
Audacity Crash Path To Permissions Hell

In my recent posts I suggested that the names of our less-than-two-month-old twins were just plucked out of think air. Of course that was a bit of a lie, as shown by my wife’s post on the same subject on Facebook. I include it below for the record.
What’s in a name? I have been asked a few times about the origin of our children’s names so I thought I would share it with you here.
Several years ago, when Matt and I were first starting to talk about having children, I had a dream that a little girl came up to me and said, “Hi mommy. I’m your daughter. My name is Edith.” Now, this was not a name I had ever thought about before but it’s the kind of name I like and so I decided that she could have the name she told me she wanted.
Lenore is a family name. It is my mother and my niece’s middle name. It is from “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe.
We knew both babies would have their father’s last name and not mine so we decided to stick with a British theme for names. Arthur is simply a name we liked a lot. We then went to Wikipedia and found a bunch of Arthurs throughout history and fiction that we both found intriguing. Chief among them Arthur Conan Doyle, Art Garfunkel, Arthur Miller and Arthur Dent. Bonus: Harpo Marx’s first name is actually Arthur.
Elliott (double L, double T) is for Elliott Smith, my beloved songbird. If you know me a little bit then you know how important this artist is to me. It seemed fitting to name my son after him. Well, middle name at least.
And there you have it. Two kids, four names, the weight of history on their young shoulders.
People have asked where we got the names for our children from. The answer is, just around the place, but here’s a list of various people and entities with the same names.
People have asked where we got the names for our children from. The answer is, just around the place, but here’s a list of various people and entities with the same names.
I work a lot on my laptop when out on business, and I find that not having an app key (also known as the “right-click menu” key – although that is misleading) is a right royal pain. I like to use the keyboard as much as possible, and the trackpad is terrible.
I noticed this problem when I was going through some emails on my work laptop and marking them as done (I use the ‘Flagged completed’ function to make them disappear from my main folder). I wasn’t using the mouse, so I was using the up and down arrows to select an email, then hit AppsKey > U > M to mark the email complete.
That is, I would have done if my laptop had an app key. Without one, I had to use the mouse/trackpad, which meant taking my hands off the keyboard. I’m no touch-typist, but it was annoying.
“But surely”, you say, “can’t you just use the right trackpad button on the laptop, which is right there by the keyboard and does the same thing?”
First, let’s be clear about the difference between right click and the app key. They are not the same, but they are related:
This meant that if I was relying on the cursor to select items in the email list, moving up and down with the cursor keys, and not looking at the location of the mouse pointer, I needed the Apps Key, otherwise just hitting the right-click button would bring the menu up in the wrong place, and to avoid that I would have to move my hands from the keyboard, move the mouse, and it’s just a whole thing.
I found a solution in the form of AutoHotkey, which was always being plugged by the folks over at Lifehacker. AutoHotkey provides
Fast scriptable desktop automation with hotkeys
and
a scripting language for desktop automation
and it solved my problem easily. I installed it, and just added the following line to the default script:
Capslock::AppsKey
All this does is remap the Caps Lock key (which I never use) to the App Key, so that now on my laptop I can easily bring up the app menu without using the mouse.
In addition, I added these lines:
^;::send %A_YYYY%-%A_MM%-%A_DD%
^+;::send [[%A_YYYY% %A_MM% %A_DD% %A_DDD%]]
These are extra. The first line just expands the very useful Excel and Access functionality of inserting today’s date with Ctrl+; across the whole of Windows. The second line does the same, but wraps the date in double square brackets to easily insert a valid date wiki link in my TiddlyWiki. Of course, the date is in ISO-8601 format to avoid confusion.
AutoHotkey is very powerful and useful, and these examples barely even touch the surface, let alone scratch it. Highly recommended.
[This was posted on my company’s internal intranet, hence the dry tone. But hey, content is content.]
I am always trying to find ways to manage my to-do list. I’ve tried various methods, including paper, Outlook, Google, and various phone apps, with varying amounts of success. Recently, I think I have found a method that seems to be working better than most. It uses a very simple but powerful tool called todo.txt.
Todo.txt was created by Lifehacker.com founder Gina Trapani, after realizing that many computer geeks were using a simple plain text file to manage their task list. She created a simple set of rules for formatting a plain text file (like what is produced by Windows Notepad) so that the information is structured in a predictable way.
The summarized rules are:
There are some other rules including how to deal with creation dates, due dates, and completion dates. All the rules are here. There’s a lot more to it, including a dedicated Unix command-line tool, lots of powerful filters and so on, but the point is that it is very simple and powerful, with even more powerful features if you want them.
An example of a valid todo.txt file is:
2014-12-22 Submit application @Work +PM
2015-01-11 scan photos @Home +Blog
2015-01-12 @Work draw diagram +DubaiMetro
(A) Urgently buy milk @Errands
X This has been done @Home +Renovations
(A) Call Mom @Phone +Family
(A) Schedule annual checkup +Health
(B) Outline chapter 5 +Novel @Computer
(C) Add cover sheets @Office +TPSReports
Plan backyard herb garden @Home
Pick up milk @GroceryStore
Research self-publishing services +Novel @Computer
x Download Todo.txt mobile app @Phone
The smart things about todo.txt are:
It’s been working well for me. While it allows 26 levels of priority (A-Z), I only use 4 (A-D), and they mean this:
The tool fits nicely with my attempts to keep control of my productivity and workflow, and I highly recommend it.
I used to enjoy posting a video with a fancy generated backdrop based on the video imagery. Sadly though, This Is My Jam has shut down, leaving only the archives of people’s posts. Was it The Guardian’s fault? Implicitly of course, as in all things, the answer is a reverberating yes.
They have been kind enough to set the site up as a kind of memorial, so you can browse other people’s archives as well as your own. Here are a few choice ones:
They also generated a little spiel about each years “jams”. Here are mine (I’ve emphasized some nice or strange bits):
2015: muteboy’s 2015 started strong with “Outdoor Miner (Wire cover)” by Hate Songs. 9 more jams followed it! Plenty of post-punk, new wave, and melodic death metal. muteboy found a rare one: “Burning Bridges” by Wire. People really liked “Good Morning Britain” by Aztec Camera (with Mick Jones). muteboy crossed 75 jams in February! And it all came to an end with muteboy’s final jam: “Rheinlust” by Fursattl.
2014: muteboy’s first jam of 2014 was “Living On The Ceiling (Vince Clarke Remix)” by Blancmange. 18 more jams followed it! Plenty of new wave, ambient, and 80s. muteboy posted a rare gem: “In The Space Capsule (Love Theme)” by Teeth Of The Sea. “It’s Alright (Baby’s Coming Back)” by Eurythmics got a lot of love. “Sequitur” by Steve Hauschildt closed out the year.
2013: The year got going with “Sensoria” by Cabaret Voltaire. muteboy found their eternal jam in August — “True Faith” by New Order. There was a lot of new wave, electronic, and electronica. “Dirty Epic” by Underworld got a lot of love. muteboy crossed 50 jams in November! “Europe Endless” by Kraftwerk closed out the year.
2012: In August, muteboy joined This Is My Jam, and kicked things off with “Never Be The Same” by Ulrich Schnauss. Nice. It was a year of electronica, ambient, and electronic. muteboy’s 2012 came to a close with “Zombie 303” by AGT Rave Cru.
In the absence of the site, I might still post the odd tune on here. (New stuff should probably go over on Both Bars On, I guess). Here’s my first one. In fact, it was the final tune I posted to TIMJ a few weeks ago, but I was playing it in the car this morning, and it put a smile on my face again, so here you are:
This is a followup from this post back in August 2013. The instructions described there no longer work, but this new way is easier and uses an open-source map. That last post got quite a few comments on it, asking for tips and telling me it no longer worked. I’m glad to provide an alternative.
I’ve recently needed to create large map images again, so I looked around for a new solution. I found it in the wonderful community around OpenStreetMap. From the About page:
OpenStreetMap is built by a community of mappers that contribute and maintain data about roads, trails, cafés, railway stations, and much more, all over the world.
Local Knowledge
OpenStreetMap emphasizes local knowledge. Contributors use aerial imagery, GPS devices, and low-tech field maps to verify that OSM is accurate and up to date.
Community Driven
OpenStreetMap’s community is diverse, passionate, and growing every day. Our contributors include enthusiast mappers, GIS professionals, engineers running the OSM servers, humanitarians mapping disaster-affected areas, and many more. To learn more about the community, see the user diaries, community blogs, and the OSM Foundation website.
Open Data
OpenStreetMap is open data: you are free to use it for any purpose as long as you credit OpenStreetMap and its contributors. If you alter or build upon the data in certain ways, you may distribute the result only under the same licence. See the Copyright and License page for details.
I particularly like the “free to use” bit, and because it’s free, people have built some amazing tools that extract and format the data in useful ways. All we want is a big exported image of a certain area, so here are the steps.
Open data, people creating free tools, it’s great. If you have need for maps in your business, check out Switch2OSM for information about using this stuff commercially.
I’m using these maps to semi-automatically generate cover art for my podcast, The Coiled Spring. Check out Episode 15 here.
Cassie and I moved into our new apartment in Abu Dhabi on Friday, bringing to an end a far-too-long period of living out of suitcases in hotel rooms. Our new place, on the 15th floor of the Capital Plaza building, has a view of the Arabian Gulf, two bedrooms, four bathrooms (yes) and tiled floors throughout. The Capital Plaza building complex contains the fancy Sofitel, has five towers (hotel, office, three residences), and looks like it was designed by Ivo Shandor. I’ll be posting some photographs soon.
Four bathrooms in the American sense. two bedrooms, each with an en-suite, one “powder room” or “cloak room”, and one bathroom off the maid’s room (yes), which we’re using to store boxes.
There’s a lot more to write about obviously, because the last couple of months have been a real rollercoaster. More to come. In the meantime, I will leave you with a new word I learned today: