Perhaps you’ve heard of Amazon’s new Cloud Player and Google Play (previously Google Music), and perhaps you’ve used one or both of them. If you’ve already formed your own opinion, it’s unlikely that what I will say here will change it, but if you’re considering trying one of these (admittedly awesome) services, you may enjoy reading on.

Though I love my Macs, I often use Ubuntu. I have an old laptop running Ubuntu (which I’m typing this on right now) and I occasionally run Ubuntu in VMware Workstation or VMware Fusion just as an efficient alternative to Windows or when I’m doing something that is particularly Linux-friendly.

My favorite window manager right now is Xmonad, a tiling window manager written in Haskell. I know very little of Haskell, which makes navigating its configuration files, which are Haskell scripts, somewhat daunting, but the window manager itself is simple and incredibly fast.

There are two tools that everyone who uses Xmonad comes to love: xmobar and dmenu. The former places a persistent status bar at the top of the screen, which of course you can customize, and the latter is triggered by a keyboard shortcut and opens a one-line menu of programs in your path that is filtered as you type. The ultimate no-frills launcher.

This is the story of how I finally got Xft (anti-aliased TrueType fonts) working in dmenu. It makes it look amazing. Seriously.

A few days ago I wrote about my experience with Rbenv, the Ruby environment manager (is that what they call it?). My overall experience was good, but I did encounter a couple of hiccups getting the “ruby-build” plugin to work. While installing the whole kit once again on this cute new Ubuntu laptop, I figured it out.

I can’t believe how utterly, totally, fully, and completely I overlooked this. I could add a few more adjectives to that list and it would still fail to capture the magnitude of sustained neglect it required on my part not to realize that this existed.