Slashdot Mirror

http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com/ - The Sartorialist is a a photographer for GQ, Vogue, etcetra who publishes his photos of well dressed people he meets on the street for all to see.

http://www.idiotcomics.com/ - Idiot Comics is a spot on webcomic sometimes, but lately its been a little slow.

http://waiterrant.net/ - A blog written by a waiter who has spent a long time in the restaurant business. Source municipal is a pretty good read.

http://postsecret.blogspot.com/ and PostSecret of course...

The best ones I read I pull together with Liferea's web scraping support and some Perl to generate an RSS feed either by building one from scratch or gutting the description tag and replacing it with HTML from the site to get the whole article. The Mother 3 Fan Translation, The Onion, McSweeney's Letters, the New York Times, and the Astronomy Picture of the Day from NASA all fall under this category. Snownews has a repository for these scripts at http://kiza.kcore.de/software/snownews/snowscripts/. I'd submit mine but I could never log in.

Now, having said that, the Slashdot interface clearly leaves something to desire, even when using Lynx. Why is there no true modular command line interface? I would think of something along the lines of

How's about a command-line RSS reader?

http://kiza.kcore.de/software/snownews

Slashdot doesn't include the comments in RSS (probably a good thing), but you can get your stories nice and easy. I just tried it after reading your message. I'd have preferred vi keybindings, but you can change them in a rc file. There's a bunch of extension scripts (including some Slashdot ones). JFYI.

Come on, at least post a link. ;)

I live in text mode. Here's a selection of my preferred apps. Most of these are still in active development (though some are more active than others).

screen. Simply indispensable. It slices and dices console sessions. Pretty much everything I do, I do in screen. I've a page elsewhere that describes everything screen does for me.

zsh. My shell of choice. Think of all the good features of bash, ksh, and tcsh rolled together. (Without much of the ickiness, particularly the csh heritage.) Personally, the killer application of zsh was that fact that not only did it have context-sensitive completion but (unlike tcsh) it shipped with hordes of completion definitions right out of the box. Type 'dpkg -L fo<tab>' and zsh will autocomplete on the Debian packages currently installed on your system. With an ssh-agent running, type 'scp otherhost:fo<tab>' and zsh will ssh to the other system and autocomplete on the files available on that host.

irssi. The best IRC client I've come across, certainly beating out IrcII, BitchX, and even epic. Multiple windows, extensible, tons of plugins available.

bitlbee. This is actually an IRC-to-Instant-Messaging gateway. It allows me to use irssi and the IRC environment with which I am so familiar to also deal with those of my friends and family who insist on using the various IM services.

snownews. curses-based RSS aggregator. I shopped around a bit before finding an aggregator that I liked. snownews does everything I need.

mutt. Possibly the best mail client around, GUI or not. While pine is okay (and simpler to use), mutt is much more customizable and scales better to large volumes of email.

procmail. Again, not exactly command line, but essential to my email usage.

Emacs. My text-mode editor of choice. Feel free to substitute XEmacs or vi (preferably vim) at your own preference. I prefer emacs to vi, though I know a decent amount of vi, as any sysadmin should. I actually like XEmacs a little better than GNU Emacs, but GNU Emacs has better UTF-8 support.

w3m. There's also links; I'm not tremendously familiar with it because w3m fills all of my needs and it used to be the case that w3m had better HTML support than links, but I don't believe this is any longer the case. Of note is the fact that w3m can do tabbed browsing, though it's not multithreaded, so you can't read one tab while another is loading. Also, if you run w3m with a valid $DISPLAY, it can even show images in the pages it displays.

moosic. This is a music jukebox. The features that distinguish it from other such programs are twofold. First, it runs as a standalone server; you interact with it via a command line client. (In theory, a curses or GUI client could be written, but to my knowledge none yet has.) Second, it's customizable with regards to how it plays music. It has a config file where you tell it what programs to use to play various music formats (it does come with reasonable defaults). Someone elsewhere in this article pointed out mpd; I'll have to look at that, but it at least doesn't appear to support the various MOD formats.

mplayer. It does more or less require some graphical output (X, framebuffer, whatever), but it's run and displays it status in text mod

snownews is a great console RSS reader.

I've found snownews to be a great RSS aggregator, and prefer using it to any of the GUI-based aggregators I've tried. Your mileage may vary, but I'd say it's one of the most useful console applications I've recently discovered.

• pdksh is a superb shell
• screen is a first-rate window manager
• nvi is a fine editor
• lynx is a good browser
• snownews is a decent RSS aggregator
• And /usr/bin contains most anything else you might require.

Ummmm they do.

For example I have the following two feeds in my snownews aggregator:

• askslashdot.rdf
• developers.rdf