Category: Tech

My old car was built in 1991 and had limited multimedia options. An AM/FM radio and a cassette player long disabled by having an old cassette tape stuck in it. Interestingly, for a few dollars I was able to buy an extension to my mp3 player that once plugged into the electric cigarette lighter, would broadcast the output of the mp3 player into the radio. It didn’t work half bad.

My new car has a jack to directly hook up an mp3 player, but you still have to play the mp3 player using its interface – no fun while driving – and also using up the battery on the mp3 player.

While I was looking up how to use the mp3 player in my new car I learned that the modern CD player it came with could play the modern digital and compressed audio formats like mp3 files. Just make a “data cd”. The cool thing I discovered is that these digital audio formats are a lot smaller than traditional CD audio formats. I was able to get a 7 CD audio book copied onto just one CD. I get the convenience of an mp3 player by not having to fumble with multiple CDs while driving and I get the convenience of the CD player interface on the dashboard of my car.

How cool is that? 🙂

There are a myriad of command shell based text editors for Unix operating systems. They were conceived by hard core geeks doing serious application development. This doesn’t quite fit the needs of a contemporary Linux desktop user or even a Mac user who just needs to do some simple editing of system files.

NE – short for “nice editor” is made for the humble desktop user. It is what you would get if you made notepad run on Linux, run in the command shell and if you added a few more features.

It uses CUA ( Windows/DOS ) keyboard shortcuts AND has menus, drop down menus. The commands are labeled what you would expect them to be labeled. It is small, takes little space on your hard drive, is very fast and runs on just about every kind of Unix, including Cygwin: