One of the more humorous ad series today is the Geico “caveman” commercials, featuring a caveman complaining about the stereotype of something being “so easy a caveman could do it.” Since we don’t have to worry about offending cavemen (or cavewomen), companies can safely poke humor at that demographic...

Vim’s flexibility and countless features are a major asset for experienced users, but a challenge for newbies. If you’ve always wanted to try Vim but were put off by your first attempts, you can start off gradually by getting to know Vim’s GUI and easy mode. This article is...

Here’s another writing pet peeve — when folks confuse peak (or peek), and pique. Here’s an example of proper usage: I live in Denver, Colorado, so I have a lovely view of the mountain peaks when I look to the West, but my interest is piqued when I find...

After coming back from Linux.conf.au last week (I stayed in Sydney an extra week for vacation) I noticed that the WordPress folks had released 2.1 while I was busy getting sunburned. I’ve upgraded my blog to 2.1 and all went well. Definitely worth a look if you’re the blogging...

Before Vim 7.0 was released last May, I usually had six or seven xterms or Konsole windows open, each with a single Vim session in which I was editing a single file. This takes up a lot of screen space, and isn’t very efficient. With Vim 7.0, users now...

Mutt just happens to be one of the mail clients that sucks less. I’d been getting tired of Sylpheed lately, so I decided to try out several text mail clients and see how they fit my email volume. Part of the fruits of my labor is this tutorial on...

Mutt is a great mail client, in large part because it is extremely customizable. You can tweak Mutt’s behavior and have it do tricks that are nearly impossible to do with other mail clients — but it can be a bit daunting to get started with. Let’s take Mutt...

Vim is a powerful editing tool, but there are some things it just can’t do. However, Vim lets you access shell commands and utilities without leaving Vim, and that lets you perform some amazing tricks. If you run :shell or just :sh while you’re in the editor, Vim (or...

Just reading Mark Shuttleworth’s response to Matt Zimmerman’s summation of the community’s expectations of the Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6.06 LTS release. One thing stuck out about Zimmerman’s comments, that’s the complaint that users still have to use the command line for some tasks. I know, the Holy Grail for...

Vim ships with a lot of useful functions that make life easier when you’re editing text, but Vim is also an extremely extensible editor. If you find yourself typing the same long commands or strings of text over and over again, it’s time you learned how to set mappings...