Thursday, 27 March 2008

I've never been much of a podcast listener, largely because I haven't gotten my act together and downloaded any on a regular basis, and partly because the iPod is tied to Sarah's iTunes on her laptop, so it's not convenient to go fiddling with the iPod. If I ever manage to get back into the swing of things and get to the gym regularly, I think I'd prefer to listen to a podcast rather than straight music, so I can hopefully expand my brain while I'm slogging my guts out on the treadmill.

Kynan and Shona have both talked about LugRadio events from when they lived in the UK, and I've been vaguely aware of it as a podcast (it's probably the first podcast I'd name if you asked me to name one). I vaguely knew that Kynan had been trying to organise something LugRadio related in the Valley for a while now.

Well, it turns out he's succeeded, and it's good to see he's gotten some credit for it as well. Onya Kynan!

So I got all excited when I went and looked at the schedule and discovered it was going to be something vaguely like a mini-linux.conf.au, I scurried off and bought a couple of tickets. Then Sarah pointed out that it's the weekend that we're going to San Diego for a four-day weekend. Oh well, at least the tickets were pretty cheap.

So, if, unlike me, you'll actually be in the Bay Area on April 12th and 13th, check it out, it sounds like it'll be fun.

I switched from Pine to Mutt as my primary email client around the time I decided to become a Debian developer, because Pine's PGP support was abysmal (it also beat building Pine packages by hand all the time).

The other bonus feature was it threaded emails, which made it easier to follow mailing lists.

It's been a very gradual learning process since I switched, and I certainly don't consider myself to be a Mutt power user. I initially really hated it, I think largely because of the concept of "old, unseen" messages, versus "new" messages, and the behaviour of the Tab key. Once I unset the mark_old variable, it got a lot more tolerable. I think at some point I either plagiarised someone's .muttrc from the Internet, or sat down with the manual (or possibly a bit of both) and came up with a config that I could live with, and it's been workable ever since.

One problem I (more recently) started having was that when I had 200-odd unread emails in my inbox, which has been pretty common occurrence in the last couple of years, and someone replied to an email in an old thread, because I wasn't necessary scrolling through all 200-odd emails (as new, unthreaded emails usually sorted chronologically at the bottom of my inbox), I'd miss the fact that the email had arrived, often for extended periods of time.

I was lamenting this problem to Sarah over dinner last night, and saying how I preferred Gmail's behaviour, where the position of a thread in the inbox was determined by the date of the most recent email in the thread.

I figured Mutt must have a sort option to be able to deal with this, and so I went rummaging in the manual last night, and discovered the sort_aux configuration variable. I've set that to last-date-received, and now I'm very pleased. I should never miss an email again. Of course, I should really try practising Inbox Zero, then it wouldn't be an issue.