I’m writing this post using Lynx, a command-line, text-only browser, just to see how it works out. I feel cool, thrilled, even daring. Lynx is pretty neat shit, however extremely limited. It manages to handle text, links and frames but can’t handle such things as CSS styling, images and all that newfangled fancy shit.

I first installed it as a fall-back if I should ever have a problem with my X server not starting, which is possible since I like to beta and even alpha test shit. This way, even though I didn’t have a GUI desktop environment to launch my usual browser of choice, I could still boot to just a command-line and hit the support forums for assistance using Lynx.

After a bit of tooling around in the options, I configured Vim to run as my default text editor within Lynx, so in an instance where I would need to enter text (like for this blog post), I can launch Vim and start typing away. Vim is a command-line text editor that I’m sorta-kinda-almost comfortable with. It’s one of those editors that at first glance looks ridiculously difficult to handle, but the more you use, the easier it becomes and if you have the balls, you learn the myriad assortment of commands and eventually become the ultimate text wrangling master. You also never get laid again, ever. A geek milestone that I’m not ashamed to aspire to.

Now that I’ve proved to myself that I can effectively post to my blog with a command-line browser, the likelihood that I’ll do so again is pretty much nil. Yeah, it’s cool, old-school shit, but I do prefer the glittery trappings of the WordPress GUI. Still, I think Lynx is a must-have install for situations like I mentioned above when all hell breaks loose and your GUI has shit the bed and died. It’s also a great barometer of how well put together your website is. Fire up Lynx and check out what your site looks like. Like I said before, CSS styling and graphics will not be displayed, but if you’ve laid things out properly, you’ll see a sane and coherent text-only version of your website. If shit’s all jumbled with stuff that’s supposed to be at the bottom running at the top, then perhaps some redesigning is in order.

On any given day, I might bounce around three different computers and use usually two to three operating systems. One thing that drives me crazy about this is managing my RSS feed subscriptions&8212;of which I have quite a few. I’ve tried various readers like Sage, Bloglines, Firefox’s live bookmarks and my personal favorite, KDE’s Akregator. It’s always the case that while one RSS feed has one necessary feature, it lacks another. So, I keep trying new aggregators. Enter Newshutch.

Right now, my biggest peeve is keeping my feeds synced with where I happen to be, so that news I’ve read on one computer with one aggregator won’t show as unread on another machine. I really hate it. As I mentioned above, I’ve played with Bloglines, which is web-based and was about to give it another try when I heard about Newshutch. In all honesty, it’s really no different from Bloglines in functionality except for some fancy Ajax action. I like the look of it and appreciate the 21st century feel Ajax brings. There’s no notifier apps/extensions to use, which is a downer and feeds update every thirty minutes. I uploaded my OPML file, importing my feed list and am willing to give it a try for a couple weeks.

Someday, someone will make the better aggregator. One that’s either web-based or synchronizable between computers, has a decent notification system where the user can tweak individual feed update schedules and delivers feeds attractively or at least lets you edit a CSS file to display them with. Someday.

Addendum
After using Newshutch for a couple hours, I’ve left it behind and am now back using Bloglines. Newshutch is too damn clunky and slow for any real usage, unfortunately.

Web filters are retarded. The only times I ever butt against a company’s web filter seem to be when in search of legitimate, non-offensive information. I’m not into breaking the law. I’m not into downloading porn at work. Why penalize me when I try and look up some technical information because an application like SmartFilter or SonicWall considers some geek’s tutorial on getting an Open Source application up and running, “Free Software/Downloads—Forbidden”, even though no actual software or source code is stored on the site? Or blocking a website as pornography because the author of the page has the unfortunate last name of “Dyke”. SmartFilter kind of seems like one big oxymoron. Perhaps StupidFilter is more appropriate. I could give a rat’s ass whether it kept kids away from pornography, all I know is that it often keeps me from accessing harmless, legal and innoffensive information—usually technical in nature. Fuck that.

Sick of being hamstrung by obtuse internet filters I set up a proxy on my server using squid that I tunnel to via SSH. Once connected, I bypass all web filtering wherever I am and as a bonus, all information sent to and from my browser and my server is encrypted and therefore private to anyone snooping on the local network. Here’s how.

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While I’ve known that Gmail uses SSL to log in, someone recently pointed out to me that while my password is sent to Google fully encrypted, once logged in, all pages that I view are sent via http, meaning that all the emails I read and send can be scooped right out of the ether at any open hotspot.

One remedy I found is to manually change the address from
http://mail.google.com/mail/ to https://mail.google.com/mail/
and for that session, you should be using https and all the pages you view in Gmail will be encrypted. Very cool, but I have to remember to manually check this every time I log in. I smoked way too much weed as a teenager. Half the time I don’t even know what day of the week it is. No lie. How am I supposed to consistently remember this?

Looking further, I found this great extension for Firefox that takes care of the problem for me. CustomizeGoogle lets you set a whole mess of options for a variety of Google services. I won’t get into most of the details since they don’t apply, but check them out because a lot of them are pretty cool. One option that is relevant is that once installed, you can set an option for Gmail to always use https by default. Just check off that one option and from that point on, you have worry-free, encrypted Gmail sessions as a default. Pretty damn useful. CustomizeGoogle also lets you set an https default option for Google Calendar as well. Even sweeter.

Unfortunately, Safari, Konqueror and other browser users are out of luck (IE users, you deserve what you get.) with this extension, so unless there’s something else out there, they have to manually check the session every time or set a bookmark using https in the URL and be consistent about accessing Gmail through that bookmark.

Since this past Saturday, I have been living in my new digs, sans internet connection. This will be remedied by the coming weekend, but for the remainder of this week, I will have to relearn what life is like without the benefit of a 24 hour, high speed pass to the world wide web. From what I’ve experienced so far, it is a horrible, dark and miserable existence and if it were not for the knowledge that this hell will be over by Saturday morning, I’d be sorely tempted to end my life by hanging myself by the shower-curtain rod.

I have no qualms admitting that I am an obsessive internet junkie. I see nothing wrong with it. I’m the type of person that checks his email at least a hundred times a day and who’s answer to every single one of life’s problems is to Google it first. It’s good. It’s fucking great. I’d squish an ethernet cable into my ear and staple a monitor to my forehead if I thought it would get me anywhere.

Now, with this huge and gaping pit in my free time, I’ve had to resort to pre-internet forms of entertainment to keep myself from drilling holes in my forehead to let the little demons out. Such degrading pastimes as reading real books, watching television (no shit, there’s stuff besides Law & Order on every night. Who knew?) and thinking about things are but some of the indignities I’ve had to endure. It hasn’t been pretty. Pretty soon, I’ll start getting color back into my pallor and acting all well-adjusted and all that hippie crap. Horror. Sheer, nasal-plumbing horror.