Thought I’ve gotten away from it a bit in recent months, tychoish has a long history of being an outlook of lists of various things. While I’m not sure I want to post all of my lists for everyone to point and laugh at, the following might be worth exploring.
This is a list of things I need to get worked out with my new computer, with technology in general. I post it both because I need an excuse to do a little brainstorming, and because it might be nice to get a little feedback from you all. Without further ado:
- Get USB Mounting/Auto-mounting to work more smoothly.
I use USB mass storage devices so rarely that I’m totally oblivious as to how I should go about setting this up with Arch Linux.
- Reformat and server-ify my desktop.
Since I’m basically not using my desktop as a desktop anymore… and there are some things that just don’t work… and there are no files left on it that I don’t have backed up elsewhere… I think it’s time to do a system wipe. I want to put Arch on it. I had thought about putting Xen on it and using virtual machines, but I’m now in a place where the increased management burden of that would outweigh the benefits of that. So I think I’m just going to set it up like a server, (but I suppose setting up a lightweight desktop wouldn’t be a big stress). Mostly I think having a server at home will be useful for testing, development, and othersuch projects. In any case, it’s not terribly useful as it is.
- Reorganize my music collection (now on laptop).
I copied over my music collection and while I’ve had a bunch of luck with mpd, I need to spend some time reorganizing the music. It’s on the list, and I shall do it.
- Straighten out the situation with my external hard drive.
Yeah, no clue here. I hope it’s alright. I’m going to try and use the Mac at work to see if I can’t make it work better. I may crack the enclosure and put it in my desktop once that’s in better working order.
- Acquire accessories:
There’s stuff I’ve had on my shopping list for a while. In no particular order:
- A more suitable laptop sleeve.
As it turns out, I have this backpack that’s great for lugging stuff around, but it’s bigger than I need most of the time, and the laptop padding could handle my 15.4" PowerBook back in the day. Current laptop is quite small, so it’s sort of overkill. This is lower priority.
- Additional power adapters.
The battery on this puppy is amazing. Having said that it’s nice to have a power adapter that can just live in my bag so I don’t have to fuss with repacking the power adapter every time I leave somewhere. I think one at my desk at work, one for home, and one for my bag is my usual complement and Lenovo power adapters are a lot cheaper than mac ones…
- Wireless access point for home.
Somehow I don’t have one. Oversight. Must procure soon. The thing is that I have an ancient 100 foot Ethernet cable that seems to do the job pretty well.
- Sort out Sleep/Wake Cycle
I think I mostly have this one sorted out. Basically, I had problems with the new laptop freezing when waking up from suspend/sleep when the network state upon return was different than when the laptop went into suspend. A little tweak to the ACPI event script, and everything seems to be in order.
- Write Network Management Triggers
I’m using the preferred network manager suite for Arch Linux (e.g. “netcfg”) and it works great, except it’s sometimes a bit bothersome to mange things, when I think it ought to just work. So I think I have a solution: create shortcuts and triggers in the window manager to get network stuff working a bit more smoothly. Now I just have to make it work.
- Tinker with StumpWM contrib packages
Once I got Stump WM working and set up, I mostly abandoned it. There’s
all sorts of cool lisp things in the contrib/ directory that I
haven’t tinkered with. Well, except for mpd.lisp, and even then not
terribly much. I think I’d get something out of playing with those and
so it’s on the list.
- Figure out what to do with the x41.
I’m not sure. The old laptop works, and I feel like I should do something with it… But what?