I spent some time recently revamping my zsh setup, something I haven’t really spent any dedicated time with since about 2006. In transitioning to oh my zsh I discovered fasd , a command line productivity booster. Essentially it tracks the files and directories you work with in your terminal, and ranks them by “frecency”, both frequency and recency. You can then reference them with short, usually single character aliases and fuzzy matching.

I’ve generally been a desktop guy for most of my life, but since unboxing a X1 Carbon (pictured left) from work last year, I’ve been falling in love with Thinkpads. I’d had an X230 back around 2011 which was a great piece of hardware, ran Linux like a dream, but it was relatively thick and heavy with a very dim display. I ended up going back to a desktop workstation for it’s replacement.

One of my new year’s resolutions is to be less reliant on Google by this time next year. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, I’m sure many others do as well once we realize what’s involved and why those services are free. However it requires time, maybe in some cases money, and most of all a loss of functionality because there’s no denying Google builds great stuff. In the end I’m generally just complacent and end up accempting the warm embrace of slick free services harvesting every possible detail about me to power advertising.