Motivation. I love Craigslist – I’ve used it to find great housing options when moving to a new area, as well as deals for various appliances and furniture. Unfortunately, I always find myself awkwardly scratching notes in a spreadsheet as I try to track the most promising ads. This cumbersome process inspired CraigNotes.

Features. CraigNotes is a simple website which presents Craigslist ads inside an enhanced interface. CraigNotes lets you rate ads, take notes, and hide irrelevant spam. It automatically fetches the latest ads which match your search, and lets you continue to view old ads – even after they disappear from Craigslist (which only keeps them around for a week).

This simple functionality makes it a lot easier to keep your favorites at your fingertips, along with any additional notes you want to remember (I jot down details I receive from the ad’s poster when I contact them, as well as my opinion about the ad).

Give CraigNotes a try and let me know what you think!

CraigNotes Screenshot:

Here is a screenshot of the UI (with fake “random” failures inserted to show how failures are handled):

Needless to say, this made the Acrobat part of my installation useless. Strangely, the dialog persisted even if I was already running Photoshop when I started Acrobat. I tried deactivating and reactivating, reinstalling, and so forth — all to no avail.

Google didn’t seem to have any advice on the matter, so I gave in and tried calling technical support. Though the representative was nice, he unfortunately didn’t have an immediate solution to the problem. I kept playing around with my installation and stumbled across something that worked — instead of running the 64-bit version of Photoshop, I ran the ordinary version (it is installed in your start menu alongside the 64-bit version). Ever since then Acrobat has worked fine (even when it is the only Adobe product running)!

It seems like the 64-bit version of Photoshop doesn’t properly communicate the activation details to Acrobat — a pretty bizarre (and annoying) bug for an Adobe product (which I am usually very fond of). Thankfully, the workaround is pretty simple — just run the regular version of Photoshop (presumably running Illustrator or any of the other programs in the suite would also do the trick).

It was a piece of cake to install on my Linux box, and it looks like Mac’s have an implementation of FUSE available too. Once you have installed the tool you can mount a remote file system just like this:

format: sshfs username@host: folder_to_mount_in
example: sshfs dound@myhost.com: wwwdound

I now use sshfs to mount folders from a variety of remote machines on my local machine — it is much better-suited to many tasks than FTP, and for some tasks it beats SSH too. It is also handy when I want to grep remote files on a server I only have FTP access to. The only downside is that while you are in a terminal whose current working directory is within the remotely mounted directory all commands experience a slowdown – while I expected file-related commands like to run slower, I did not expect commands like clear to experience a noticeable latency. It is not clear to me whether this is an issue with sshfs, FUSE, or mounted file systems on Linux in general, but maybe I will look into it later. Regardless, I highly recommend sshfs — it is a very handy utility and much better than the alternatives.