I absolutely adore the popular new microblogging service, twitter. But lately, it's been overrun with spammers. I'm sure many of you are as unhappy as I am to see such a promising and exciting new service despoiled, so I'd like to share a couple tips I've picked up along the way, on how you and I, how we, can help combat this.
Twitter has an @spam account for reporting spam. When you see spam, simply RT is to @spam. Sometimes they can be slow to respond, so if you don't get a response after a few minutes, you can RT it again.
Particulary egregious spam needs swift action. If a spammer is being especially horrible, RT their tweets to all your friends and followers, encouraging them to RT to @spam. Muliple offended parties will more quickly get the spam fighting team's attention - it may even become a trending topic, where it can easily gain momentum and be noticed. This is highly effective.
Please pass this along to others and do your part to decrease the volume of spam on twitter, and keep it the wonderful place @where we #blog.
Of course, I use urxvt. It has support for changing fonts on the fly with escape sequences, so I put together a little script to make it easy. Having a tiny font can be pretty useful if you're watching log files go by or something is compiling and you just want to keep an eye ...
#!/bin/sh
# switch fonts on the fly in urxvt
# my default font
font="xft:DejaVu Sans Mono-10:antialias=true:hinting=true"
case $1 in
small) font="7x13";;
tiny) font="5x8";;
# some crazy fonts I made out of my handwriting
rupa) font="xft:rupa:style=Regular";;
r) font="xft:rupa clean:style=Regular";;
esac
printf '\33]50;%s\007' "$font"
el is a fuzzy wrapper around $EDITOR (or other commands), that aims to allow quick search and selection of a file. I started writing it at work, where we have lots of directories with files whose beginning and end are the same, and I'd be typing something a lot.
At its simplest el takes any number of arguments, each treated as a regex on files in $PWD. To be displayed, a file must match ALL of the arguments. el will show a list of matching files, but if there is only one match it will directly open the file for editing, allowing me to grab any old part or parts of a file name and quickly open it.
This script has been evolving for a while, it started as shell, was perl for a while, lately python C, and i've been tacking on all sorts of involvements. I use it all the time these days, I'm curious how many others have written similar things.
el : python
el : C (@ github)
Two of the extensions for firefox for firefox I find most useful are vimperator and tab mix plus. But vimperator 2.0 is decisively incompatible with tab mix. After suffering without tab-mix for a while - as giving up vimperator is not an option - I came to the realization that firefox 3 had swallowed almost everything I use tab mix for, except for the one thing I really missed: having links to external sites open in a new (backgrounded) tab.
So I put together a greasemonkey script out of bits and pieces of a couple others that didn't do exactly what I wanted. It works almost everywhere, but a couple sites (like Google Reader) already open stuff in tabs but don't background the tab. A simple about:config setting fixes them:
browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground;true
(note: this does prevent firefox from taking focus when external links are clicked)
Having links work this way is great for going down a page with a ton of links and clicking interesting stuff to read in chunks, and it confuses the heck out of people that get near my browser - they click on stuff a zillion times but the page doesn't change, and they don't notice all the tabs they've opened.
A little script for automating screencap pasting via Dropbox. Nice if you bind it to a couple keys:
C-PrintScreen dbcap
S-PrintScreen dbcap -s
and etc ...
#!/bin/bash
# use Dropbox like cap.sprunge.us
# requires scrot and xclip
cap=~/"Dropbox/Public/screen.jpg"
[ -d "$(dirname $cap)" ] || exit
scrot $* $cap || exit
dropbox puburl $cap | xclip -i -f