http://five.sentenc.es/

The basic concept – email takes too long to respond to, and generally the more important the subject, the longer it takes, and the less inclined you are to get around to answering it.

The basic solution – flatten out everything, and respond in five sentences regardless of recipient or content.

The guy who thought this up even puts this link in his email signature, so that anyone who questions his brevity can see his policy for being so terse (rude?).

Would this work? As a general policy, I think I like it. My procrastination threshold is very low, so something that speeds up my rate of important work would be welcome. However, I like to think that there are some people I write to, and some subjects I write about, that cannot be dealt with in only five sentences. To do so would be to treat them with a certain level of contempt, relative to the closeness of my relationship to them/interest in it.

This is a nice little hack for those of you who use macs and need to dive into X11 from time to time, for example if you use the Gimp, Inkscape, or Openoffice.

One of the annoyances in X11 is that shortcuts that apply in the rest of the OS X world don’t apply in X11 (e.g. the ‘copy’ shortcut, ?-C, doesn’t apply for something like the Gimp. You need to do ctrl-C instead, which throws out all your hard-earned muscle memory).

So the trick is this. The Cmd key (?) is designated the ‘meta’ key in X11. I don’t use the meta key for any of my apps. If you don’t know what it is, then you probably don’t either.

We then just map the function of the control key over to the command key, so they do the same job. This means all the normal ctrl- shortcuts work as normal, and all the native application muscle memory works nicely too.

What you need to do is create a file called .Xmodmap in your home directory (or just add to it if it already exists). Enter the following lines:

clear Mod2clear
controlkeycode 63 = Control_L
keycode 67 = Control_L
add control = Control_L

This code maps the Control key to the command key, so they effectively do the same thing.

Now go into your X11 preferences. You should uncheck the ‘Use the system keyboard layout’ option.

Next time you start up X11, it should be re-mapped. Voila.

Note: The code from this came from //extrabright. Many thanks.

A letter to Optimus Prime from his GEICO auto insurance agent

 ProVoc is a good little program for training vocabulary in a number of languages. It works pretty well for Biblical Greek and Hebrew. It’s also free.

I’ve put together some vocabulary files for the 2nd year Moore College Set texts. The New Testament 2 file covers selected greek texts from John and Romans; the Old Testament 2 file covers Deuteronomy 5-7 & 30, 1 Samuel 9-10 and 2 Samuel 6-7. Every word that appears in those texts is listed; they’re unicode and therefore font-independent; and they’re labelled by word type (noun, adverb, etc.).

Hope that someone finds them useful.