Little Cosmos

I have been using ThinkPads for the past seven plus years. I love the design, reliability and excellent Linux compatibility not to mention the best typing experience money can buy. After three years of 10+ hours/day  and countless trips, my ThinkPad X201 finally started to act up.  Wireless  reception degraded quite a bit, track light is gone and the palm rests are broken and had to be taped to the chassis. It was time to get a new machine as I have some important business trips to attend to and being caught with a dead laptop is a show stopper. Naturally, my target was another ThinkPad. However, I wasn't sure which model was best.  I know I couldn't wait so I had to make my choice soon. My criteria was simple. I needed something light < 3.5 lbs. with a large screen. My peepers are not what they used to be :-).  After some research, I discovered the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon. Of course Linux compatibility was a concern so I scoured the net looking for people who used it

This post is to help you get your installed packages working automatically when Emacs 24 starts.  If you don't know much about packages in Emacs 24, Google for it. I installed several packages and themes but found they don't work upon starting Emacs 24. If I load them manually, they function with out issue.  To fix it, I added (package-initialize)  to the very top of my .emacs file and right after my elpa load path. (add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/elpa")  ;; add elpa load paths (package-initialize)  With these in place, I managed to make all my installed themes and packages available to me right when Emacs starts. No more "can't find this file" errors.

I am an Emacs lover. Here I admit it :-). One of the things I loved about my previous days with Mac OS X, was the Emacs keybindings (shortcuts) when editing text. CTRL-A, CTRL-K, CTRL-E are some I can't live without when editing e-mails and text docs. If you want to enabled Emacs keybindings (shortcuts) in Ubuntu 12.04 (Unity or GNOME3) just open a Terminal and paste the following line: gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-key-theme "Emacs" Enjoy!

At work , I use BIP as a proxy server to keep me on IRC so I can see what I missed and respond to any pings while I was sleeping. As the admin for our instance of BIP, I hated having to restart it every time I added a new user. Little did I know, you can administer BIP remotely if you are are setup as the admin. Here is how to set it up and use it.  Designate your account as admin: Open bip.conf found in /etc (I use Ubuntu) Add  admin = true; Restart BIP More information are in the bip.conf man page. Admin BIP from your favourite IRC client Go to your favourite IRC client that is connected to BIP and type /quote BIP HELP Voila. You are prsented with a list of commands you can pass bip. My favourite is RELOAD .

I have been running Ubuntu Precise and so far so good. It works very well on my ThinkPad X201 including Dual screen support. Unity is solid as a rock and the docking station works like a charm. There are a few rough edges like power management efficiency changing on a daily basis but I expect that to stabilize once the release date approaches. If you haven't tried Precise, then you are in for a treat.

Saw this list of pictures of Syria on the BBC website. Here they are .