Bring your dear Vim to Firefox – Vimperator

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If you are a die-hard Vim fan and haven’t heard of Vimperator already, here’s great news: You can control your web browser using the keyboard without the need to touch your mouse just like in Vim.

Vimperator is a Firefox extension that creates a Vim-like environment in your browser. It removes all clutter including the menu bar, tool bar and bookmarks bar. However if you want, you can bring them up again using a simple command. Navigating the pages are same as in Vim, use hjkl and what-not. The list of commands you can use is enormous, but thankfully Vimperator has a great documentation as well. Just type :help and hit Enter to view the help.

You can build aliases, map keystrokes, etc in a separate configuration file named .vimperatorrc. There are also dozens of plugins available.

It takes some time to get used to the command-only interface, but once you are through you will know that it’s worth the effort.

Take a look at the minimal look of Firefox once Vimperator is installed:

Rename your TV shows with Filebot

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If you have no idea why you should rename the episodes of your TV shows, take this example. Suppose you have the Prison Break TV series with its episodes named like this:

PrisonBreak4.avi

PrisonBreak5.avi

etc

But it would be quite useful if you could have them renamed a little more descriptively like this:

Prison Break – 1×04 – Cute Poison.avi

Prison Break – 1×05 – English, Fitz or Percy.avi

Or you may need to rename them to another specific format.

FileBot is a free and open source tool which does this renaming for you automagically. It obtains the correct episode names from sites like TVRage and AniDB, so it will work for almost all TV shows and anime. Other than renaming shows, it has several other features, including subtitle downloads.

FileBot is cross-platform and can be launched via Java Web Start. The app is less documented and its features are a bit hidden, though.

Browsing without images

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I’ve always been a Chrome fan, but switched to Firefox three days ago. The reason is that Chrome does not have an image blocking extension yet.

Yes, I’m browsing the web with images and Flash turned off these days. It’s a minimal browsing experience. It cuts the crap and lets you see only what’s important. It gets better when you make use of the Readability extension. The pages load much faster and the dear bandwidth is saved. And if you want to turn on the images for a certain site, the toggle button is only a single click away.

99% of the sites can be viewed without images with no problem. Even Facebook, unless you want to see the occasional photo that someone tags you in.

And talking about Firefox, I’m getting used to it. It’s slow and rickety like an old CTB bus, but then, I love old CTB buses.

OhLife – the diary you've always wanted to write

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Writing a diary continuously is something most of us fail to do.

OhLife is an online diary which employs emails to push us into making an entry each day. It will send you an email every day at 8pm asking how the day went. What we have to do is to reply that mail and the reply will be saved as an entry in the diary.

I’ve been using the service for about five months now and found that this method really works. The two major reasons are that you’re reminded of writing an entry each day and you don’t have to open any application or website to write the entry: just replying the mail at least with a single sentence would do.

If you’re one of those who has always wanted to keep a diary but cannot keep up with the habit for long, give OhLife a try.

Last.fm scrobbling problems

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Many users have experienced that their tracks aren’t properly scrobbled in last.fm during the past 24 hours. However, this seems to be a display issue, the tracks are actually being scrobbled. To see the real track list that’s been scrobbled, add “/tracks” to your user URL.

eg: http://www.last.fm/user/thameera/tracks

Hope the issue will be solved soon.