Feb
04
All geeks love gadgets. Every geek I know has drooled over the Thinkgeek.com merchandise. In South Africa, we sure as hell have a shortage on whats cool and what is downright hot! Now Nic, Justin and Gregor introduces Nudjit.com!
It looks fantastic. It already have some great reviews on some really hot gadgets and I’m excited to see whats happening next. Boys, keep it coming! If only I had a big enough budget for all these funky stuff… My bank manager would kill me, though!
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Kick-ass Tools, Software Development Stii
Jan
29
I stumbled upon this absolute genius little Javascript that you can drag onto your bookmarks bar and hit it when viewing your requests page. This little script will ignore all active requests, one time! Genius. Simply beautiful. Oh, and simple!
Here is a screen cast of this bookmarklet in action. Watch this, then go to http://www.ignoreall.com/ and get the thing. Works like a damn charm! 
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Kick-ass Tools, javascript Stii
Nov
15
I used to be a comic book collector in my younger years. I absolutely loved comics and used to spend a big chunk of my monthly salary on buying comics to grow my collection. I mostly had DC Comics and Marvel Comics. Marvel just scored BIG brownie points by releasing thousands of their print comics online. And not even some digitalized remake of the original, but the quality is damn near the original state.
I think it is kind of sad that today’s kids don’t have much of the comic magic that we used to have. It simply became too expensive to buy new comics @ approx. R40.00 per new comic here in Africa. Nobody really stock them either, so finding comics these days are very hard. When you do find the occasional stack of comic books, you can forget about building up a nice series as there are no constant stream of running issues.
For only $5 per month, you can have access to thousands of comics and titles. Much more affordable! A great, GREAT move. Now we only hope that DC Comics follow suit and do the same. Comic heaven on earth! They released 250 free samples, so go check it out!
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Kick-ass Tools, Web 2.0 Stii
Oct
15
How many times has it happened that you work a lot in ViM and then catch yourself typing ViM commands in other software applications? It happens quite a lot with me. 
The thing is they are just so damn handy and quick!
Lucky for me I stumbled upon this new cool Firefox Add-on that actually allows me to use ViM commands in Firefox. It is fantastic. Best of all, it takes very little getting used to. For example:
- I = Like the ViM insert mode. Disable all ViM command keys.
- gg = Got to the top of the open document
- G = Go to the bottom of the open document
- :gh = Go to your browser’s home page in the current tab/window
- :gH = Go to your browser’s home page in a new tab
- :open http://stii.za.net = Opens the URL in the current browser tab
- Ctrl+c (Control key and “c”) = Stop the page from loading
- Crtl+^ (Control key and ^ or 6) = Selects the previous tab you had open
- r = Reload the current open document
- R = Reload skipping the cache (Extremely useful!)
- t http://stii.za.net = Opens the url in a new tab. If you specify more than one URL, it will open each URL in a new tab.
- :open google foobar = Will search for foobar in google in the current open tab/window.
- :tabopen yahoo foobar = Like the command above, but will search Yahoo in a new tab for foobar. Supports Firefox keyword bookmarks and search engines
- /firefox = searches the open document for the string pattern “firefox” going forward
- ?firefox = as above only searching backward
These are but a few useful commands. To see more commands all you do is type :help and and you’ll have a complete list of shortcuts and commands.
Admittedly, it is not ViM. It emulates ViM and some of the common commands and keystrokes, which is still very handy. I’m loving it!
You can download and install the latest version of the vimperator add-on here.
Here is a list of commands and keystrokes.
Even if you do not use ViM, it could still be a very neat and handy little extension that can make your life much, much easier. Try it out. Thank you Martin Stubenschrott!
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Kick-ass Tools, firefox Stii
Oct
12
I found this incredibly useful visual ViM cheatsheet while tracking “vim” on Twitter (Thanx to Rafiq!).
Funny thing is you get so damn used to the keystrokes that once you go back to another text editor you constantly end up putting things like /searchstr or :wq or :24, 60 w newfile.php, etc… into your source code file. Its quite funny after a while. Nope, I’ll stick with ViM, thank you.
To see the image lifesize, click it!
Another interesting discovery was this vimrc file that will apparently turn ViM into a (mainly) Ruby on Rails IDE. I have not had the time to check it out, but if RoR is your thing, it might be worthwhile to give it a shot!
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Kick-ass Tools, Programming Stii
Oct
09
I’m still a n00b as far as OSX is concerned. One thing I must thank Henk Kleynhans for is that he introduced me to Quicksilver. What an amazing little application!
Quicksilver is often seen as a Spotlight replacement. My first comment to Henk was “but its the same as Spotlight”. Ha, was I wrong! Yes, there is some striking similarities, but Quicksilver goes far beyond launching your applications or opening your documents.
Here is a perfect example of its usefulness. This is a function I use ALL the time. OSX have a great dictionary application. It is vast and powerful and pretty useful. Ever so often I get to a web site where there is an English word I simply don’t know. Now I first have to open the dictionary application and search for the word before I get to know what it is. Fortunately for me, Quicksilver integrates beautifully with the dictionary application. All you do is the following:
You enter the Quicksilver hotkey (in my case it is Command + Spacebar) to launch it:
You type a . to tell Quicksilver that it is text you are entering and it must not search for an application or something else. Right after the . you type or paste your word (if you copied it).
You press the tab key to move to the second block and type dictionary. Note that you would probably get to dic before the dictionary application icon appears. The more you use it, the more Quicksilver will “know” that you want dictionary. On my Mac, when I type d it already knows I want the dictionary. Once the dictionary icon shows you press enter.
And Viola! it opens up a small window with the dictionary explanation of the word you don’t know!
Initially I thought that it is slower than simply launching the dictionary or keeping it open and entering the word and search for it. Initially I was right BUT once you get into the keystrokes it simply cannot be beaten!
If you want this functionality though, you need to install the Dictionary Quicksilver plug-in. It is as easy as pi. Open your Quicksilver control panel, go to Plug-ins and tick the Dictionary tickbox. There. All. Is. Good!
As you can see there is quite a few plug-ins and I would probably do more of this soon!
PS: Dumbass me went and highlighted the Developer plug-in. Soz!
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Apple stuff, Kick-ass Tools Stii
Oct
05
I love my Tshirts! Actually I live in them. I also love ViM. I had this Tshirt made for me as a tribute to my favorite editor. What I would like to do is sell them and donate the proceeds to the Ugandan charity that ViM supports. If any ViMmers can help me out it would be great! More details can be found here: http://iccf-holland.org/
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Kick-ass Tools, Tshirts Stii
Oct
04
If you work a lot on the command line and specially if you are used to Gnome on Linux, then you will find out very quickly that the default Terminal.app application for OS X does not cut it. It is okay for smallish and quick jobs, but if you are living on the command line and using ViM as your editor of choice, it becomes a mission.
All you have to do though is to download iTerm. iTerm is a GPL terminal emulator which is far better than the default terminal application. The biggest drawcard is the support of tabs. If you are used to Gnome on Unbuntu you are used to opening one terminal window with an array of terminal session windows. iTerm allows you to do the same. In the Terminal.app application (the default one) you have to open multiple windows and arrange them to make sense.
There was one quirk I found, but with a quick solution. When using ViM in iTerm, you are restricted to the hjkl keys to move the cursor. This is fine, but when you are in INSERT mode and forget to press escape and try to move the cursor, you’ll irritate yourself.
So how to fix to move your cursor with the arrow keys:
In iTerm, click on “Bookmarks” and “Manage Bookmarks”
You will see a list of bookmarks if you more than one set up so select the one labeled Default by clicking on it and highlighting it and click the edit icon (the button with the pencil in it or the third from the left).
All you then do is change the keyboard setting from xterm (OS X) to Global.
Once you are done, you need to quit iTerm and fire it up again and “Viola!” your arrow keys are hunky-dory in ViM.
I found this helpful help at : http://www.help2go.com/
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Apple stuff, Kick-ass Tools, Software Development Stii
Sep
20
Lets face it, there is certainly no shortage of editors and IDE’s out there today. One would think that command line editors like VI or VI iMproved, Nano, Emacs, etc. should die a really sudden, quick and painless death. Yet, you’d be sorely mistaken. These editors will stay the editors of choice on any *nix server that does not have a GUI installed. Plus what could be simpler than typing
sudo vi /etc/apache2/httpd.conf
to edit system configuration files?
Me and Charl also had a discussion about how hardcore old school geeks swear by it, doing all their programming in these editors. You’d wonder why. I sure did, so I whipped out vimtutor and sharpened the ol’ VIM skills. Now, working with it more and more and getting used to all the shortcuts and keystrokes, it is becoming clearer by the day why it remains the editor of choice for hardcore geeks. It makes it fast! I’m by no means a hardcore geek, but I do see why they like it.
Admittedly, it is quite a learning curve, but once you are used to the commands its much quicker raking in those keystrokes than it is clicking all over some editor to get your rocks on!
It has got really good syntax highlighting and just in case you are afraid you will sorely miss your IDE’s tabbed open document interface you can easily open as much terminal windows as needed to suit your needs. All in all, I think I’ll stay a little longer with VIM than what I expected…
Multiple windows with VIM
PHP syntax highlighting
Python syntax highlighting
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Kick-ass Tools, PHP, Programming, Python Stii
Sep
07
Jing is software that allows you to make screencasts and screenshots. It is absolutely fabulous software! Simple, easy to use and it integrates with screencast.com which allows you to send your newly made screencast on-the-fly to the web. It encodes the screencast video with shockwave flash (SWF) by default.
The upside and downside to it is that as they say: “Jing isn’t a product right now—it’s a project.” which is great, BUT “It’s free for now!” which is quite sad… So while it is free, you can go grab it for both Mac OSX and Windoze.
Blogged with Flock
Tags: jingproject, screencasts
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Kick-ass Tools Stii
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