Although I loved the tiny form factor and take it with me practically everywhere, I was never quite satisfied with the default Xandros Linux and have fidgeted around ever since trying out different options, spending way too much time on the on the excellent eeeuser.com community site, zapping the flash drive with different distros.

Finally this evening I think I found the answer: http://www.ubuntu-eee.com/

Slick, easy to install, great looking, and of course a proper operating system under the hood. Props to the team who put this together, it’s terrific. If you have one of these little beauties yourself, I highly recommend checking it out.

Anyway here I go clogging up the internet with a post that somebody, somewhere will hopefully find useful.

Are you that person? Well… have you ever used the shell command curl to fetch a web page? It’s cool, isn’t it, but you do end up with a splurge of ugly HTML tags in your terminal shell:

Eugh!

So… how about we parse that HTML into something human-readable?

Enter my new friend, w3m, the command-shell web browser!

If you’re using OS X, you can install w3m using darwinports thusly:

sudo port install w3m

Linux hackers, I’m going to assume you can figure this out for yourselves.
So, with a brand-new blade in our swiss-army knife, let’s pipe the curl command into the standard input for w3m and see what happens:

Hmm… two problems here: because I’ve grabbed its output and piped it off to w3m, curl has started blethering on about how long it took. I can fix that with swift but ruthless the flick of a -s switch to silence it. How about all that raw HTML though – I thought this w3m thing was supposed to parse my html, not just regurgitate it?

It turns out that w3m assumes its input is of MIME-type text/plain, unless told otherwise. Let’s set the record straight:

Aw yeah. Now we’re talking. Old-skool green-screen meets nu-school interweb. It’s like being back on the BBS network of yore.

What’s the point of all this? Well, that’s up to you. I have a couple of ideas, but you’re going to have to start coming up with your own you know. Why are you reading this anyway? Haven’t you got anything better to do?

If you have a unix/linux/apple machine handy, or have at least had the sense to instal cygwin or coLinux on your quaint old PC, then give this a rumble.

Prepare a file with the inclusion / exclusion rules for the files / folders you want to copy. For my solution, it looks like this:

• *.cs
• **/lib/.
• *.csproj
• *.sln
• *.resx
• *.jgp
• *.gif
• *.gif
• *.aspx
• *.ashx
• *.js
• *.ascx
• *.config
• *.xml
• *.txt
• *.html
• *.htm
• *.dbp
• *.sql
• */
• *

There are a few fascinating points to note about this file:

• The lines that begin with a ‘+’ character are include rules.
• The second line copies anything in a /lib folder, which is where we keep dependencies in my world
• The second-to-last line tells rsync to copy every folder. Without this, the last line would exclude all the folders (rsync works its way through the folder tree recursively) and you’d never get to the files you’d mentioned above. Read that bit again, it’s hard to understand at first, but important.
• The last line excludes everything else.

Now fire up your terminal, and invoke the magic of rsync:

rsync -av –exclude-from=files.txt source/Projects/Widgets/ target/Projects/Widgets/

Which means

• copy all files (recursively)
• write verbose output

And there you have it. Yet more unix joy.

Until now. Todo.txt is a series of command-line scripts for slicing and dicing a text-based todo list. If you stick to a few conventions, you can use the scripts to suck out relevant information as and when you need it. Combined with the humble yet awesome power of the bash shell’s pipe, there are a multitude of ways you can shove your action lists in front of your lazy face. Trust me, if you keep or have ever kept your lists in a text file, you owe it to yourself to check the site out.

Something I always wanted to do with kGTD but never managed to in satisfactory manner was to sync my digital lists to index cards for perusing whilst (gasp!) off-line. Enter linux’s lp command:

todo.sh list | lp -o PageSize=Custom.3x5in -o page-top=10 -o page-bottom=10 -o page-left=5 -o page-right=5 -o lpi=8 -o cpi=15

See here for an explanation of all those crazy lp options.

I just love this stuff. Sometimes it’s almost as good as being back at the terminal of my faithful BBC Micro.

What I didn’t really consider is… and I bet you’ve already guessed it, dear reader: the piddly-poor upload speed on my ADSL connection. Quoted at 448 Kbps, by my reckoning that means I’ll get about 3.3GB up the wire in a 24 hour period… which means we may be here for quite some time. Better turn off that pesky Windows Update.

The nice thing is that, because I’m using rsync, once the initial sync is done, only the changes to files will be uploaded, so traffic should drop back to normal… some time in 2008.

Note to other linux-naive cygwin users out there. If you want to install the ssh command, look for the package called ‘openssh’. No amount of staring at the packages squid and ssmtp is going to make it appear where you might expect it to.