[Vimoutliner] biking with a notebook

[Mark S.]

"Vim Outliner User and Developer Mailing List" <vimoutliner at vimoutliner.org>
> Steve wrote:
> Yeah, "replacing" is the wrong word. What I
> should have said is "augmenting". 
> The ,, commands are here to stay.

Actually, there are no ,, commands in my debian version. Why is that? Would be 
happy if someone could tell me how to turn them back on. (instead of \\).

There's just *too* many big laptops out there. Seems like everyone wants to 
have a desktop environment, no matter the cost.  Or maybe manufacturers think 
they can only make money selling large machines.  Just like car manufacturers 
think they can only make money selling SUVs. To me its obvious that there is 
a need for a high quality light-weight machine with lower power requirements. 
Heavier machines tend to disintegrate under their own weight when carried in 
a backpack or messenger bag. They often don't have enough power to provide 
for even one leg of a commute. People that commute, bike, camp, work from a 
coffee shop, do inventory management, meter-readers, estimators, surveyors, 
quality control, bird watchers ... anyone who wants to walk around and still 
use a computer could all benefit from such a machine.

Just went for a 20 mile bike ride on Friday. In the messenger bag was a shared 
OLPC. Booting from a chip allows it to run debian. With practice, I find I 
can type pretty well. For extended sessions, I can plug in a USB keyboard. A 
portable mouse, about the size of a cigar, makes manipulating easier. I've 
changed default font-sizes on an application by application basis so that my 
aging eyes can see the screen. Usually. Ctrl+ enlarges the fonts under 
firefox. A pair of reading glasses helps with the rest. An external antenna 
allows me to connect with sources 30 yards away.  The biggest problem is that 
everything is just a bit too slow. And there seems to be an occasional  
network/memory problem when running under debian.

A similar machine but with more computational/memory power, with all 
networking problems resolved would be the ticket. Some people are still using 
640x480 machines, so its not the end of the world to use a 1380 wide screen.

-- Mark