Further to my post which included details of NovaMind — if you’re looking for some Mind Mapping software and don’t want to spend any money, you should investigate FreeMind. It’s available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux,… in fact any OS with a JVM (because it’s a Java app). It works great, but it has fewer features than NovaMind. One of the nice things about Open Source software is the developers by and large aren’t bothered that users might somehow find out about a competing product and switch to it. In fact they are usually quite open about other products already available. If you take a look at the FreeMind Wiki pages you’ll find an entry for Alternatives to using FreeMind, which lists some other free and commercial Mind Mapping programs. I see that sort of thing quite often on FOSS sites, and it always makes me smile. You just don’t normally see information like that on commercial software sites.

The default key bindings for the home and end keys in Mac OS X are different to any other operating system I’ve ever used. By default, they seem to be bound to the viewport, rather than the line of text you are editing. In a multi-line document, the Home key scrolls up to the top of the document, and the End key scrolls down to the bottom. In each case the caret stays where it was. As a programmer I find this behaviour to be just plain wrong— I want Home and End to move to the start and end of the current line. I have found a way to “fix” this problem by editing the default keybindings file, ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict. Create the directory and / or the file if they’re not already there, and make it look like this:

{
        /* Remap Home / End to be correct :-) */
        "\UF729"  = "moveToBeginningOfLine:";                   /* Home         */
        "\UF72B"  = "moveToEndOfLine:";                         /* End          */
        "$\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfLineAndModifySelection:"; /* Shift + Home */
        "$\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfLineAndModifySelection:";       /* Shift + End  */
}

If there are already entries in DefaultKeyBinding.dict, just add the 4 new mappings above to the main section of your file.

Here’s a neat idea. Take a photo of the wall behind your laptop, then set that photo as your desktop wallpaper. You end up with something like this: (update 2019-02-28 - all the links are dead.)

The Two Ronnies are returning to the TV! I watched Ronnie Corbett host Have I Got News For You a few weeks back, and it was hilarious. Even when he wasn’t telling jokes I was laughing. He could read a tax return and it’d be funny.</p>

Last week I had a sudden revelation, and replaced the 60W incandescent bulb in my desk light with an 11W low energy bulb. Like most people these days, I have these bulbs fitted in many of the lights in the house. For some reason I never thought to put one in my desk light. It used to be too hot to touch within 5 minutes of switching it on, now it runs cool and remains easy to move around. Yes, I know I sound like a bit of a dork putting that in my blog. :) P.S. My desk light is an old original Luxo L-1, with a clamp rather than a base. My father-in-law gave it me when he rescued it from the office where he worked.