Improved Searches on Kirkville with Relevanssi

I’ve recently installed the Relevanssi WordPress plug-in, by Mikko Saari, to improve search functionality here at Kirkville. WordPress’s searching, out of the box, pretty much sucks. It just returns a bunch of stories, with no context for the search terms, and no filtering of the results in order of search relevance. If you have tried searching here in the past, you probably didn’t find what you were looking for; or didn’t find what’s really there in all my posts and articles.

Relevanssi solves this problem by providing a relevance-based search engine, which sorts search results on a page with short excerpts and highlights your search terms. (These are options that can be tweaked in the plug-in’s settings. I chose to use 100-word excerpts and yellow text background for highlighting.) You’ll find that searching now is useful here. If you’re looking for specific books, music, iTunes features or iPod tweaks, try entering a couple of search terms in the box to the right and see what turns up. Thanks to Mikko for developing this plug-in; it’s very useful, and I think a lot of other WordPress users will want to try it out.

BBEdit – The Text Editor for Processing Words – Updated

I wrote the following back in 2005, and I felt it needed updating. I use BBEdit regularly, for more and more writing tasks, and I feel it’s one of the best tools on the Mac platform. While I don’t write much code, much of my writing includes code, such as HTML tags, so BBEdit makes it easy to deal with ordinary text and code together. Read on…

Like many writers, I perform a variety of tasks that involve producing and processing words. For some of these tasks, I am free to choose the tool of my choice, whereas others have external constraints that require me to use a specific word processor. And that specific program is Microsoft Word. But many tasks allow me to choose the tool I want to use. BBEdit, from Bare Bones Software, is becoming the text editor I turn to most often when I have only text to process.

When writing computer books, Word is the de facto standard: while you might be able to use Unix/Linux tools with certain publishers, most of the books I’ve penned are built on Word templates, which contain specific styles set up by the publishers so they can easily transfer the text into their page-layout programs. In addition to these styles, Word is the best tool for tracking changes and comments, as well as passing texts through the complex review process that computer books undergo.The same used to be true for articles I write for Macworld magazine. Macworld recently shifted from Word templates to a tag-based system, which allows me to write in any text editor. Word is still the standard for tracking changes, comments and queries. (How I wish there were a text editor that could handle change tracking and comments the way Word does…)

Read the rest of this entry »

In Praise of the Pencil

It can generate megabytes of text, needs no batteries, and has no user manual. It is comfortable to hold, it smells good, and it is relaxing to turn around in your hand as you try to think of the right words. The humble pencil, the forgotten analog writer’s tool, is generally ignored as people try to have the fastest computer and the most powerful word processor. But no tool has more power to change the world: words written with a pencil may last forever, even after the last power plant dies.

I’ve long been a pencil fan, and, even if I’m writing these words on my iBook, I have several pencils next to me. I use them to doodle and sketch, or to jot down ideas as I brainstorm. Much more than pens, the pencil has character: it comes from nature – from trees and the soil – and it is rooted in the deeper subconscious as a tool that has lasted for some two centuries.Pencils don’t need ink; all they need is a sharpener. (And, in a fix, you can whittle a pencil point with any knife, or even hone the tip of a pencil on the sidewalk.) The smell great when you sharpen them, as the musky aroma of cedar wafts up to your nose, combined with the gritty, underground scent of graphite. They are warm and friendly; they have souls.

But not just any pencil will do. I’ve tried out most of the pencils I have come across, and my quest ended when I bought a box of Derwent Graphic pencils, in assorted hardnesses, and eventually discovered the sensual feel of the 3B pencil. The soft lead of the 3B lets me write with no impediments, as the words almost ooze out of my hand. Combined with a yellow legal pad, I can think of no better word processor.

To learn about the history of the pencil, Henry Petroski’s wonderful book The Pencil: A History of Design and Cir*censored*tance is a must-read. Not only does the object come alive, but Petroski’s wonderfully gee-whiz writing style helps you understand the import of such a banal yet powerful object. You’ll learn, among other things, that Henry David Thoreau revolutionized pencil-making in the United States – his father had a pencil factory – before going off and becoming a writer.

Review: The Kinesis Advantage Keyboard

Buy from Amazon.com

(Note: there are several models available; the above link is to the Kinesis Advantage USB keyboard in white, but the keyboard is also available in black, and Kinesis has several other models. Also, I wrote this review some time ago, and some of the features may have changed since then.)

This strange keyboard looks out of place compared to the standard input devices that are supplied with computers today. Based on the venerable typewriter, standard keyboards place the hands, wrists and arms in abnormal and uncomfortable positions. Many computer users suffer from repetitive stress injuries (RSI), which can be debilitating. While there are a number of alternative keyboards available, some which split the keyboard in two and tilt each half, others which move the two parts of the keyboard even further apart, the Kinesis Advantage takes a unique tack by turning the keyboard inside-out.Most ergonomic keyboards use a convex layout where the middle of the keyboard is higher than the sides. This allows you to keep your hands at a more appropriate angle, and lets your arms be more correctly aligned with your hands. The Kinesis uses a convex approach, splitting the keyboard into two wells, each containing half the keys. You place the heels of your hands on the rests in front of the wells, and your fingers move downwards to press the keys. This lets your hands relax much more – you don’t have to raise your fingers to press keys, and therefore use less energy. And the keys themselves in these wells are not in straight lines, but are staggered to match the lengths of your fingers.

In addition to the main keys being in wells, other keys, such as the space, enter, delete and backspace keys, are located under your thumbs. This lets you press these keys much more easily, and since they are very commonly used, it saves a lot of stretching. The command, option and control keys are here as well, but they become problematic – I find it necessary to lift my hands to use them. The command key is about a half-inch too far from my thumbs, and the option key even further. Using keyboard shortcuts that call for multiple command keys becomes rather difficult because they are split across the two halves of the keyboard. Also, the space bar is only on one side – I had some carpal tunnel problems that were partly due to my using my right thumb to press the spacebar; when I changed to using my left thumb, they went away. You don’t have that option with this keyboard.

But using this keyboard is a real pleasure once you get used to it. I immediately noticed a decrease in tension in my chest and neck, probably because of the position of my arms and the way they are spread apart. However, this is a one-size-fits-all keyboard, and I had trouble getting my large hands to be comfortable on the rests and fit in the right place in the key wells. A bit more depth would make this keyboard easier to use for people with large hands.

This type of keyboard is meant for touch-typists. If you hunt and peck you won’t get any of its ergonomic advantages. For the greatest benefit, using the Dvorak keyboard layout gives your hands even more of a rest, since more of the keys you press are on the home (middle) rows.

Some things do bother me about this keyboard. It has a hollow sound, and a slightly stiff action – I like keyboards that are smooth, such as the one on recent iBooks. It’s noisy too, and after a while the resonance of the keys gets to me. It would probably take nothing more than dampers under each key, but the constant click of plastic on plastic is fatiguing. It can take a few days to get used to the basic layout of this keyboard, and even longer to get used to the locations of the special keys (modifiers, arrow keys, etc.), but after a while it feels much more natural than a “normal” keyboard. Since you can remap any of the keys, and program the F-keys to do anything you want, you can set the keyboard up to fit your needs. You can also record macros – commonly used text, such as your name or a boilerplate signature text – in the keyboard’s memory.

Another drawback is the fact that you still need to lift your hands off the keyboard to use a mouse or other pointing device. For a while, I was using a Kensington Expert Mouse Pro trackball, which works well with this keyboard, because it is about the same height – moving my hand from one to the other is smooth. But using a mouse is much more difficult, since the keyboard is high off your desk and the mouse is generally at desk level. This keyboard would be ideal with a built-in trackpad so you could work without any extraneous movement.

This keyboard is pretty big – it’s 16 1-2 inches high and 8 inches deep, and stands pretty high as well, almost 3 inches. This is smaller than the other ergonomic keyboards I have, but only because of the lack of a numerical keypad (which is accessed by pressing a special key and typing on the right side of the keyboard, similar to the way PowerBooks and iBooks work). But it seems bigger, perhaps because of the wider space between my hands.

One other advantage is the presence of two USB plugs underneath the front end of the keyboard. You can plug a mouse and another device into these plugs, saving you from using a hub and keeping the wires out of the way.

The Kinesis Advantage is not cheap, but for people who type a lot and either have RSI or want to prevent it, it’s an investment that will be recouped very fast. I know several translators who swear by this keyboard and wouldn’t give it up for anything. The only real difficulty is taking the plunge and committing yourself to it. Like when you buy new shoes, it feels very strange at first, but once you get used to it you may never want to turn back.

The Joy of Travel in the Digital Age

Guest post by Rob Griffiths, webmaster of Mac OS X Hints, and author of Mac OS X Power Hound.

Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking about Mac OS X (one of my favorite subjects) at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco (thanks to everyone who came to my sessions!). Since I live in Portland, Oregon, I had to pack for a plane trip to the ‘big city.’ That’s when the fun began…Traveling has become a much more complex endeavor than it used to be. A decade ago, packing for a three-day business trip would require nothing more than insuring that you had sufficient clothes in your bag, the required personal care items, and perhaps your address book and maybe even a calculator. But that was about it.

Packing today, especially if you’re giving a presentation, is a whole different ballgame…

First, you need to make sure that you’re reachable, anytime, anywhere. So that means the cell phone makes the trip. And if it’s a trip of any length, you’ll also want to take your cell phone charger. Items one and two, check; I got both things ready to go in the bag.

Next, you’re probably going to need access to your address book, schedule, open to-do’s, voice memos, and all of the other nuggets of wisdom hiding in your PDA. And again, if you’re going for any length of time and have a PDA with a rechargeable battery, you’ll want to take the PDA’s charger as well. For me, that’s a dock with attached cable. Items three and four, into the bag.

Read the rest of this entry »

Unleashing the Power of the PowerMate

Buy from Amazon.com

I have always had mixed feelings about gadgets. I like the cool factor inherent in some of them, but I tend to find that the cooler they look, the less useful they are. So I rein in my gadget-buying impulse, and try to purchase only those that are both cool and useful.

Sometimes it’s hard to find whether a given gadget is useful. If a friend or colleague owns one, you can try it out; if you see it on display in a store, you can give it a whirl. But some gadgets are hard to find – especially here in my Alpine village, where mail-order is my only option.

When Griffin Technology’s PowerMate came out in 2001, there were lots of articles saying how cool it was, including a mention in the traditional TidBITS Macworld Expo Superlatives article. The coolness is clearly visible – an attractive brushed aluminum knob/button, taken from the most minimal of stereo designs, sits atop a thick layer of translucent plastic with a soft blue light pulsing beneath it.However, cool is one thing, but not one of the articles I read, nor the manufacturer’s Web site, did a good job of describing how I might apply the PowerMate to my everyday tasks. This brief article is intended to do just that – you’ve gotten a gist of how cool it looks, so let me tell you how I have been using this gadget for the last week, and why it will most likely remain by my keyboard for a very long time.

Setting It Up

Setting up the PowerMate is a breeze. It connects to a USB port via a short USB cable, about 18 inches (48 cm) long, but also comes with a 40-inch (101 cm) extension cable if you need to connect it to a computer farther away.

You configure the PowerMate via a preference pane under Mac OS X or a control panel under Mac OS 9. When you open its preference pane, you see four sections: Setting, Action, Pulsing, and Long Click Length. The first section, Setting, lets you choose for which applications you want settings to apply. The PowerMate doesn’t do much – you can rotate it (right and left), click it (press the button), use a long click (press and hold briefly), or click and rotate (right and left). That gives you a total of six actions, each of which can tell your Mac to do one of several things: rotating can raise or lower volume, scroll up or down, move the cursor left or right, move the cursor up or down, or (and here’s the most important) invoke a key combination; clicking can invoke a click or a double-click, mute the volume, open a file, or send a key combination. Choose which action you want to program, choose what you want it to do, click Apply, and it’s set.

The PowerMate also works as a power button – you can use it to turn on compatible Macs. This can be useful for those with keyboards that lack power buttons and whose computers live under their desks.

To help you get started, the PowerMate driver comes with presets for a handful of applications. For example, in iTunes, rotating the knob raises or lowers the volume, and clicking it pauses playback. For iMovie, it is set to work as a jog and shuttle controller. For most other applications, it is set to scroll up or down, but you are free to change these settings, add applications, or delete any of the predefined applications’ settings.

You can also adjust settings for the length of a long click (since the PowerMate software sends its actions when the button is released, you can adjust the long click length from 0.5 to 4 seconds). Finally, you can change the pulsing speed of the two blue LEDs beneath the knob – a feature that was frequently requested shortly after the PowerMate began shipping. One thing to note is that Unsanity Software has released a free CPU usage monitor, called Cee Pee You, which lives in the Mac OS X menu bar and can also indicate CPU usage via the PowerMate, so, for example, you can have it pulse faster or slower, or change brightness, according to your CPU usage.

Putting the PowerMate to Work

None of the above would have been enough to convince me to buy a PowerMate (which retails in the U.S. for $45; I paid 79 euros for mine). What would have been useful, though, is a clear explanation of how this gadget can be applied in everyday use. So, here are some examples of how I have programmed my PowerMate.

• Microsoft Entourage: One of the most common actions I perform in Entourage is to check my mail. So, I set the click to Command-K (Send and Receive All). I’ve kept the right and left rotate settings to scroll – the PowerMate’s scroll is much smoother than pressing the spacebar and moving down one screen at a time. It is also easier than using a scroll wheel on a mouse – I have found that with the PowerMate under my right hand and my trackball under my left hand, I can do much more, and do it more easily.
• Microsoft Word: I use the PowerMate to scroll within Word documents, and I set the click to Command-F6, which cycles through windows. When I long-click the PowerMate, Word saves my current document.
• Safari: In addition to scrolling, I click the PowerMate to invoke Command-Shift-Right Arrow to cycle through open tabs.
• NetNewsWire: This news gathering application has changed the way I receive news, and the PowerMate is a welcome addition. Command-G goes to the next unread news item, which I now access by rotating the PowerMate to the right. When I click-rotate to the right, I invoke Command-K to mark all items in a feed as read. I set the normal click to the Return key, which opens the item in NetNewsWire’s browser.
• Terminal: What, use a multimedia knob to control the command line? Absolutely. I set the PowerMate to emulate the up and down arrow keys when I click and rotate, letting me scroll through my command history quickly. Clicking maps to Return, which runs the selected command. Rotating normally scrolls the window up or down.

Power, Mate

These few examples show you how versatile the PowerMate can be. I’m sure others will find even better ideas how to use it; I only wish there were a way for users to share this information. The manufacturer should allow users to post their ideas, but the Web site currently lists only a few tips. If you have other ideas, feel free to share them in TidBITS Talk.

It is rare that I adopt such a new type of tool so quickly, but in just one week I have become convinced that this is an essential tool for any kind of computer use. Have a look at what the PowerMate can do – you might be surprised how practical it is.

(This article originally appeared in TidBITS issue number 653, and is republished here according to the Creative Commons License.)

Read more articles in this category: Tools & Techniques

Back to the Basics: The Hipster PDA

Merlin, at 43 Folders, shows how he creates and uses his “Hipster PDA”, a unique combination of file cards and binder clips, to organize his action items.

Using the Getting Things Done methodology, the Hipster PDA is a great way of organizing your stuff and getting back to the basics.I’ve long been a fan of analog tools, especially the pencil and paper. I feel more grounded when working with them, and I like to see the evolution of my ideas, which get zapped when working on a computer.

In addition, the feel of paper, and the smell of a freshly-sharpened cedar pencil are envigorating, and they help me flex my neurons when I need to.

Far from being a Luddite, I’m all in favor of any way of simplifying things we do that have been complexified by technology. Any suggestions for other ways to simplify life?

Read more articles in this category: Tools & Techniques