Weekend Nonding

I have a couple of old computers sitting around, gathering dust, so I decided to do something with them over the weekend.

KODI

I’ve been curious about what these media servers like Plex and the rest were about. Besides, I have a bunch of old movies, on an HDD, completely sidelined by Netflix and Amazon Prime. So I installed Kodi and indexed the movies on the hard disk and wow! It pulled all the movie data, including the IMDB overviews and thumbnails, and now I have a Netflix kinda thing but for movies on the hard disk. I couldn’t figure out how to stream it on my TV, though. That’s a project for another weekend.

Swapping CAPSLOCK with CTRL

I also have an old laptop with 16GB of RAM just gathering dust. It has some problem with the display going off if it is jostled and it had Windows on it, which I formatted and loaded with Mint running XFCE. I don’t expect to use this machine much, so I did something I’ve always wanted to try — mapping the CTRL key to CAPSLOCK.

I wouldn’t dare do this with my work machine because I’ve three decades of muscle memory that would sit up and slap me silly, but no harm trying it on a machine I’ve set up for experimenting. It’s quite a useful swap, actually, especially for working in Emacs but also a drastic change, because it would affect the entire OS, but then… I discovered god-mode.

God-Mode on Emacs

I’ve been curious about modal editors. I’ve always wondered what the hype was about. Since I’m not a programmer, I don’t really need to have a separate mode for inserting text and one for editing it. I assume programmers find it useful because their edits are of a quicker kind than the edits writers have to make, and I have a habit of editing as I write, which is probably not good practice, but it is what it is.

So anyway, I was reading an article about someone waxing eloquent about the beauty and joy of modal editors, and decided to try it out for myself. EVIL for Emacs is too much change, and while Meow seemed like less of an investment, it also seemed like overkill for idle curiosity. Finally, I settled on god-mode.

I can see the attraction now. It’s cool in that, I don’t have to keep reaching for the modifier keys, and after just a little while, I started using it intuitively. It’s still idle curiosity, but I’m keeping this one because it could be useful.

Good night.

* Nonding is Tamil slang for tinkering. I think.