lixo.org

It’s probably not surprising to those who know me, but I’ve been caught up in the podcasting craze lately. I get caught up in every craze, no matter how foolish, that comes around in the internets, anyway, and that includes pluralizing its name. Ah, well, what can I do, I get distracted easily by shiny things waved in my general direction.

So, when I was trying to find new stuff to listen to in my daily little-over-an-hour commute, I was having a look around and stumbled upon Joshua Snatcher’s Casting the net wider. So those of you already using del.icio.us, here’s the good news: you have a podcast. Just put a bunch of audio files online, bookmark them with the tag system:media:audio (try looking at all posts – there’s quite a bunch of stuff there already), and you’re done. Here’s my feed, just in case.

I’m not planning on recording anything for now, although I’m interested in the possibility of getting an iTalk and just randomly grabbing someone at the office for a quick interview at geeknights or other even via Skype. Volunteers? Drop me a note!

For a couple months now I have been using my dear old Emacs when doing Ruby stuff (with IDEA and Eclipse still taking care of me whenever I’m working with Java), and I had completely forgotten what happens to your left pinky when you use Emacs too much.

Put simply, it hurts. Lots.

If you have never used Emacs in anger, this cheat sheet might give you an idea: all those capital C’s are Ctrl key combinations, so in Emacs parlance, “C-x, C-f” means holding Ctrl and pressing x and f in sequence.

After mentioning this to a friend who uses Emacs all day, exclusively (and is also one of the finest C programmers I’ve known personally), he pointed me to this little trick he has used for a few years now: remapping the Caps Lock key to become another Ctrl key.

So, for those out there stuck on a tiny Dell laptop keyboard and running Windows XP, here’s the solution I’ve used: create a file named remap_capslock.reg and paste this into it:

REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout]
"Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,1d,00,3a,00,00,00,00,00


Execute it, restart, and enjoy being unable TO SHOUT IN NEWSGROUP DISCUSSIONS OR WRITE END USER LICENSE AGREEMENTS while your pinky thanks you.