Wasting just a little bit more time: a tale of dzen and reddit

Are you tired of switching from the console to browser, and then pressing F5 to see what's new on reddit? So am I. There's got to be a better way of seeing new posts on reddit without leaving the comfort of the command line. And there is. If you run Linux with dzen, here's a possible solution. Simply use this script. It checks reddit and outputs the first ten titles in a way that can be used by dzen. It should be clear from the source how to make the script output more than ten titles or how to monitor something other than the main reddit (e.g., programming, pics, funny or others subreddits). Now all one needs to do is run this script every n seconds (depends on how often you expect new articles to arrive), you can use something like this. One last thing left to do is add a line to your .xsession that calls your checker script, e.g., I have the following line:

~/.dzen/checkReddit.sh | dzen2 -y 800 -ta c -l 10 -bg '#2c2c32' -fg 'grey70' -p -e 'entertitle=uncollapse;leavetitle=collapse' &

And here are the results (the reddit bar sits quietly at the bottom of your screen until you move your mouse over it, when you get the situation shown on the picture to the right):


Of course, once you see what's new you still have to switch to your browser if you want to actually follow the links, but this should at least save you the trouble of switching only to find out that there's nothing new. Note that there are many things left to be done here, this is just a little sample of how you can waste a few more minutes of your life.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Firefox 3 download day - Mozilla just got into politics

Well, Firefox 3 finally arrived and all is well in the world. I was just browsing the downloads map and was ready to call it a night when something caught my eye. Something was strange about that map... Ah, that's it, there seems to be one state missing on the map. For all of you that don't know which one is missing, let me give you a hint -- it's a small state just north of Albania, south of Serbia. You guessed it, it's Kosovo. Yes, Kosovo. The state that got its independence in February this year is not plotted as a separate country, but rather as a part of Serbia (of which it was a part until recently). Now, it may be considered overranting, but I wonder why isn't Kosovo listed as a separate country. After all, it is recognized by the US (country which Mozilla calls home), the UK, France, Italy, Germany... The list goes on. And it's not like the guys at Mozilla didn't have time to prepare, Kosovo got its independence in February which gave them some four months to add it to the countries list. So, why can't I see how many people from Kosovo downloaded Firefox 3? And more importantly, who decides if a country is relevant enough to be added to a company's list? It seems that nowadays a country has to be recognized not only by other countries, but also by companies if it wishes to make a meaningful existence...