Friday was my last day at work for the forseeable future. I'm now splitting my time between being a househusband and my personal projects. So far, on the projects side, I'm mostly still working on the compilation of the truly terrifying Grand Unified TODO, which now stands at 3.6K in 170 lines of plaintext.
In other news, one of the friends mentioned in my May 12 journal entry now has a machine outfitted with Linux and Gnome2.6. He and his wife say (repeatedly) that it's far better than the crufted-up WinME install they had, and Abiword and Firefox and Gaim are fabulous, but they are intimidated/annoyed by some things.
The best instance is burning audio CDs. My initial solution was to give them a copy of the bash script I use, which converts from MP3, normalizes, and burns, and all you have to do is type "mixcd" at the command line...but you do have to copy the tracks you want to an empty directory and rename them to set the track order...all of which takes me a few seconds, but which is a major annoyance for them. Meanwhile, all the GUI tools I can find to do this are a patchwork of windowpanes containing multiple filebrowsers, checkboxes, radiobuttons, selection lists, and prefs panels. So far as I can tell, there is no app which will let you drag tracks into a list, drag them around, then burn them. Or even better -- according to my friend -- drag them FROM CDS into a playlist, ripping to WAV on the fly, instead of assuming the user has a central repository of music in their filesystem (he doesn't, and doesn't have the drivespace to do so).
I'm doing my best to make everything work as close to the way he wants it as I can, but I'm still happy to get back home to my ratpoison and collection of little handcrafted utilities. And all this is really a stopgap until they can save up for an eMac, anyway.
