Saturday geek scraps

  • One function for a newspaper in the Internet age might be to edit the comments rather than the commenters. Having opinions is quite quick and easy, as is, for some people, writing them down. But ensuring that your comments section is an improvement to the original posts, as it is on Making Light and a few other places—now that is skilled drudgery, of the sort that both readers and writers have an interest in paying for.
  • kill -9 bride No one in this country seems to be following the trial of Hans Reiser, a noted geek1 who is accused of murdering his Russian mail-order wife after a dispute over child custody. The defence is that that his apparent lack of concern and strange behaviour are just natural in a nerd, and not indices of guilt at all. The local paper has been more or less liveblogging the story, though; and the verdict is due tomorrow.
  • I am now stranded between three incompatible note-clipping systems. Zotero is much the best for scholarly research but is clunky and requires Firefox2 running and doesn’t easily share with the laptop. I could waste a day building a database form which would display and search zotero data inside openoffice but there must be a better way, one possibly involving a second monitor.

    Evernote2 has the best tagging system. Evernote3 has a slightly glossier interface and a web clipper that works with Firefox 3 Beta. On the other hand, it won’t import large databases from v2 and wants to store everything in the cloud. I don’t want everything stored there, thank you. There is still nothing to beat Ecco for project management.

1 His file system used to come with Suse linux.

2 Which is written in Clunky++

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