!
! Make caps lock control. Uncomment the commented out lines below to swap
! caps lock and control.
!
remove Lock = Caps_Lock
!remove Control = Control_L
!keysym Control_L = Caps_Lock
keysym Caps_Lock = Control_L
!add Lock = Caps_Lock
add Control = Control_L

[Update: 2011-12-29 I still use my HHK at work but switched back to a regular style keyboard at home.]

I took it to the apple store who checked it and told me to call apple care. I called apple care from outside the apple store and after explaining the situation they agreed to service the computer to tighten the hinges. I got my MBP back with slightly tighter hinges but no where near what I was used to on my MacBook. For the past year or so I haven’t been able to work from the couch like I want.

When apple revved the 15″ MBP I checked to see if the 17″ style hinges had made it in the 15″ MBP. They had. I was crushed and kept my eyes out for a new brand of laptop. I hate running linux on a laptop and windows is out of the question, so I waited. When Apple released the new 17″ MBP I read the reviews. There was little mention of the hinges except that it opens further than the old 17″. I started watching the apple forums for reports of loose hinges and found a lot of reports from 15″ MBP owners. Feeling hopeful I went to the Apple store to see if the hinges on the new unibody 15″ are as bad as they are on my 17″, they were.

That was about a week ago and the new unibody 17″ wasn’t in the stores yet. I noticed apple changed the shipping time on their website down to 3-5 business days. I thought if the shipping time is down they must have some in stores. I went back about a week alter and they had some on display. The hinges on the unibody 17″ are significantly tighter than those on the unibody 15″ and the old style 17″. So I bought one, and it’s great. I typed this from my couch without smashing my fingers.

Thank you Apple for learning from your mistakes (although you should have learned from the old 17″ and not pissed off all the new 15″ unibody owners). The hinges on this new MBP are almost perfect and the extended battery life isn’t too shabby either.

defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool TRUE

I’m not sure why apple made fixed width fonts a preference pane option and decided to leave plain text out. Having both seems seems important to me.

Laptop size has is very important. I don’t like that apple always tries to fit the most power into the smallest package. New style wide screens are great. They are have a nice sharp picture and are great for watching movies. They don’t work so well on a laptop. The display is great but because they are wide screen the rest of the laptop has to be built in a rectangle shape. This makes it more difficult to use when laying back on a couch. There isn’t enough height on the base to put it between my legs and stomach (maybe I need a bigger beer gut). It also forces me to look down further to see the screen which is worse for my neck and back. I had the same problem with my powerbook. The height and width of my iBook is perfect. I just wish it was as thin as and as powerful as a macbook. Everyone seems to be very concerned about making things smaller. Sometimes it’s ok to keep something the same size yet make it faster.

My perfect laptop would be a 4:3 screen with the sharp resolution of a 16:9 in a 14″ screen. It would be as thin as a MBP and just as powerful.

I would like to be able to specify window specific settings to be applied to windows that are created. Things like when the javascript viewer in firefox opens it will be a specific size, always on top, and open at a specific position. These things are all possible in KDE but not Mac OS X. They aren’t so important on the laptop as they are on a desktop. On Mac laptops I have found it works well enough to simply flick a finger across the trackpad to an Exposé hot corner to show all windows instead of having several desktops. When that laptop is docked another profile should load that sets up shortcuts for switching to virtual desktops and automatically moves all those windows to the correct desktop.

• The list is down to
• Window specific settings for on top, size, and location.
• Easy profiles for being docked vs mobile.
• Shortcut keys for most window operations like maximize, close, minimize, and open.
• Ability to map those shortcut keys to anything not just a few choices.

Mac OS X is the current leader for my primary OS choice for portable and docked environment. Once they fix the items above (or you submit comments telling me how to easily accomplish those things) I will be able to run my entire computer life from a single box. Something I have wanted to do for a long time. The end to this quest is getting closer but it’s not over yet..

GConf Error: Adding client to server’s list failed, CORBA error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0
Could not set mode 0700 on private per-user gnome configuration directory `/home/firewire/.gnome2_private/’: Read-only file system
Read only? How did the filesystem suddenly become read only? After some more digging I found that it’s a trick ext3 pulls to try to protect itself. From dmsg:

[4671483.997000] EXT3-fs error (device hdb1): ext3_free_blocks_sb: bit already cleared for block 963080
[4671483.997000] Remounting filesystem read-only

I’m pecking this out from firefox in windows in vmware. Since vmware runs off of my second disk it’s still writable.

Well that’s what I get for using a salvaged drive from a 4 year old compaq. So now I’m stuck. I have a nice SATA disk with all my important info on it. The only problem is kubuntu won’t let me install from that disk without formatting it because it’s using reiserfs. I can go back to suse but that would be a step backwards. I am quite disappointed that kubuntu won’t let me install without formatting the disk. I’m open to suggestion for another distro to try or tricks to make (k)ubuntu work on my SATA disk. I was really starting to warm up to kubuntu too.

I was a big slackware user back in the day but I haven’t seen much movement from that project since the yellow lung granule. I would really like to stick with kubuntu for a while but it’s inability to install from an existing reiser parition is a deal breaker. Fedora has a nice usb stick install capability. I might give it a try. I’m going to sleep on it. I hope this box is still up in the morning

Why don’t you just work? When I copy something from firefox and try to paste it into gaim why do you paste something that I copied from konsole 20 minutes ago? I have set kipper to synchronize the selection and x clipboard. Why doesn’t this work? Why do you hate me? You work from home. With the same exact apps. Yet at work when I need you the most you fail. Miserably.

-Eric

This is really pissing me off. I have tried to switching the klipper options, switching from kde. All I want is a little freedom of choice when I copy and paste. It seems that RHEL has squashed that flat. I want to have the choice of pasting with a keyboard command (shift + insert is fine) but I want it to work and paste the thing I just copied, not the thing I copied 20 minutes ago. It’s driving me crazy. I’m not giving up though. My quest for the perfect working environment will continue (probably forever) but I’m not giving up. I have it pretty good right now bug there are a few more bugs to kill. The clipboard is at the top of my list now. I know it’s possible because it works from home.

One thing I love about kubuntu and what spawned this post is the ipasq package/script. It’s not flashy and it doesn’t have a lot of output but it _just works_. Literally. I have been dreading setting up ip forwarding on this box for a few days because it’s normally a big pain in the ass. After a few minutes of searching yahoo I found the ipmasq package. I installed it and ran it. It spit about a bunch of permissions errors from iptables. Then I ran it with sudo. I was expecting another error prompting for interfaces what I got as nothing but amazement. It didn’t output anything but windows in vmware suddenly started connecting. Never before has it been so easy to setup ipmasquerading. Thank you ipmasq and who ever built it. You are truly great.