ANN Twitling: a Twitter link digest tool#

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:54:57 +0000

Problem: I can't keep up with the Internet

I often check Twitter on my phone. When I see tweets with links in them I tend to skip over them intending to return later when I'm on a computer with a full-size screen, and then forget about them either because I find something else to look at or I can't be bothered with scrolling all the way down again. And looking through old tweets is nearly as bad on the full-size twitter web site as it is in a mobile client.

Proposed solution: I need a computer program to read the Internet for me

Thus, Twitling: a small script consisting of Ruby and Sinatra and OmniAuth and the Twitter gem and Typhoeus to grab links in parallel, the function of which is to read one's timeline and display the resolved URL, the title and an excerpt from the text of each link that was posted. Source code is on Github.

I haven't really used it myself yet in anger: the first thing I notice while testing it is that there are a whole lot more links in my feed than I thought there were, and the original plan to produce a 24 hour digest might become very unwieldy.

Possible further development ideas include

• speed it up, by prefetching, better caching, or fetching the links asynchronously and client-side

• an "older" link at the bottom of the page

• Atom/RSS output so it gets fed to me every so often and I don't have to remember to check it

• email output (for the same reason)

• some css gradient fills just to make it look modern (hey, I already used text-shadow, what do you want, round button borders?)

• your suggestion here: email dan@telent.net or open an issue on Github. Bug reports too.

Try not to break it, please.

Sharpening the sawfish#

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 20:25:20 +0000

My son is two weeks old today. I don't usually go a bundle on putting personal info on the public web - I keep that for Facebook, where they at least pretend to keep it private for me - but I mention this to explain why I'm using my laptop a lot more than my desktop lately.

The problem with my laptop is the mouse pointer. It's one of those pointing stick devices technically known (apparently) as an isometric joystick and more commonly known as a nipple , and when the room is warm the little rubber cap gets slippery very quickly. So I decided to invest a little time in a few keyboard shortcuts.

As an Emacs user I know I'm supposed to like tiling window managers, but I don't. My editor windows are windows onto text files that may be any size and shape but in which it's a fairly safe bet (see "locality of reference") that the spot I want to edit next is usually spatially close to the spot I'm currently looking at. The other 'windows' on my screen are things like web browsers and GUI programs where there's no such guarantee, and the only way to make them work is to allow them to take the size and shape that their authors wanted them to have. So after a brief experiment with awesome I punted it and went looking for a programable window manager that was designed for overlapping windows.

And ended up back with Sawfish, which I used to use back when it was fashionable. Sawfish customization is a two-phase process: first you write commands in Lisp, then you use the sawfish-ui program to assign them to keystrokes. A bit like Emacs, really, and perhaps not surprisingly.

First I needed some shortcuts to focus particular windows (Emacs, Firefox, xterms). Happily, someone has done the work for this already: I just had to download the Gimme script and set up bindings for it

Then I needed something to chuck windows around the screen. The requirement is pretty simple here: every window on my screen is aligned against an edge, so I just need commands to pan a window to each edge. Here is the finished script in which the points I would like to draw attention to are

• I use focus-follows-mouse mode, or whatever it's called these days. This means that if I move a window under the pointer I need to move the pointer too otherwise it will go out of focus. The warp-cursor-to-window function does this: I needed to calculate the pointer position relative to window, which for some reason isn't a builtin.

• window-frame-dimensions is window-dimensions plus the decorations. We need these dimenstions for throwing windows rightwards or downwards, otherwise they end up slightly offscreen.

• define-command is the magic that makes our new functions show up in the sawfish-ui dialog. The "%f" sigil means to pass the current window into the function.

And that's about it. Put the file somewhere that sawfish will find it - for me, ~/.sawfish/lisp seems to be a good place - add the lines

(require 'gimme)
(setq warp-to-window-enabled t)
(require 'throw-window)

to .sawfishrc, and then set up your keys in sawfish-ui. I assigned them to Windows-key shortcuts: at last, I have a use for the Windows key.

If you hadn't spotted in amongst all that, I have githubbed my dotfiles. More for my convenience than for your edification, but feel free to rummage. If you are one of the three other remaining XTerm users, have a look at the XTerm*VT100*translations in my .Xdefaults - I stole that "press Shift+RET to background the command" trick from Malcolm Beattie nearly twenty years ago and have been using it ever since.