Musings of an everyday geek

Linux now booting on the iPhone/iPod Touch, with video.

If you own an iPod Touch or iPhone and you the web at all make sure you upgrade to the latest firmware. I’ve always assumed it was a lack of CPU in the iPod Touch that caused larger and more complex sites to be so slow. Turns out Safari just needed to get fixed.

…why do most CFL bulbs…those high efficiency ones that are going to save the world…come in non-recyclable packaging?

I’m watching the election results on msnbc.com and they’re actually putting the full 16:9 aspect ratio to proper use. Most of the time they shoot things in widescreen but virtually all shots are framed to fit the older 4:3 format. Along with election results msnbc is showing poll closing data on either side of the screen. While the data isn’t extremely useful it is nice to see the space is getting put to use.

If you’ve spent any time at all on this site then you know that VIM is my preferred text editor. Even though I’ve been using it for years I still learn something new about the editor from time to time. Here is something that I just figured out a couple of weeks ago. It turns out VIM provides a simple way to repeat exactly what you last did. By simply pressing the period key, VIM will repeat whatever command -or- text you last entered.

For example, lets say you’re editing an HTML file that has a list of links. Before each link you want to add a generic image. You could do this a few ways; type in the text each time, use a search and replace or copy and paste. Using period is just one more method to add to your toolbox. To use this trick, enter INSERT mode by pressing i. Enter in the text you want to enter before each link (or whatever it is you need to repeat a few times) and when you’re done press ESC. Move to the next line and press the period key. Whatever you typed previously will be inserted to the right of the cursor. You can do this as often as you like but as soon as you delete a letter, line, insert different text or whatever the “period key” shortcut will begin to do that action instead.

Another way to use this is if you’re deleting lines of text over and over. Say you want to delete 10 rows of text at a time until you’ve deleted what ever it is you need to delete. You could press d 10 down arrow and then each time you press the period key you’ll repeat the same action.