I’ve been having some difficulty using Pidgin these past how many days so I was looking for another messenger client to check out. Incidentally I stumbled upon a blog entry about CenterIM, a messenger client for the command line/terminal. Knowing that it’s available in the repositories made me get it right away.

Centerim

Pros:

• CenterIM consumes barely 1% of my memory. I am running it on an Acer Aspire One 150Bb with 1GB of RAM.
• Several IM protocols are supported: Jabber, Yahoo, MSN, AIM, LiveJournal. It also has an RSS Reader.
• You can have several conversations at the same time.
• The screen shows the keyboard shortcuts that help you navigate through the application.
• By default, the sound is on so you could hear the ‘ping’ sound when you receive a message.

Cons:

It’s interesting actually. So if you’re looking for a way to chat while you’re on the command line and you don’t want to use an IRC client connecting to a Bitlbee server, then CenterIM is more of a good fit for your needs.

To learn more about CenterIM, here’s the CenterIM website.

I’ve recently talked about using Newsbeuter and it has been interesting for me because of how focused I am on reading whatever content I get online through it. However, knowing that I need to somehow fix some things so I could work better with it, I decided to make a config file that does that.

My needs are mainly for saving articles in one spot, indicating which browser to use and indicating where podcasts must be saved. I am still happy with the keyboard shortcuts that are available by default and the colors look good in my eyes. But it’s faster if I could configure the other settings

one could enqueue a podcast so it could be downloaded

We could take a look at the sample config file on the Newsbeuter help:

# a comment
max-items 100 # such comments are possible, too
browser links
show-read-feeds no
unbind-key R
bind-key ^R reload-all


The ones on the left side are the things to be customized and the ones on the right, or after a tab, are the settings of your choice. For my needs, it’s actually simple:


browser firefox
download-path ~/Podcasts
player mplayer
save-path ~/Documents/FeedArticles


You need to look at the table of configuration commands that you could tweak.

One more thing I like about Newsbeuter is that it does have a counterpart for managing your podcasts. For example, I have a list of podcast feeds in Newsbeuter and I have selected to ‘enqueue’ some of the episodes (done by pressing ‘e’) then I could run “podbeuter” on another terminal and view the list of enqueued files. I could toggle the download of all these files on Podbeuter. Podbeuter is included when you install Newsbeuter and it really is meant for managing your podcasts. It will also use the same config file as Newsbeuter’s so there’s no need to worry about that.

I’ve been looking for a better way to read my RSS feeds and I’ve been thinking that it would be nice to take it away from the web UI of Google Reader. As much as I love Google Reader, I realized that I’d like a different way to read my feeds these days. Google Reader has been overwhelming, so to speak.

Image credit: Clair Ching, 2009.

Enter Newsbeuter. It is a terminal-based RSS reader which you could easily use and tweak according to your needs. For one thing you could export your OPML file and use that as a basis of your list of feeds. At the same time, you could also go start from scratch and all you need is a text files with all of the feed URLs of your choice. If you’re looking for a way to tag these feeds, don’t worry. Your text file can indicate the tags to be used for them. You just need a file called “urls” in your .newsbeuter directory and you’re good to go.

What I like about reading in Newsbeuter is that I could focus on the news and not look at the pictures yet. Sometimes pictures take too long to load on my computer and it gets irritating when there are too many pictures loading. At least if I could get the textual content right away, I could decide to open the article in a browser later on to view the pictures, etc. I also like how Newsbeuter is quick. One more thing that Newsbeuter has going for it is the keyboard shortcuts used. You’ve got “o” to open it in a browser, “q” to quit reading an article, “s” to save the article as a text file, and so on. There are also many things you could tweak so that you could use it according to your needs. I have yet to tweak it so I could easily manage podcasts.

It’s been a week since I started using Newsbeuter and I really like it. So far, I can’t see anything else that might replace it.

Do you ever get a lot of video links from friends over IM and you wish you could actually just save them first? Well, you could download them via clive on the command line.

clive downloads videos from YouTube

It’s really nifty if you could save them and video them later, without having to browse it on the internet first. At least, for me, I think this is really cool.

Another awesome thing about clive is that it could download videos even from Google Video, CCTV, among others. See? Even other sites with video streaming could be a source for extraction via clive. How nifty is that? Also, the command to use when you want to download a video is easy to remember:
clive <http://www.youtube.com/yourvideohere>
It will save the file from wherever you run it. If you run clive on your home directory it will save the file there.
And in case you still find it a bit difficult to remember there’s a front-end for clive and it’s called abby. It might be easier to use if you prefer something graphical.

I suppose that files downloaded as mp4 would benefit those who use ipods. And at least it’s way better than getting stuck with only flv files. I tried playing the videos I downloaded and they were quite alright. This looks like something I might be using a lot in the coming days. My friends and co-workers give me interesting video links from time to time.

Looking for a way to surf the ‘net on the terminal? Use w3m!

I’ve used w3m time and again because it’s quaint that way. I usually use it as an Emacs macro/extension. It’s nice! I could read webpages while in Emacs, aside from the terminal.

You could look it in Synaptic if you’re using Ubuntu. You could also check it in apt. Or your package manager.

There are really nifty commands from the w3m manual:
w3m [options] [filename|URL] -s — this one is for displaying pages in shift JIS so if you’re viewing a Japanese page, chances are you’d find this good as an option
w3m -T text/plain [filename|URL] — if you want to get the source HTML.

Who says you can’t do anything from the command line when there are so many tools you could use?

I must confess. I have bad command line habits! I make directories and subdirectories, one directory at a time… Meaning, I make a directory then cd to that then make a subdirectory from it. However, I learned today that I don’t have to do that. Thanks to the article: Learn 10 good UNIX usage habits. It lists down the bad habits and the good ones.

Part of how the bad command line habits have been formed when I think about the way it is on the graphical user interface, like what steps I have to take. These days I’ve been mainly reliant on Gnome so I have lost practice using the command line.

Another snippet from the article:

Stop piping cats

A basic-but-common grep usage error involves piping the output of cat to grep to search the contents of a single file. This is absolutely unnecessary and a waste of time, because tools such as grep take file names as arguments.

If you have been doing these same things, it’s time for us to learn these good command line habits together!