Rubénerd :)

Screenshot of my Armada M300 as a lean, mean Google Reading machine!

Given this is Sunday (as of two minutes ago), I thought it would be logical to post a Sunday blog post. That was an entirely irrelevant and superfluous sentence; then again so was this one. And this one too.

I’ve started getting into the habit in Adelaide where I’m studying to catch up on my latest Google Reader and Bloglines feeds first thing in the morning and before I go to bed on my cute 2002-vintage Armada M300 subnotebook in my room because it’s interesting but also relaxing. At these times of day there isn’t much light out so I have an even lower tolerance for Blazing White® website themes, so I decided to completely re-theme the entire interface of the machine to accommodate my picky eyes.

ASIDE: This bizarre post is mostly geared towards Linux, FreeBSD and whatnot, but the browser specific whatnot could be adapted if you have a Mac user or if you use that obscure operating system a small software company in Redmond makes.

Firstly, if you’re a Mozilla Firefox or Opera user with Greasemonkey or an equivalent user style engine, I’ve found the Google Reader Dark-Blue-Grey user style by hronir to be by far the most readable dark theme. If your machine has limited screen real estate like mine, the Google Reader Maximize Vertical Space script by Chase Seibert makes a huge difference, and plays well with the colour changes — an important consideration!

Next the browser itself: I first downloaded the beautiful MidnightFox Dark Firefox Theme which I’ve had lots of success with on my MacBook Pro, but then I thought I might as well take advantage of the fact Firefox is a GTK+ application and use a theme that would affect all the applications I use. I really love the dark Xfce-dusk theme, so I downloaded the Xfce theme package and added the following line to my ~/.gtkrc-2.0 file. If you’re using a desktop environment you’d probably want to use it’s theme selector.

On Linux
include "/usr/share/themes/Xfce-dusk/gtk-2.0/gtkrc"

On FreeBSD
include "/usr/local/share/themes/Xfce-dusk/gtk-2.0/gtkrc"

On NetBSD or other systems with pkgsrc
include "/usr/pkg/share/themes/Xfce-dusk/gtk-2.0/gtkrc"

Finally I customised the window manager. I use dwm on my Armada M300 because it’s ridiculously fast and lightweight even when running on very modest hardware, plus it automatically tiles windows. In the config.h file in the dwm build directory I changed the following lines then recompiled and installed (you could substitute these hex colours into whichever window manager you’re using too):

[...]
static const char normbordercolor[] = #404e63;
static const char normbgcolor[]     = #404e63;
static const char normfgcolor[]     = #000000;
static const char selbordercolor[]  = #222a36;
static const char selbgcolor[]      = #222a36;
static const char selfgcolor[]      = #ffffff;
[...]

The results are what you saw at the beginning of the post. I love this colour scheme so much I’ve even started using it for when I’m writing code and assignments because it’s so easy on my eyes when stared at for hours on end. Good times ^_^.

So that I can reference what I use in future posts, I’ve already written a list of security and privacy extensions I use with Mozilla Firefox and commented that they’re the primary reasons I choose to use it over every other browser. Using a browser without those extensions (or equivalents) makes me feel naked and scared now! You can take that however you want.

I’ve installed far too many extensions over the years that I’ve later never used, but these are the usability ones that have stuck.

Adblock Plus

Absolutely essential, it reduces irritating distractions on pages and makes them render much faster because you’re downloading less stuff. Some people complain about Adblock Plus. I ask how many of them own a DVR which skips ads, or how many of them have a WC break or a snack instead of watching sponsors of a sports event. Enough said.

Greasemonkey

Greasemonkey ets you modify the appearance and function of individual sites and pages by clicking and automagically installing scripts from sites such as UserScripts and UserStyles. Once you have scripts installed, they work transparently and so fast you can’t tell they’re even there.

I started using this when I thought Google messed up Reader’s interface.

FireFTP

I mostly use the shell to quickly get sftp work done, but for tedious and repetitive tasks FireFTP makes it really simple. If you’re one of the few who haven’t tried it, it launches itself as a tab within Firefox and uses the split file manager metaphor like Norton Commander with the left pane showing your local drive and the right showing the remote server.

FireFTP is honestly polished enough to be a standalone application.

British English Dictionary

I find it curious that even if you explicitly download the "English (GB)" versions of Firefox, it still comes with the American spelling dictionary which battling with gets pretty old fast.

This extension is fairly old as far as extensions go, but it still works even in the lastest Firefox 3 builds. And besides, you could argue spelling doesn’t change as fast as builds of an open source project do. Wait, ignore what I just typed; that’s a Pandora’s box I would rather leave shut!

If you don’t like being scolded for not peppering your words with Zed, grab it!

FoxClocks

Adds a world clock to either your status bar or your bookmarks bar; I choose the latter.Insanely useful to have right in your browser where you’re most likely to be viewing things and conversing with people from other parts of the world.

For example, I can check just by looking at it what the time is in Singapore when I’m in Adelaide and vica versa, as well as the eastern Aussie states, the UK, Talkeetna, Toronto, Tokyo… I thought that was some clever alliteration.

LORI

The Life-of-request info extension adds a really useful monitor to your status bar that shows how many seconds, how much data and how many requests a page took to render. Supposed to be used for people who want to monitor the performance of their own websites, but I use it for everything!

For example, did you know a Whole Wheat Radio page heavy with images and other media renders faster than many commercial websites? Wonder if it’s faster than the RIAA or ARIA…

More Apple-esque themes

I discussed these late last year. In a nutshell, these themes make Firefox look much more Mac like. Firefox 3 was a huge improvement over version 2, but it still looks a bit kludgy.

Gnome Firefox 3 Theme

I use this theme for Firefox on my FreeBSD and Linux boxes. It replaces the default toolbar icons and styles with ones that match your other GTK+ applications. Fits really well with Xfce and window managers such as dwm or OpenBox where you’re using mostly GTK+ apps like RoxFiler and Gnumeric.

For those of you who are also using the "Google Reader (12/05/2008) Tweaks" Greasemonkey script that makes Google Reader usable again, you may have noticed Google tweaked the interface just enough to break it. It’s as if the Reader folks want you to like the new interface regardless! I hope they don’t make this a habit.

Fortunately trashrockx has updated the script to remove Blazing White again. Uninstall your current version and update if this has affected you. Don’t worry about the date in the name of the script still referring to the 5th of this month, it is an updated script.

Clearly from looking above I have a lot of reading ahead of me. And I’m supposed to be spending this weekend and next week moving gigabytes of accumulated files. Let’s see what Atuu says about Wal-Mart first though. We don’t have Wal-Mart in Australia or Singapore, what are they? Do they sell pre fabricated house sidings and stuff? Walls? And I was under the impression there were only a limited number of walls you could fabricate depending on what materials they’re made out of.

The new Google Reader interface

I was really worried I was going to have to ditch Google Reader because the new blazing white interface with heavy black text was just too difficult to look at as I mentioned yesterday (Google Reader takes a turn for the bland).

Fortunately some quick thinking people have created some great scripts that make me remember why I love Greasemonkey! If you do a search for "Google Reader" on UserStyles.org or UserScripts.org there are hundreds of scripts you can install with two clicks, many of which have been hastily updated to work with the new interface.

If you use Greasemonkey and were also put off by the new Google Reader interface, give these scripts a try:

Google Reader (12/05/2008) Tweaks

This script by trashrockx reintroduces colour on the sidebar and other elements to decrease the contrast back to the level it was before. It quite literally makes Google Reader usable again!

Google Reader vertical space maximiser

This script by Simon Lieschke removes everything above the feed heading bar which gives you MUCH more space for feed items. I tend to use the Search box a lot myself, but if you never do you may want to check this out.

Another Dark Google Reader Style

This updated script by KullDox inverts the background which is much easier on the eyes first thing in the morning and late at night. I like to toggle between this and the first colour scheme above during the day.

If you have any cool Google Reader Greasemonkey script ideas, post a comment :-).