I awake to find that Google (cue my dastardly mock American pronunciation: Gugurl) is retiring Google reader, their RSS feed aggregator in July of this year. Luckily my use of Feedly will transition out of it smoothly but I am reminded that I really need to ‘roll my own’ even more than I already do. Got to break that Google habit before it breaks me or at least leads me up some blind alley.
I’m a little dilettantish when it comes to my choice for surfing the net on a desktop. Browser loyalty is skittish at best. The paradox of choice writ large.
This demo of a possible gesture based controller for computers looks more like the delicate art of playing a Theramin.
Me I want to be able to control my computer by wildly gesticulating in ways that, from afar, look like I’m about to dance the funky chicken or feel like chicken tonight. The World’s cubicle workers are going to need more elbow room.
I’ve just added Gnome 3 shell to my Mint XFCE desktop. How messed up am I? A status update for fellow geeks there.
I’ve made me peace with DAB radio. I just think of it as the new AM/MW which adjusts my expectations accordingly.
Image by ehoyer under this creative commons licence
I recently installed the Granola energy management software to my netbook just to see if it would eek out some extended battery life time. Initial results look good and battery time has indeed been increased with no apparent effect on perceived speed or response.
Granola is available for linux and Windows desktops. It can also be deployed on VMware ESXi. It is free for personal use but has a very small cost licence which makes available much more detailed energy controls and monitoring options when deployed across many computers at the same address. Power saving results can be tracked over time via an online account which records your power usage data.
Available desktop stats are displayed in a slightly generalised way with preferences available to show annual or cumulative energy savings.
I’ve always loved the keyboard to get around my desktop rather than a mouse. For those of us who are not yet 100% consuming content via a touch screen (which has its place,don’t get me wrong) then the option to search and navigate by keyboard is a great boon to productivity I find.
My two current faves are synapse on my netbook (sorry open source systems only but there are plenty of equivalents out there such as Alfred on Mac OS X and Launchy for almost all systems).
Synapse – a semantic launcher for Linux
I like Synapse because it makes use of the Zeitgeist engine which logs and learns how you work together with common associations. Sounds geekier than it actually is. I find it a help anyway. Your own mileage may vary.
Gleebox web page navigation
The second software helper is a plugin for the Chrome /chromium browser or Chromebook/Chromium OS. It’s Gleebox. Once installed it enables a quick keyboard shortcut to activate an overlay that lets you navigate via the keyboard. It’s just as easy to type a url directly into gleebox, All in all it helps to move search and navigation to the keyboard rather than the mouse or trackpad.
I heartily recommend them both.
To add the Synapse ppa in linux just cut and paste these commands in the terminal window
