white noise

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RSS

reading rss feeds with mutt

Q: how to improve my RSS feeds reading experience?

A: using my mail reader as a feed aggregator.

Over time I tried many different RSS feeds aggragators, both web based and stand alone applications. There are many which are really nice, but every one I tried was lacking one feature or another. I saw that the Thunderbird mail reader has the option to handle RSS news as emails, so I decided to look for something that enabled me to the same with mutt, my mail reader of choice.

I found a really nice tool called feed2imap, which perfectly addresses my needs. It is really easy to setup and configure - the configuration file is well commented - and does it's job smoothly. Now I have all my news in dedicated mailboxes.

Tags: geek tools

2008-06-29 17:31:35

a better keyboard experience

I've been really busy at work last week; we attended at a fair, and a huge amount of time was devoted to the preparation of the event and the physical presence at it. With near no spare time, I took the chance to focus on side things, and most of all to think about how to improve my virtual working environment.

I am a great fan of tiled window managers, and been a long time user of dwm. I also love to work with my keyboard most of the time, and except for graphic and web surfing, I hardly need a pointing device (I use a trackball, by the way).

What I was looking for was a tiled window manager with a more flexible approach to layouts, and some kind of keyboard driven web browsing interface with the same rendering capabilities that firefox provides. For the window manager I gave awesome a try, and after some configuration I am pretty satisfied with it. For the web browsing interface I decided to install the vimperator firefox extension; it seems to be very powerful once you get used to key mappings (which in the end are the same that vim uses).

I'm going to post more impressions on both tools as soon as possible.

Tags: geek tools

2008-06-12 19:44:19

files batch remane

Today I had the need to uppercase the name of all files in a directory, and I came across rename, a really nice tool the quickly perform this task.

From the man page:

NAME
    rename - renames multiple files

SYNOPSIS
    rename [ -v ] [ -n ] [ -f ] perlexpr [ files ]

DESCRIPTION
    "rename" renames the filenames supplied according to the
    rule specified as the first argument.  The perlexpr argument
    is a Perl expression which is expected to modify the $_ string
    in Perl for at least some of the filenames specified.
    If a given filename is not modified by the expression, it will
    not be renamed. If no filenames are given on the command line,
    filenames will be read via standard input.

Tags: sysadmin tools

2008-06-01 21:38:11

indiana jones 4

Dicono che tre sia il numero perfetto, e forse in questo caso al terzo capitolo ci si poteva anche fermare. "Indiana Jones e il regno del teschio di cristallo" non aggiunge niente alla serie del più noto archeologo cinematografico, e si segnala per essere un film indubbiamente ben fatto - Spielberg da questo punto di vista è un vero maestro - ma, purtroppo, altrettanto piatto.

Sin dalla prima scena ho avuto una sensazione di deja-vu, senzazione che non mi ha abbandonato per le rimanenti due ore. I dialoghi sembrano aver perso smalto e parte di quella gradevole ironia a cui eravamo abituati, mentre le situazioni proposte sono tanto spettacolari quanto un pochino telefonate. I personaggi ripropongono clichè già visti senza dare apprezzabili variazioni o aggiunte, e le buone idee stentano a decollare.

Si guarda con piacere, indubbiamente, ma è semplicemente entertainment di ottimo livello. Mi aspettavo qualcosa di più.

Tags: cinema

2008-05-23 20:08:22