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Recently I am experiencing RSI (repetitive strain injury) related pain in the left hand. I must find some way to fight it and would appreciate your comments.

MacBook Pro is what I am using these days. This both sets the environment in which I am trying to help RSI-related symptoms and is also partially a reason why RSI has become more intense.

Contrary to many other reports I am not experiencing problems with the mouse-holding right hand. Perhaps this is because I am a keyboard user and avoided using mouse for file navigation tasks on Windows thanks to the FAR Manager (an advanced file manager similar to Norton Commander).

What I found out after moving to a Mac is that the left hand gets more stress because of keystroke combos like Cmd-W, Cmd-’, Fn-Bspace, Fn-Shift-Up, etc. These require hand to be moved out of the normal typing position and moving fingers into multi-key combos which make the hand hurt more. Maybe it is also something in ergonomics of the keyboard or something else is different between the way I work with this notebook and the previous one (IBM ThinkPad R40).

Anyhow, need to find some way to fix this. There is software that makes you take regular breaks, which helps with typing tasks. But even more important in this situation would be to offload the left hand from frequent shortcut combos (but unfortunately the left part of the keyboard is where the only set of Fn, Ctrl, Opt keys is located). How would you solve this? What other things might help?

Aaron writes about running filtr on Maemo/Nokia N810 (filtr is software for applying filters to images). Some applications he is using include SVN, Python, GPS bindings, ImageMagick. Just quoting bits of it here, due to my interest in the Maemo platform (I have a Nokia N800 and need to put it to better use):

“For a variety of reasons I’ve been using my N810 again, flashing the operating system and reinstalling stuff from scratch. The N810 does not make the Earth move, especially in a world of jail-broken iPhones. Its wireless chip is not terrifically strong, the GPS chip takes forever to establish a signal and the touch screen — let’s be honest — makes you pine for Apple.

But it is a pretty reliable workhorse of a device if you approach it with a measure of tolerance (compassion?) and — especially in a world of jail-broken iPhones — there is an impressive wealth of software already written and/or ported to run with little hassle.”

“Just for kicks a few months ago I pulled down a copy of
ModestMaps from trunk, no less, using Subversion and wouldn’t you know it ws-compose.py ran out of the box. Just like
that. It blew its brains out trying to do Atkinson filtering but otherwise generating maps
and pinwins Just Worked !

Anyway, imagine my surprise when I discovered that someone had
actually gone to the trouble of porting ImageMagick, of all things, to run on the N810. Which got me wondering : Would filtr run
under Maemo?”

DealNews just sent an alert informing that N810 is available for USD 363.-.
Trying to resist temptation to buy yet another gadget.

Mood: traveling to San Jose, CA (in Dublin now, flying to San Francisco tomorrow morning)

Going Solo is a one-day educational conference for freelancers and small business owners of the internet industry and beyond, organised by Stephanie Booth and taking place in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Being a freelancer probably a whole different world. I know people who are successful at their own business and people who are just thinking of going solo but afraid to dive into this [probably] uncertain world. Not done that myself, either.

Conference such as “Going Solo” (which is on this Friday!) should be interesting to anyone thinking of freelancing and looking for others’ experience. XTech 2008 is finished now (it was great!) and this conference is what I would be interested to go to next.

Unfortunately the schedule is too busy and I will be traveling to the Semantic Technology 2008 conference shortly. But all is not lost - Stephanie writes that conference videos will be online - which should give at least some feeling of “virtual presence".

SMS 4x More Expensive Than Data From Hubble [SlashDot]

“Physorg has a paper comparing the cost of text messaging versus the cost of getting data from Hubble Space Telescope.

From the article: ‘The maximum size for a text message is 160 characters, which takes 140 bytes because there are only 7 bits per character in the text messaging system, and we assume the average price for a text message is 5p. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that’s 1 million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 5p each, that’s £374.49 [$732.95] per MB — or about 4.4 times more expensive than the ‘most pessimistic’ estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs.” “Hubble is by no means a cheap mission — but the mobile phone text costs were pretty astronomical!"”

Is that surprising?

As heard from a friend working at a mobile phone company shortly after text messages (or SMSs) were introduced: text messages are using the existing signaling infrastructure and had virtually no additional network costs when introduced.

Mobile phone company could have added SMSs at not cost at all but had to set some “symbolic” price to avoid getting overloaded by the tsunami of free text messages. This “symbolic” price is what we are paying now.

P.S. Personally, I do not worry about the cost of SMS messages that much, but would rather encourage mobile phone operators to provide 3G data services at affordable, low price.

Twitter “hashtags” (such as #www2008) have given users an easy way to tag Twitter messages or “tweets".

“Hashtag” convention has emerged from the Twitter user community and is not yet supported by Twitter itself (this was the case with @replies - a way to address other users and engage in conversations with them - which also emerged from users’ behaviour and only later was granted special handling by the microblogging service). This creates an opportunity for external services for using Twitter APIs to create websites for tracking conversations that use “hashtags".

#www2008 is a tag used by many participants of the WWW 2008 conference to tag their short messages. See below for some of these services which will show you twitter conversations and reports from the conference.

Hashtags: www2008 => http://www.hashtags.org/tag/www2008/

This site provides real-time tracking of Twitter #hashtags. It includes a nice “sparkline” showing the history of popularity of the given tag. This is an opt-in service and in order for your messages to be shown on it you must add @hashtags user as your contact on Twitter.

Summize Twitter conversation search => look for keywords www2008 and “www 2008″

Summize lets us perform keyword searches on Twitter conversations, updated almost in real-time. Using it you can find conversation missed by hashtags search. For example, when someone just used a phrase “WWW 2008″ or did not opt-in to hashtags search service.

There must be other services like this. It was interesting to follow conversations on Twitter and occasionally bump into other authors of short messages seen on Twitter. What someone could do now with these conversations (apart from reading them and maybe finding something interesting) is extract and visualize a community of Twitter message authors at WWW 2008.