Keyboard shortcuts in OOo

I read an article today about different keyboard shortcuts in OpenOffice.org Writer that was very helpful. If you use Writer you can certainly take advantage of some of these. The author said that some of these will probably work in other programs. I tested a couple of these in my blog editor and can confirm some work here as well.

To start off, let me list some of the basic ones that everyone should know.

  • CTRL + C = copy
  • CTRL + V = paste
  • CTRL + X = cut
  • CTRL + P = print
  • CTRL + S = save

Here are three very useful ones he pointed out that I did not know.

  • CTRL + ALT + Up/Down Arrow = moves the current paragraph above or below the previous or next paragraph.
  • CTRL + Left/Right Arrow = moves the cursor to the next word either left or right.
  • SHIFT + Up/Down/Left/Right Arrow = selects the text appropriately. Just try it and you will understand how to use it.

Jump on over to the original article to see the many others he showed. Not all of them will be useful for everyone, but using keyboard shortcuts really are a better way to work once you learn them. Until you learn them and put them into practice it is hard to see their value.

New site is up

I finally got done with my redesign of www.dpeach.com. It really was not as much of a redesign as it was a moving to a new platform.

In the last few days I cleaned up the CSS to make the site more readable. I also changed fonts. You can sign up for our prayer letter mailing at the site. That was a feature at the old site as well. This site is functionally equivelent to the old site, it is just easier for me to maintain.

One thing that has been broken for a very long time at the site was the RSS feed. Now that is fixed.

Since it is a WordPress site, I am going to allow people to leave comments and see if I can build a bit of a community there. My readership will grow over the next year as we travel to our supporting churches and announce the site. I also plan to do regular updates. The old platform was not as easy to update as WordPress is. But, that was somewhat by design. When I built the previous site, I did not want it to look like a blog. I also did not want to bother people with constantly changing content. I am going to treat the site more like a blog now and see if I can get some interaction going.

With that done, I can come back to working on the new design of My Thought Spot. I changed the theme here and then abandoned the work I was doing on it. But, I did learn quite a few things at dpeach.com that will help me working on My Thought Spot.

Big storm

We had an interesting storm a couple of nights ago. We are currently in rainy season, which is the same as hurricane season. Hmm, interesting how that works.

Normally we only get rain in the afternoon between 3:00 and 6:00. But with this strange storm we had come through, it broke loose at 2:00 in the morning. That meant that in our sleep deprived stupor, we were running around trying to get things shut down and unplugged.

Since there is only one outlet in my office, it is pretty easy to unplug the 16 items plugged into the 4 daisy chained power strips. Fortunately we never lost power in all of this. Quite surprising too since the lightning bolt that woke us up felt like it was right out our window. We bounced out of the hammocks and clung to the ceiling before the light and noise left the room. Then we bumped into each other trying to figure out what needed to be unplugged.

When it was all over we laid back down and I thought about needing to unplug one more item–the telephone line to the DSL modem. I did not do it though. The lightning was essentially gone by then. I don’t know if that was the culprit, but the next day our modem would connect to the Internet just fine, but would not connect to the internal network. My computer’s network card is dead as well as my PCI bus.

Our son’s computer is just flaky. In Windows no USB device will work, and the only PCI device that works is the video card. Also the keyboard is dead. In Linux the keyboard works, but PCI devices (except the video card) are all dead along with the USB devices.

We were without an Internet connection most of yesterday. I was finally able to get a new modem at the ISP’s office in the late afternoon. They replaced the modem with no charge. That was a surprise to me since I don’t have a contract with them and I bought my modem outright instead of renting from them monthly.

Still trying to figure out what to do with these two crippled machines. One is my main box, but I am able to work with my notebook on the Internet and transfer files through a USB flash drive from the big box.

This means my website updates that I was hoping to finish on Thursday have been seriously delayed. Maybe by Saturday night I will have them up and running.

Websites update

I am heavily working on 2 sites right now. On this one, My Thought Spot, I am mostly just tweaking a few things here and there as they show up. I did not do any serious testing of the theme before I put it live. I also have some features with the old theme that I have not moved over here yet.

The bulk of my site building time has been spent working on my main ministry site www.dpeach.com. I have the new site at www.dpeach.com/new which is mostly ready to roll out. Currently I don’t like the header border. I have not figured out how to change that white section to another color and still keep the nicely rounded corners.

I also am working on getting phpList integrated with my theme so that I can still have people sign up to get our prayer letter. My old CMS software that I was using at dpeach.com has a mailing list program built in. With the move away from phpWebSite, I need to find different mailing list software.

The one thing that is keeping me from putting this all together is that I don’t like the “plain text” mail that phpList is sending out. My preference is always plain text mail as opposed to HTML mail. But somehow the text coming out of phpList is different than the plain text I get from any other source. I am subscribed to a couple of mailing lists which use phpList and they all have the same font problem. The font is too small. I thought “plain text” meant a certain standard? Until I can figure out how to get the fonts working right I am hesitant to commit to phpList and therefore the roll out of the new site will be delayed.

What is your project about?

I read a blog posting that said XBMC is a great project. Then there were comments to the posting that said how much they loved XBMC. Finally someone else posted that XBMC has been forked and now there is the OSXBMC.

Wonderful. What is XBMC?

I checked out the link to the supposedly improved forked OSXBMC. Nothing obvious on the main page as to what the project is. They only say what has been changed in the most recent version.

I hate that. No clear information as to what the project is about when you visit the main page.

Oh, great, there is an About link at the top of the page. Though it requires that I go somewhere else to find just basic information, at least it will be right there. Uh, no. It just says they are a group porting XBMC to OSX. There is at least a link to the official XBMC site in the side bar.

Too much work.

I am picking on this site/project because it happens to be the most recent one I have run into, but it happens often, and mostly in the open source community. There has always been a disconnect between developers and users. The developers give the users what the developers think the users want. Then the users have to think like a developer to figure out how to do it. Often the interface suffers in open source software.

The lack of information at a website is another example of this disconnect. The developers know everything about the project, therefore they don’t understand the need to explain it to the users. They expect the users to understand the project as much as the developers do.

And, no, I am not going to tell you what the project is about. It is not my job to be their evangelist. They need to handle that on their own and win me over as a user. Then maybe I will take up the cause.