The Setup for Average Joes (at least the Average Joes at Hacker News)

My commute through Seattle’s Capitol Hill and into the heart of downtown takes me through a maze of cars, pedestrians, and well-intentioned but not always well-thought-out nods to cyclists.  But in this chaos lies the beauty of riding to work every day: It is simultaneously a workout, a mental challenge and, quite possibly, the most efficient way to get to work. But it’s not the same as riding on a placid trail somewhere, blissing out to the iPod.  It’s not even like a fast group ride on a country road.  It requires both heightened attention and a willingness to forget many of the “rules” of cycling.  In their place, here are 10 things I’ve learned about daily commuting in the city:

“Earlier this evening in the office Jason Kincaid and I, both Android users, asked MG yet again why he won’t admit the iPhone flaws. He said ‘As soon as there’s a better phone, I’ll buy that one instead.’ I pointed out that the iPhone doesn’t actually make calls with any reliability, and he said, seriously ‘It doesn’t need to. I use the phone mostly for apps and browsing, not calls.’

My response – if it actually made calls, perhaps that wouldn’t be true. He then threw something at me and stormed out of the office. True story.”

They didn’t put the Mac in Emacs for nothing. (Dear Usual Pedants: I am aware that Emacs predates the Mac. This is an attempt at wit. A bad one, I’ll give you.) Did you know that you could use Emacs navigation keys in TextEdit? And Terminal? And many other Cocoa apps? They all work the way you’d expect. Well, at least mostly. In TextEdit, ^N and ^P go to the beginning and end of word-wrapped paragraphs, not just lines.

With a key reference guide...

This section illustrates basic org-mode usage by showing how I used org-mode to create this document.

The good news is that all the bits and pieces of software that you need to run a WebDAV server on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard are already installed. You only need to configure them correctly and turn them on. Some experience with Terminal is preferred, and you should be familiar with executing UNIX commands. Let’s start!