Can anyone else relate to this?

A few weeks back, I finally entered the 21st century and bought a smartphone. For the longest time, my cell phone was exactly what it looked like – a phone – and I didn’t have a lot of interest in turning it into something more. The truth is, I usually feel a little too accessible; why invite unadulterated intrusion? Then I started traveling more and things changed. I began to see a smartphone as a way to enjoy more freedom in that accessibility. In other words, I sensed an opportunity to become just a little less tethered to my laptop. I can be responsive while maybe enjoying a little natural light. Novel.

So I looked around. Now we all know that the iPhone is the sexy pick. Check that. It’s the holy-crap-that’s-sexy-as-hell pick. Maybe I’m not sexy enough or maybe my need for sexy is waning as I age, but I chose to live a rebel’s life. Defying the urge to conform, I chose the Blackberry Curve 8330 (yep, big time rebel, here). I made that choice, in part, because I keep hearing about some of the basic features that the iPhone lacks, but above all else, I chose the Blackberry because I simply wasn’t willing to give up my network (that famous mass of Verizon Wireless-gear-wearing bodies that you can probably hear, even now) for a phone. It’s just too damn good. Period.

So anyway, now that I’ve been using it for a few weeks, I thought I’d “publish” my thoughts on the device so far.

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You know what’s really starting to piss me off? It’s really starting to piss me off that the keyboard shortcut for copying text on Windows (and Linux, as I recall) is the same shortcut that terminals adopted for, “Halt, or I’ll shoot!” (a.k.a. “Put down those freaking pencils, now!” and “Stop what you’re doing, mister, and stop it right this instant.”)

This morning has been fraught with aborted processes and I needed a moment to voice my discontent. Thanks for tuning in.

At home I’m completely wireless. My OCD gets tweaked by cords, so I’m Bluetooth and 802.11g all the way. My minimalistic skills are so advanced that I sometimes lament the need for a power cord. If I didn’t need power, my desk would be positively pristine.

For the last several months, I’ve noticed that my wireless network is no longer auto-detected when I boot up or whatnot. I can’t be sure exactly when it happened beyond knowing that it’s been a problem “for a while now” so I have no way of knowing what triggered it. The end result is that all of my apps start up (and try to connect) before I’m connected and errors are thrown. Oh, and that I have to sit and wait while all of the wireless networks in range are sought out and detected.

Although it’s annoying, it hasn’t been so annoying that I’ve been willing to invest a lot of (read: any) time in tracking down a solution. And, since I had no idea of the precipitating event, I honestly had no idea where to start.

Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.

This weekend I did one of my periodic system audits to clear out applications that I installed, but haven’t used enough to keep them. In the process, I noticed that I had accidentally moved my System Preferences application. I know it was accidental because I have moved it to /Applications/Uninstallers, a directory I created to store – can you guess? – uninstallers for the various applications that have them.

Recognizing that it shouldn’t be there, I moved it back out to /Applications and – gasp! – my wireless networks are auto-connecting again. Magic. Moral of the story: Do not move the System Preferences application. Ever. Or anywhere.

Since upgrading to Firefox 3 oh these many months ago, my Launchy install has been woefully out of step. It’s been an annoyance, but I’m not on my Windows box all that much so it wasn’t exactly at the top of my hit parade. I finally had a free minute today, so I spent that minute understanding the problem and finding out how to fix it (and then another one writing this).

The problem, of course, is that Mozilla moved its bookmark “repository” to SQLite and the data is stored in a file named places.sqlite rather than the bookmarks.html file that has held this data since approximately the dawn of time. Fortunately, a simple change to about:config is all that’s needed to bring Launchy back up to speed.

To give Launchy access to your Firefox 3 bookmarks:

1. Type about:config in your address bar.
2. Type exporthtml in the filter textbox.
3. Double-click the browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML line item in the result set. This should be the only item that appears and double-clicking it should change the value from false to true.
4. Restart Firefox.
5. Access Launchy > Options > Catalog > Rescan Catalog to rebuild Launchy’s index.

Update 7/30/2008: Tweaking this configuration setting also sets Quicksilver back on the right track. I had to monkey around a bit with the Firefox module in the Quicksilver catalog to get it to index properly, but I managed to get it under control after a bit of wall-to-wall counseling.