81–90 of 122 posts
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Programming is sadly still pretty much text-based. How many characters do you display on your monitor? Could you display as many with a smaller font on a smaller display? I don't think screen resolution is the bottleneck in information transfer here.
I think it is great that it is text-based. Can you imagine searching for code without text?
"I don't use a desk. I work in five or six different places and postures around the house. When the weather's good, I'm outside, or on the porch. My preferred "desktop background" is some interesting view in back of my netbook's rather small screen." This is such a liberating setup. I'm rethinking my need for a home office now.
> This is such a liberating setup. Yeah, it's "liberating" until you develop chronic back and shoulder pain later in life.
I now rotate between a standing desk, a normal desk, a couch (only when reading/exploring - typing here is tougher), and the floor, and all of my back problems have disappeared.
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> I hate to pull this card on you, but what have you done? Solid ad hominem. On a related note, Hess has also taken himself almost totally out of society. Even UPS can't find his place. While it has a very Walden Pond quality to it, I personally include my social life in my "what have you done" list. Modern day Thoreau he might be, but remember that a lengthy git history doesn't make any person objectively "better" o…
When the discussion is individual productivity, I don't think that questioning a critics ability to produce by drawing comparisons to another is, in the strict sense, an ad hominem. Probably not the most civil thing to do, but I don't think it is an ad hominem.
Which is why I prefaced as saying I didn't like to pull that card. I think the OP I was replying to just rubbed me the wrong way with his attitude of "so says the guy using a back-worldly shit 1024x600 laptop with dial-up", like joeyh was some sort of luddite who would be more productive with newer "better" hardware. It stank to me of being someone who didn't even know what joeyh was producing with his setup, and just brushed him off as "not productive", when I really feel that joeyh's example is something to, at a bare minimum, study as an example of what's possible when you slow down and focus on the code and design instead of dual 30in monitors and teh shinee.
Furthermore, GP, yes, worth is a totally artificial human construct; while you may value social interaction more than others, I tend to see developing open source software as being an almost infinite good, as it can improve innumerable peoples' lives, albeit only a little bit at a time. That's the power of software.
It sounds like the new Chromebook is a pretty good solution for him. Or maybe wait a year more for the next-gen one, which hopefully will have a 4 cell battery.
I've been looking for a replacement for my Mini 9 and this seems to be about the only thing out there. Microsoft sure has strong armed everyone to make things with regular HDDs because they needed to run Windows... I actually went into Microcenter last year looking for a SSD netbook, and they practically chased me out of the store, and added $50 to everything that wasn't Windows (which they didn't have the prices on…
Interesting, but not totally unexpected as this is very much in the tradition of Unix terminal users. Never mind that today's "dumb terminal" is probably an order of magnitude more powerful than yesterdays mainframes, and you can fall back to even bigger servers without many problems. But I'm always a bit surprised by small-screen laptop-only users, whether it's this rather charming off-the-grid kind or your average…
5 months ago I transitioned from being a desktop C# app developer for medical devices to a Rails remote contractor. This meant going from a dual quad core 3.33 extreme desktop machine with 3 displays (2 x 24 and 1 21) to an 11" Macbook Air with a 1.7 dual i5. I'm much faster on the air. I have a tiling setup that I can quickly switch/move windows around, it keeps my vision and neck focused and reduces strain to both.…
All my tools respond instantly (with a big enough project eclipse stutters on every interaction, even with an i7 + 16G of ram). And I can code happily on my monster quad core or my hacked up chromebook. This is flexibility.
Like brandall10 I found that the difference in focus is enormous. I haven't connected with my code like this for years. In a modern IDE everything moves, every twitch of the mouse brings up some overstuffed menu or brings up some javadoc summary of somesuch. It is an environment of constant distraction.
My terminal is like a warm summer's morning. Clear skies and not a soul to disturb you.
If Joey is reading this... It sounds like you are living in a remote place. It'd be cool to see a more detailed blog post with pictures. Also as someone who has lived with a flaky dialup connection for a long time recently, I can highly recommend mosh. Setup irssi+bitlbee on a server running under tmux. Then connect with mosh and attach to tmux. This way you get reliable chat and irssi should set the important flag for the window, giving you notifications of new messages too. You can also configure irssi to mark you as away when you disconnect.
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My main gripe with chromebooks is that they don't have a windows key (KEY_LEFTMETA). As a xmonad user, I have quite a lot of functionality bound to that key and I'm not too sure about moving it over to KEY_LEFTALT (mostly because of conflicts with my Emacs key bindings).
Have you tried overloading the search key (used to be caps lock). This key is roughly useless outside chromeos (and I never used it inside chromeos anyway). I am planning to bind that key to my windows-key when I get home tonight so I can use the keyboard to get at my Unity launcher. As an aside, I was very impressed how well Unity runs on relatively anaemic hardware. for running a terminal and a web browser it runs…
An alternative that I've been wondering about is key sequences (M x) for WM actions and key chords (M-x) for all other things. This seems possible to do in xmonad (last point in this blog post [1])
"If it doesn't have a keyboard, I feel that my thoughts are being forced out through a straw." Beautiful.
It's great to be reminded that productivity doesn't really depend as much on the tools you use as some might have you believe. I keep thinking about buying a faster laptop, or I'm complaining that getting fiber is way to expensive where I live, and then I read about someone on an ancient tiny netbook on dialup who is probably way more productive than I am.
How often would this actually help me?
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I assumed that you were referring to compilation time on his netbook, but I guess you were referring to download time over dial-up?
Exactly, now we're both in sync.