment when (if) an actual European polity will be created, will not be the moment when European publics, led by their elites, realize that they are actually Europeans. It will be the moment at which self-interested political parties, rather than arguing and picking petty squabbles about whether ‘we’ should all be Europeans or not, start arguing and picking petty squabbles about what kind of Europeans ‘we’ should be.

WaPo:

Like Washington’s go-go, Baltimore Club exists as a regional sound relatively unknown outside the mid-Atlantic. The music blends the repetitive boom of house or techno with hip-hop’s aggressive posturing and full-frontal frankness (one of the most popular B-More singles is DJ Booman’s “Watch Out for the Big Girl”). What B-More lacks in subtlety it overpowers with shouted hooks, uncleared samples and chest-rattling bass patterns that induce dance-floor euphoria. Baltimore Club allows hip-hop heads to get their rave on.

Still can’t figure out if I like bmore at all, or if it’s just Donna Summer. Suspect the latter