I have have a computer question for the crowd.
I’m looking to lay out the design for my next sweater. Traditionally I have done these designs using Excel to lay out the grid and place the stitch pattern. It’s not ideal of course, but I have a copy of Excel and that’s worth something. Now Zoe is aging, and while I still have a copy of excel, I don’t really want to clog up the system to use it, and know there must be a better way to handle this. Any ideas? I don’t need fancy stitches like cables or any of that, just dots for contrasting colors. Cheap/free is preferable.
Another annoyance: Email. I really like email communication, but the software sucks. I like that my email is all IMAP-y right now but mail.app kinda sucks (crashes a lot, lots of overhead, syncs slow and inconsistently). I want to switch to mutt and some sort of mail-downloader combo (hopefully something that uses mbox rather than Maildir formats), and there’s a good tutorial here, but I’m not feeling particularly inclined to get to work on zoe, given the fact that I might only have her for another several months. On the other hand, I’ve found that these UNIX-y/command line type things are much easier the second time. And why suffer longer than necessary. I think moving the mail reading over to a command line thing might make my situation a little bit more tenable.
While I’m whining about technology I’d like to say that I really wish you could move/copy a list of files around in a subversion repository/working copy using a wild card ie:
$ svm move ./* ./archive/
Which won’t work. I think in the next version they’ll implement this, but I don’t know. This might be a reason to switch to git, but I have to say that the complete lack of GUI tools for git concerns. I’m good with a command-line, but if a project is of any size, with any number of folders, and very quickly, it’s good to have a picture.
Ok, I think this post is done.
Onward and Upward!