This post brought to you with a considerable amount of vim.

I’ve been getting back to basics on a number of things, not the least of which is writing. Good writing takes time, effort and a degree of passion that is hard to muster these days (especially considering the kind of drivel that clogs the intertubes, and the stamina required to reach the nuggets buried underneath), and I’ve found that the best way to do it is to remove any and all barriers.

Fancy formatting? . for drafting text? gone. Arcane solutions to keep track of what I’m writing across multiple machines? . Time to write? Er… OK, that’s a tough one.

Still, things are not that black and white. I’m still using on my to keep around notes I edit on my desktop, although it’s still faster to write drafts on the crummy Notes app and e-mail stuff to myself. And I’m finding I spend quite a bit of time inside gedit on my (where has, so far, worked flawlessly, much to my amazement), and nearly all of it in or on my .

So yeah, my writing isn’t as much broken as it is fractured, but at least I’m polishing the stuff between cracks.

That said, I suppose there isn’t much actual news these days. Yeah, someone figured out yet another way to do roundabout “cut and paste” on the using bookmarklets, ontouchstart, mail: URIs and whatnot, with (predictably) a number of privacy issues. And the Washington Post also has slow news days and .

And, of course, the ‘there will be an netbook at Macworld’ loonies are out in full force, but I won’t link to them1.

All of it is hardly worth mentioning other than as further evidence that the current model for Internet news publishing and advertising is broken and is continually lowering standards. Eventually even the dimmest reader will catch on to the fact that most of it is fifth-generation re-posts of unsubstantiated news, and go elsewhere for entertainment2.

Which leaves a kind of bitter grit on my eyeballs, considering that there is plenty of good stuff to read out there and oodles of very interesting news. For instance, DisplayLink hardware has been popping up all over the place3, although to my dismay there still isn’t a straightforward, wireless way of hooking up a computer to multiple displays. And the Eye-Fi guys have recently hooked up with , which I find very interesting indeed4.

It doesn’t take much to find this kind of stuff or to ponder the impact a few tweaks on these kinds of products could have. So why don’t people write more about such things, rather than cut & paste stuff from other news sites?

1 I have standards. I only link to those who say needs to do a notebook and make fools of themselves in the process.

2 Note that I do not say “for news”. Internet surfing has become an “ooh, shiny” sort of experience, and people who want actual news know where to get them.

3 Their drivers are still a , but at least they have the considerable advantage over the version of actually existing.

4 If you live in the US and feel like sending me a present, well… Eye-Fi stuff isn’t available in “Europe“European as far as I can tell. Just a hint.