Avi Freedman's Tech and Biz Topics

on internet plumbing, gadgets, nerd herding, and other related topics

Sprint Epic 4G Is Great!

More details coming soon but this phone is great…

Reasonable battery life (vs Evo). Will still probably want a fattery but it is pretty slim, great keyboard feel, great screen, fast enough, 4g w/ hostpsot is great.

I still have to use a blackberry as my main device; too much mail to delete without a del key, though I’ll poke around Android mail apps again at some point.

New freedman.net Site, Based on Jekyll

I’ve been lazy and haven’t updated my site regularly for some time. The old site is here.

For some time I’ve wanted to start blogging, but as is often the case, when I start looking at the popular software it all seems like a major time commitment to make it do what I really want. I came closest with WordPress, where I spent some energy on code, and blogspot (protosite here), which looked simple enough and easy to extract the content from later. I was really itching to write something simple to get started, but didn’t have the plan in my head.

Lenovo X21s Is a No

I wanted to see if the claim was true but alas, no – with my usual load of hundreds of Chrome tabs, Trillian, Skype, and a few SecureCRT tabs, the x21s with extended battery only got ~3 hours, not the 7 hours or so that some of the reviews claimed it might get under load.

Oh well, back it goes. It might be a keeper if I didn’t like the Vaio Z better for resolution, form factor (usability in coach), and built-in broadband and the Vaio X better for massive battery life with usable resolution.

Stripmime (for Text Dinosaurs)

I’m a dinosaur. I like vi, elm, screen, and ssh. I should use mutt but mutt is NOT just like elm and I don’t really need IMAP. But mutt’s handling of MIME isn’t so great, and in general if I’m not online for real I won’t be looking at attachments anyway, though catdoc is still fun for catching the occasional Word doc that wasn’t Save-as’d and still has all of the revisions in it.

So what’s one to do?

I’ve been using stripmime for about 10 years.

Bubba and Zehda Passed Away (Eulogy)

My mother’s parents, my Bubba and Zehda, passed away 6 hours apart in Holy Redeemer’s hospice on June 13th and 14th. Zehda had lung cancer for years and was able to survive an aggressive round of chemotherapy. His cancer started growing again late last year.

Bubba had been in and out of the hospital for the last few years for a yearly tune-up with interrelated heart and lung problems, but amazingly, she developed abdominal cancer of unknown “primary” origin (bad bad news) in April.

She was very insistent that she wanted to economize by having one funeral, and amazingly, they were stubborn enough to pull it off. They both passed away within a few days after checking into hospice.