It’s been a while since I’ve updated either of my blogs. I’ve had little time to do much else with my computers lately. I was going to install an OpenBSD 4.4 snapshot on my laptop but that was delayed between a much-shortened vacation, one of the worst respiratory infections of my life, and two hurricanes affecting family and close friends and turning our lives upside down. Hopefully everyone will have power, water, and natural gas service restored as soon as possible.
One quick and unapologetic appeal: I’m grateful my friends and family have mostly been spared the worst of the damage. There are many people, though, who will need assistance getting their lives back together or relocating, especially those in coastal Louisiana who were still recovering from the effects of Katrina and Rita when Gustav and Ike struck this year and destroyed the region again. Please donate to the Red Cross or another relief agency if you haven’t already. These agencies don’t focus relief on any one region or one kind of natural disaster — they assist victims of earthquakes, blizzards, hurricanes, droughts, tsunamis, and other disasters like fires and war as well. The American Red Cross delivers 94 cents of every dollar donated to them in actual services to those in need (much more efficient than FEMA and other government-based services). For the cost of a couple premium coffees, you can make a significant difference in helping those who’ve been left with literally the clothes on their backs.
Back to blogging… One thing I’ve scratched off my to-do list is update sylpheed to version 2.5.0 on my primary desktop. I’d installed the version (2.4.5) from OpenBSD 4.3 packages but it was crashing often, usually when deleting more than one e-mail at a time.
I’ve also compiled a patched version of dillo for tabs and SSL support. I prefer it to Firefox even though its lack of Web 2.0 features limits what it can be used for. Fortunately, most of the sites I need to use work wonderfully in elinks (which remains my primary browser). That includes gmail — which is much faster without the intensive javascript overhead Google uses to slow down users. I use dillo for the rest, and Firefox as-needed.
Most of my use continues to be in console/terminals. I’ve run the same session of screen for nearly a month. In between all my distractions, I’ve had a little time to write new scripts and set up more things in cron.
Hopefully I’ll have more updates soon, maybe even something about actually getting that OpenBSD 4.4 snapshot (or a new one) installed on this laptop.
