Emacs rocks. It is a highly customizable text editor and one of the reasons I continue to use Linux. The Dvorak keyboard layout rocks, because it streamlines typing and places the most commonly used letters in the most easily accessible positions. And the Kinesis Advantage keyboard rocks: it is a highly customized keyboard that makes typing effortless.

But Emacs on a Dvorak keyboard sucks. And Emacs on the Kinesis Dvorak keyboard really sucks. In fact, it's all but unusable.

But emacs is customizable. That's what this is about: making the Kinesis keyboard usable for writers that use the dvorak keyboard layout and like emacs. That probably boils down to me alone on earth, but so be it: customizability is what makes Linux, Emacs, and even the Kinesis, so damn useful, and if you're a writer, you may as well make your environmental useful and comfortable. Let's begin.

One approach is to use the LBDB database package to enable mutt to query the Apple address book directly. That would ordinarily be useful, but doesn't help me when I'm using my non-primary computer. I decided to hack up a perl script that would take Vcards from the address book and export them to Mutt's alias format.

Arranging the time and place to contemplate, compose, and write is my biggest challenge as a writer these days. Avoiding endless clicking on the Internet is my first challenge, but not the only one: the modern computing environment is a distraction in itself. Fortunately, a growing number of software packages have come on the market to emulate the kerosene-lamp distraction free writing experience I enjoyed in Indonesia (minus the kerosene). This article takes a look at them.

It wouldn't be stretching the truth too much to say that Copywrite sold me a Macintosh. It's that good. Copywrite was made for the creative writer. It is "missing" things you'd expect from other word processors, like the ability to make tables and so on, but that's not Copywrite's intended audience. Copywrite is for writers, and as creative writing software goes, it has no equal.

Mac OS X is the most satisfying compromise I've ever come across in the computing world: Unix underneath and Apple's slick attention to detail and the end-user's experience on top, all built on the top-quality hardware for which the folks at Cupertino are famous, my Powerbook G4 became a fast friend and a faithful ally. For a Linux user, experiencing a computing platform where everything just works is pretty stunning, and as an added bonus, most of the software I grew to love on Linux is available for Mac OS X as well through the Fink and MacPorts projects. Here are a couple of my favorite applications: