Re: [SEMI-OT] Applications in a typical ion3 desktop environment

On 2009-01-16, Philip Snowberger <psnowber-b3SXGvC/[email protected]> wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 10:23 AM, Tuomo Valkonen <[email protected]> wrote:
> bought almost an identical x61s about 18 months previous.  That said,
> it's kinda sad that the only reason it could be considered
> 'affordable' is that Lenovo was blowing them out so that they can
> hurry up and end-of-life them (I guess?).

One thing I've been wondering is, whether a widescreen display on
a laptop (not a dragtop!) is actually a bad idea too. And it's the
trend. For most _sane_ documents, the height of the screen is more
important than width. (The Modern Web counts as sheer lunacy. In
a few years, given the trend, it will require triple-widescreen 
configurations for all the advertisements and other crap, yet still
have a single 5cm text column in the middle.)

You'd need at least 15.4" WS (1.6 aspect) to fit a single A5-sized 
document (21cm tall) on the screen without noticeable downscaling. 
Such a laptop is already quite huge width-wise. In 4:3 aspect ratio
14" is enough, and width-wise it's about the same as 13.1" WS, which
just about fits a keyboard without it looking crammed. (I don't 
have much direct experience with laptops.) And a 12" 4:3 is 
approximately as tall as a 14.1" WS.

(A5 is what you get when you print two pages on one A4 sheet, and
anything noticeably smaller than that is too small for documents
that you have not specifically prepared for printing small --
see earlier post. In fact, an approx A4 sized screen -- A4 has
14.5" diameter -- with sqrt(2)/1=~1.4 aspect ratio, which is wider 
than  4:3=~1.3 but taller than 1.6, could be quite nice on a laptop.
The WS laptopss themselves actually have about the aspect ratio of A4,
but tend to have huge uneven borders around the screen. 

> [1] on the topic of mail clients, I haven't seen anybody mention 'sup'
> ( http://sup.rubyforge.org/ ), which didn't completely suck last time
> I tried it (early 2008).  

I've heard of it before and on principle it seemed almost what I've
wanted. However, at least then it suffered from some limitations that
I can't recall now, so I didn't bother trying it. 
I also read mail on a remote computer that I don't control, so
installing programs written in one of the Popular Bloated Scripting
Languages isn't very straightforward.


> it, I noticed on the mailing list lots of Architecture Astronaut talk
> about splitting it into "sup the service" and "sup the client".  YMMV,
> it may be shit by now.

That sounds bad.

> [2] I used to use remind + wyrd with great success and much happiness
> until I started using google calendar+mail for work.  The only thing
> I'd really need for remind to keep working for me is a better backup
> solution for ~/reminders than I had at the time.  Every once in a
> while I think about going back to remind+wyrd.

I use a combination of xmessages and the cell phone for reminders,
depending on the importance of the reminder and whether I should
be near a computer anyway to act on it. (Why can't computer calendar
software be as simple as that in cell phones? Wait! Probably they've
managed to ruin them in them too with increased screen size and CPU 
power.)


~$ cat bin/atxm 
#!/bin/sh

if test $# -lt 1; then
        echo 'Usage: atxm time [message]'
        exit 0
fi

TIME=$1

shift

cd /

(
    echo '(iconv --to=latin1 | xmessage -display :0.0 -file -) << "EOF"'
    if test $# -gt 0; then
        echo "$@"
    else
        cat
    fi
    echo EOF
) | at $TIME


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