“Geek of the week” : @sahgeekdad gets down with his netbook.

Feb 01

We had a couple of emails this week with the statement that email still works ( I mentioned something like that in the last podcast ) and we can assure you : It does, and it brings us nice surprises sometimes. Like this email from ‘Wiseguy’ @sahgeekdad who took the KW503  to heart and went all the way reviving his little EEEpc.

@sahgeekdad writes : 

Dear Knightwise,

I am writing this in wordgrinder on my dell inspiron mini 9.  I have installed a basic ubuntu 12.04 system with no GUI and I have been able to get wireless networking with wpa working from the command line!!! I have installed twidge and mc and wordgrinder and elinks.  I am planning to install musiconthecommandline as well as write a couple of little scripts to connect to my home network and to my local starbucks’ network.  i am excited to see what i can get done without a GUI.  Per our Voxer chat eariler in the week, I have created a multisystem USB stick so I can boot Knoppix 6 or crunchbang statler if I need a GUI or want to watch a vid.  This little baby just slips into my bag and I can be productive anywhere!  Thanks for all the help and the great tips.  You are the Jedi Master to my Linux Padawan!

Cheers, mate!
Matt (@sahgeekdad

ps – i just gotta get used to this *tiny* keyboard 🙂

pps – i am sending this from alpine, too!

 

 

This just makes my sliders heart swell with joy !

If you want to be mentioned in a “Geek of the week” post too ? Tell us how YOU turned one of the articles or episodes into reality, to let technology work for you. 

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Wordgrinder takes you back to the (productive) days of Wordperfect.

Jan 29

I mentioned a couple of interesting command line suggestions for a good Wordprocessor a while ago in a previous post. But thanks for the research I did for the “Return of the netbook” podcast, I came across Wordgrinder. Unlike most word processing applications from Redmont, Wordgrinder is not infested by a talking paper clip, and its menu bar has not been designed like a hidden Chinese puzzle that only Savants can solve.

Wordgrinder is also a different league from the  text editors like VIM or Emacs, and is not geared towards code manipulation like Nano. Wordgrinder reminds me of .. Wordperfect. Remember the little paper strip secretaries had taped to their keyboards in order to remind them what function key did what ? Wordgrinder is more like that. Hitting the escape key brings you into the menu bar where you can select all the functions you expect from a real Wordprocessor… from the early Nineties.

But in a world swamped with widgets, buttons and distractions, in a universe where every application at least has one dingdong to tweet whenever you even THOUGHT about farting in the elevator .. Wordgrinder is safe haven of simplicity and focus. Run it natively on any Linux system or access it via an SSH connection to your Linux system from your Mac or your Pc.  Sure it isn’t high tech, but it does the job pretty well. For all those times you need to knuckle down .. Wordgrinder is your friend.

Links : Wordgrinder. 

Install it from the command line (On Ubuntu)

sudo apt-get install wordgrinder

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