Last day of the Move

Woke up this morning with a exhaustion induced cold, not the best way to start my final day of moving! Here we are again though another move, for the first time ever i’m living by myself until UKvisa pull their act together and let Andrew come stay.

Having always lived with people before the new place feels empty, there is nobody to argue with over where the cups go or what goes in the fridge. I always love that first day!

Michael Geist – The Globalive Decision: Time To Pick Competition Over Canadian Ownership

Michael Geist – The Globalive Decision: Time To Pick Competition Over Canadian Ownership.

I couldn’t agree more with Geist’s call to remove foreign ownership restrictions, but I’d like to see some requirements for communication companies to share cell towers.

Additionally Bell, Telus, Rogers, and Shaw need to be “relieved” of their last mile ownership of communication lines going into people’s homes. Most were built up with public funds, but sold wholesale to a private company. Last mile could be a municipal utility where the telecommunications giants have to pay for the same access as the tiny-telcos like TekSavvy.

The CRTC is excellent at protecting the big telcos, but terrible at protecting the Canadian consumer. The original reasons for foreign ownership restrictions in Canada no longer apply post-NAFTA, and I’d hate to see the big three be successful at stifling competition because all the bad parts of globalization were allowed but none of the remotely beneficial aspects were allowed. We need to increase our anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws first, though.

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Andrew’s Geektool Desktop

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Vancouver Cityscape / GeekTools Desktop

I’ve constantly been enamoured with what keeners have done with GeekTools as seen on Lifehacker, and the recent Mario desktop got me going. The major project was to reduce disk and memory usage summaries to percentages. The hard drive one was easy enough, but the memory use percentage was headtumper. Nobody, as I could find on the Google, had done exactly what I wanted. I did the math fine (didn’t take long), but adding the percent at the end was the bitch!

GeekTools apparently operates slightly differently in shell, so I had to go step by step and think around this one. I originally had the shell line as "top -l 1 | grep PhysMem | tr -d 'M' | awk '{print $8/($8+$10)*100}' | awk '{printf "%2.0f\n",$0}' | sed '$a%' | tr -d '\n'” which didn’t quite shake it. Sometimes the simplest way (which pulls it off) requires some sleep and time away.

The desktop I found using CoolIris — and as much as I meant to save the address I didn’t. I don’t think the image is licenced for distribution, so three cheers for fair use! The fonts are Betty Noir and HaraldSquare.

Vancouver Weather (shell):

curl --silent "http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/forecastrss?p=CAXX0518&u=c" | grep -E '(Current Conditions:|C<BR)' | sed -e 's/<br \/>//' -e 's/<b>//' -e 's/<\/b>//' -e 's/<BR \/>//' -e 's/<description>//' -e 's/<\/description>//' | tr -d "\n" | sed -e 's/:/ : /' -e 's/Current Conditions/Vancouver Weather/'

Day Name (shell):

date +%A

Date (shell):

date +%d

Abbr. Month (shell):

date +%b

Time (shell):

date "+%l:%M %p"

Text (shell):

echo HdMr

Hard Drive Usage as Percent (shell):

df / | awk '{print $5}' | sed -e 's/Capacity//' | tr -d "\n"

Memory Usage as Percent (shell):

top -l 1 | awk '/PhysMem/ {printf "%2.0fper",$8/($8+$10)*100}' | sed -e 's/per/\%/'

Andrew and Mark

Your Authors

Andrew and Mark

Andrew and Mark