Lots of little ideas in my head that don't seem to make up a good post for each one, so I'm putting them into on. Be prepared for utter chaos.

  • I read about a compact microtool on the Cool Tools blog and I had misplaced my (larger) Leatherman I carried in my workbag, so when we did a large Amazon order, I threw that in it. I'm so glad I did – it fits very well in my pocket and have used it lot (including using the pliers to fix a broken zipper on my son's backpack while still at school). The size is small but it's really well built. I highly recommend it. Buy it with Cool Tool's Affiliate link. It may never leave my pocket if I'm not on an airplane.
  • I found this video about the history of orchestra hits in music absolutely fascinating.
  • I noted that my alma mater had a story about them on This American Life. I don't have any particular love or loyalty to that place but I am interested when it gets national attention outside of athletics. I went in expecting a story about how backward of a place Nebraska is (which the reporters did do, in a very snarky way) but I left with a concrete story on at what is wrong with political discourse in this country. Highly recommend listening, regardless of your political bent or your opinion of This American Life.
  • For reasons that I may share later, I setup ArchLinux on a Virtual Box machine to play around with. But I couldn't get the video working right – I couldn't get it to use "real" 3D animation but instead use software rendering, which made Cinnamon desktop a bit laggy. After much searching and gnashing of teeth I found this SuperUser answer which basically says that Arch is using too new of a version of Xorg and Virtual Box has no video module for that version. That… .angers me. If this posts helps the Google Ranking of that explanation, then this is all worth it.
  • I think I need to watch this video a few more times to totally grok it but watch Karl Voit's "The Advantages of File Name Conventions and Tagging" to a new way to think about files. His date2name script is now in my permanent install list.