Hehehe. This is soooo true.

View original comic at xkcd.

The moment Yojimbo was released I grabbed a copy. I have used it daily ever since. Yojimbo is a very nice tool for quickly collecting bits of textual data in a searchable, taggable, and secure manner. But it has its limitations. Most notably—it only runs on Mac OS X. But it also suffers from a lack of export features :(

As I have move my life over to linux (and open source software in general) I have been in search of a suitable alternative. My favorite, thus far, has been the simple Tiddlywiki. Incollector is a close runner up, but it fails the cross-platform test (it only runs on Windows and Linux, not the Mac OS.) Read the rest of this entry »

That new-band feeling

Using linux feels a lot like listening to an undiscovered band; it’s the new band none of my friends have listened to. When they first experience it they want it. I have it. I feel special. You know the story…

Huh? You haven’t heard this band?! Well, let me show you…their friends of mine. No, they’re not in the iTunes store…they released their album as a torrent. Never heard of a torrent?! Well…

Perhaps it’s the grass-roots community effort of it all. There is a very evangelistic aspect of running linux when everyone else is entrenched in their Mac OS or Windows. Everyone asks “why?” And the answer is usually intriguing enough to start some compelling conversation.

I have been wondering how linux creates that mystique and what advantage there might be in it. Most of the people I show it to have heard of linux, but they have never experienced it. I think there’s something in the experience that gives the initial impression extra impact (beyond simply reading about linux in a blog post.)

Read the rest of this entry »