Google Reader‘s interface is famously minimalist, but browsers hardly make ideal reading platforms. They give you convenient access to a plethora of distractions, from social networks to pictures of kittens. Avoid such distractions and focus on your reading by doing your reading in the command line. Besides, the command line is just plain cool, so you should be using it anyway.

eLinks is a text-only browser you can run from the command line. It is easily installed on Linux and Mac systems alike, so this idea works on both of those systems.

Installing eLinks

The first step, of course, is installing eLinks. Using Linux? Installing eLinks is simple, then. Just check your package manager of choice for it. Using Ubuntu? Simply click here to install.

Are you a Mac user? Congratulations, most of you aren’t awesome enough to be interested in the command line. You think different. Find a Mac download for eLinks here. You’ll find the Terminal in your Applications folder, under “Utilities“.

Once you’ve got the program working, you can open it in the terminal by typing “elinks” and hitting enter.

Launching Google Reader

Want to get to Google Reader quickly? Type this command into the terminal:

elinks google.com/reader/m

Just like that, you’ve opened a web browser straight to Google Reader’s mobile page. You will need to log in now. Use the arrow keys to get to the entry fields, then hit enter to add text. Log in and you will see your reading list:

Use your arrow keys to open up your article of choice. You will then see a text-only version of the article in question:

I highly recommend pressing the space bar to scroll down; it will “turn the page” completely.

Of course, this all assumes that the RSS feeds you subscribe to are full text. If some of them aren’t, Google will do what it can to convert links to a mobile version if you click a link. Alternatively, you can convert any RSS feed to full text with these tools. FullTextRSS in particular worked wonderfully for me.

Do you want a completely immersive reading experience? In most Linux distros, including Ubuntu, you can switch to terminal-only by hitting “ALT”, “CTL” and any of the “F” keys from 1 to 6. Pressing “ALT”, “CTL” and “F7″, for example, will bring you back to your graphical environment.

Alternatively, you could simply go full screen or maximize the terminal. That works too.

Other Potential Sites

eLinks doesn’t just work with Google Reader, of course – it’s a full blown web browser. Just about any site should work, but mobile versions of famous sites tend to work best, like the BBC Mobile version.

Can you think of any other sites you’d like to read in this way? Share them in the comments below, as always! Also feel free to share any other simple command line tricks you use to keep yourself from being distracted.

Command+Shift+3 – Takes a screenshot of the entire screen. Command+Shift+4 – Allows you to take selective screenshots. Command+Shift+4 then hit Spacebar – Takes a screenshot of the highlighted window/area.
Command+Control+Shift+3 or Command+Control+Shift+4 – Takes the screenshot and stores it on the clipboard.

By default, the screenshots are formatted as PNG images and saved to the Desktop. Today, we will look into a few tricks to modify how Mac OS X deals with screenshots.

Change The Image Format

PNG is a a fantastic image format with great quality but I have quite a lot of friends who run Windows and they have no idea what to do when they get a PNG in the mail. To change the default image format to JPG, here’s what I did.

Launch Terminal from ~/Applications/Utilities. Then enter this line of code:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg

And then this one to implement the change:

killall SystemUIServer

You’ll notice your menubar refresh itself, then you know you’ve done it right. Try it out.

The supported image formats are: JPG, PDF, GIF, TIF, BMP, PNG and a couple of others but these are the most popular.

Change The Destination Folder

Captured screenshots are automatically saved on the Desktop. This is great except when making screenshots is a staple of your job, like mine. In this case, I would much prefer then screenshots to be saved in a folder within a pre-defined location, rather than litter my desktop.

In this example, I’m setting the destination folder to “Screenshots” within my Documents folder. Here’s how the command should be entered in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Documents/Screenshots/

Some users report that the full path to the folder should be entered although I’ve found that the command above works. If it doesn’t work for you, then enter this instead:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /Users/[your username here]/Documents/Screenshots/

Then to implement the change, enter:

killall SystemUIServer

Keep in mind this modification will only work if the destination folder exists i.e. if the “Screenshots” folder was deleted, the screenshot won’t be saved and there will be an error instead.

Remove Shadows From Window Captures

By pressing Command+Shift+4 then hitting Spacebar, you can automatically grab a screenshot of an entire window and its shadow. It looks very pretty but the image won’t save well in JPG because of the shadow’s transparency.

To get rid of the shadow and only capture the window, enter this line of code in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true

Then to implement the change, enter:

killall SystemUIServer

To revert the modification and restore shadows, enter:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool false

How’s how a window capture screenshot looks like with the shadow:

Without the shadow, the image is more clean-cut and it can be saved as a JPG. It also saves you a lot of time from cropping.

Rename The Filename’s Prefix

In Snow Leopard, screenshots are saved as “Screen shot [datestamp] at [timestamp]” by default. Unfortunately, there’s no way to remove the date and timestamp from the filename unless a script is used to rename the output filename. Luckliy, you can change the prefix — the “screen shot” part. To do this, enter the following line of code in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture name prefix

Substitute prefix with your desired filename and you’re set. Then enter this to implement the change:

killall SystemUIServer

Did you already know the tips above or was it all a learning experience? What other “hacks” do you use to modify your screenshots? Tell us in the comments.

And guess what? Mac OS X does not disappoint. By combining the trusty Disk Utility and some black magic from Terminal, I was able to create an ISO on Mac OS X that works in both Mac and Windows. It’s actually pretty simple. Here’s how.

Insert the disc into the CD/DVD drive and launch Disk Utility. The disk will appear in the left column window. Click on it once so that its highlighted, as shown in the screenshot below.

Now that we have the source of the disc image selected, click on File->New->Disk Image from “insert name of source”. In the pop-up window which appears, select the Desktop as the destination just to make life a little simpler. Next, make sure that DVD/CD Master is selected as the Image Format — that ensures the contents of the disk are completely copied into a resultant .cdr image (Tip: keep the image’s name short and simple so that it can be easily reproduced).

Click on Save and the disc image creation process will begin, indicated by a progress window. Depending on how large the disc is, the amount of time that’s necessary varies.

When the cloning process is complete, check the Desktop and the .cdr image should be there. You can use this image on Macs, it works perfectly. However, to share it with Windows computers, we first need to convert it into a recognizable format. To do this, the help of Terminal is required.

Launch Terminal either by Spotlighting for it or directly double-clicking on the app in ~/Applications/Utilities/ and type in:

cd desktop

Then, enter this line of code to transform the .cdr to an ISO file:

hdiutil makehybrid -iso -joliet -o [filename].iso [filename].cdr

Substitute both instances of [filename] with the name of the .cdr image. As you can tell from the screenshot above, Terminal will create a new hybrid image. This image can be read in both Windows and Macs and uses ISO 9660 and HFS file systems.

So there you go. You can easily create cross-platform hybrid disc images with your Mac without the need for any additional applications. How neat is that? To mount the disk image in Mac, simply double-click on it. In Windows, CD/DVD mounting tools are required – Saikat featured a couple great tools and Jorge wrote about one which doesn’t require installation.

That’s just one of the few uses of Disk Utility. Jeffry used it to install Snow Leopard from his thumbdrive — check the article out, it’s really neat.

According to Wikipedia, Twitter is:

a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers.

So, based on the definition, I see tweeting as nothing but mass short text messaging of a user’s current status. Some people might find the activity fun, but that’s just not my cup of tea. I wanted to find out other benefits from the service that turn millions of users to tweet actively everyday.

Six Reasons To Tweet

Reading further on the Wikipedia page, I found out that there are six categories of tweets: news, spam, self promotion, pointless babble, conversational, and pass-along value. A few of these might serve as a good enough reason for me to start exploring.

Standard usage of Twitter requires users to log in to the site to be able to post and follow tweets. Not very friendly for real-time status updates. That’s why users always try to find other more comfortable ways to tweet.

During my first few days of exploring Twitter, I found some geeky methods to issue a quick tweet under Mac. It’s a combination of using Quicksilver/Google Quick Search Box (QSB) to post and GeekTool to display the tweets.

The Quick Tweet Post

If you are a Quicksilver or QSB user, you can post quick tweets using only a few keystrokes. Quicksilver needs an additional script or plugin to make it work with Twitter, while QSB comes with the feature built in.

The basic steps of using either Quicksilver or QSB to tweet are more or less the same, but since Quicksilver does not get along well with Snow Leopard in my Mac, I used QSB instead.

Here are the steps to issue your quick tweet:

First, you need to set up your Twitter account in QSB. Click on the little arrow on the right side of the QSB window and choose Preferences (or use Command + Comma while the QSB window is open)

Then click the Accounts tab, click Add Account and choose Twitter from the Account Type.

With your Twitter account set up, you can continue with the quick tweets.

• Invoke QSB (using Command + Space or hit the Command key twice)



• Write down your micro-post and then press the right arrow button.



• Choose “send Twitter status” action



• Hit enter to send the post

The Display

Tweeting is not only posting personal micro-blogs but also about following others. There’s a perfect GeekTool script to display your friends’ tweets on your desktop called Twitterbuddy.

Download and unzip the installation package to a location in your hard drive. You have to install the script by double clicking the install.command file inside the Twitterbuddy folder.

The installation will run in Terminal.

Use command

twitterbuddy -h

in Terminal to get the list of available (GeekTool) commands.

The basic command would be:

/usr/local/bin/twitterbuddy -u username -p password -n x

Change “username” “password” and “x” with the appropriate value where “x” is the number of tweets that you want to have displayed.

The Fix

New Twitterbuddy users might get this connection error: “Could not connect with twitter: Did you specify a username and a password?“. That’s because the script will only work with the older versions of twitter.gem (version 0.44 and below), while the installation process will download the latest version of twitter.gem (version 0.77 at the time of writing).

To fix the problem, you have to manually uninstall the latest twitter.gem and install the older one.

Go to RubyForge: Twitter: Project Filelist page and download version 0.4.4.

Open Terminal and type this command:

sudo gem uninstall twitter

And hit enter

Then continue with this command:

sudo gem install

drag and drop the downloaded file to Terminal window to complete the command, and hit enter.

After this re-installation, everything should work fine.

Note: Some users have reported that their Twitterbuddy installation requires a restart before working properly.

The Clients

If you prefer the no-hassle way, you could just use a Twitter client to post and follow tweets. Two alternatives that I found are: Twitterific and Tweetie. Both are available in two versions: free ad-supported version and paid version.

What about you? Do you tweet? What is your favorite tweeting method? Share using the comments below.

Luckily for them, I discovered a much simpler alternative to save the day. Like my tip, this app will enable you to stream your videos to your iPhone or iPod Touch over a local network as well as the Internet. And hey, good news — Windows users get to jump in on some video streaming fun as well! What is this fabulous application and why haven’t I heard of it, you ask? Well, because it’s our job to scour for gems like these and announce them to you.

Coupled with their iPhone app, Air Video is a Mac/Windows desktop application that is designed to act as a server and stream videos to the iPhone (or iPod Touch) in almost any format, even if they’re not encoded in h.264! It has a built-in converter which does all the encoding on-demand! We’ll touch on that a bit later. First, let’s check out the server side of this video streaming combo.

As I’ve previously said, Air Video will work on both Mac and Windows. Unfortunately, I wasn’t privileged with a PC so I’m afraid I can’t demonstrate how this operates in Windows. But I suspect that the procedure is somewhat similar to Mac’s so I’ll just go ahead with my review and hopefully pass on a rough idea of how it all works.

Installation comprises of the usual suspects: DMG; mount; drag server app to Applications folder; launch app. Once the app is launched, it resides in the menu bar. You should be presented with the Preferences window (if nothing happens, click on Air Video’s menu bar icon and select Preferences).

As you can see in the screenshot below, I’ve already added several folders to share. Have you noticed it yet? Air Video allows you to stream any folder from your computer — it doesn’t need to be from iTunes! Click on the “Add disk folder” or “Add iTunes playlist” to select folders and playlists to share. Before you begin to select your favourite artist’s playlists, know this — music cannot be streamed.

For the sake of learning (and expedience), let’s just assume that’s everything we need to set. Now we’re ready to start the server. Click on the ‘Yes’ button next to ‘Server Running’ to get the show on the road! The menubar icon will change to reflect the status of the server.

Let’s move on to the iPhone. Download the free Air Video app from the iTunes App Store. Air Video Free will only display 3-5 randomly selected videos from any shared folder. If you’re thinking what I’m thinking, you’ll probably rearrange your video files into groups of 3. Otherwise, support this marvelous app and buy the full version for $3.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed the app on your iPhone or iPod Touch, connect to your local network via WiFi and start Air Video. Click on the plus sign on the top left of the Servers page to add a server. If you’re running a Mac, it should be automatically detected. Otherwise, you can easily add a server manually. In my case, it discovered my MacBook and I only had to tap it in order to add it to the server list. Tap it again to view the list of shared folders.

I’ve set my Movies folder to be shared but I could only view 3 of the 15 items within the folder. I tapped on “12 more items” and it pestered me with a pop-up to buy the full version. No biggie. Moving on, I tapped on a recent series I’ve been watching — Gordon Ramsay’s The F Word. That brought me to an info page which very kindly informed me that the video isn’t properly formatted for the iPhone. Here’s the really exciting bit: even though the video isn’t formatted in h.264, Air Video can convert the file on the fly using Live Conversion.

After a few seconds of buffering, it started to play! Really awesome stuff. In the meantime, the server-side application is using up a lot of my CPU power, all due to the fact that it’s converting the video file into a recognizable format. That’s probably the price to pay for convenience. My advice to you if you’re planning to stream a lot of movies over to your iPhone — have them ready in h.264.

So those are the basic features of Air Video. Now, it’s time to move on to the juicy stuff — streaming over the Internet. This feature needs to be enabled in the server application under the ‘Remote’ tab. Once enabled, it will provide you with a specific PIN number which you’ll need to enter in the iPhone app to link the two together. If you’re facing any difficulties, check out their support page on Remote Access. And of course, if you’re accessing your computer from the Internet, you’ll have to make sure that the ports are opened (either by UPnP or manually configuring the router) and firewalls are set to accept certain connections.

Air Video couldn’t have been discovered at a better time. As my rusty tip slowly falls apart; a gorgeously designed and incredibly exciting app rises to the occasion. It’s now easier than ever to stream videos directly to your iPhone and iPod Touch.

Have you used Air Video? Is it worth paying $3 for the full version? Familiar with easier ways to stream video to iPhone or iPod Touch? Let us know what you think.

From Panther to Tiger to Leopard and now, Snow Leopard, we’ve seen Exposé slowly maturing from a young cub to the ferocious beast it is today. There’s just so much more you can do with Exposé now compared to a year or two ago. And sticking with the multitasking motif, I’ll show you 6 different ways you can make use of Exposé in your daily workflow, shaving precious seconds off your regular routine.

Quick Look in Exposé

Quick Look is now integrated into Exposé, allowing you to preview a window without exiting Exposé. Invoke the All Windows Exposé view and while your mouse cursor is hovering over a window (highlighted by a blue rim), press Spacebar. You are now previewing that window in full resolution but wait, you’re still in Exposé. You may either press Spacebar again to return to the All Windows view or click on the preview (or press Enter) to select that window or the Escape key to exit Exposé.

This works wonders if you have a lot of windows open and they end up being generated as tiny thumbnails. There’s no more guesswork involved. You can now be sure of the window you’re selecting while still in Exposé.

Cycle through apps

In Snow Leopard, Apple introduced Dock Exposé, where you can now click and hold on any Dock icons to invoke an Application Window Exposé view. While in that view, you can press Tab and cycle through any running application. Pressing the accent (`) key will reverse the cycle order.

You can achieve the same effect via the Application Switcher. Press Command+Tab and hold the Command key. Keep pressing the Tab key until you reach an application you want to view in Application Window Exposé view and hit the 1 key while still holding on to Command. You can now release the Command key and press Tab or the accent key to cycle through applications on your Dock.

Reorder windows by name and type

If you have loads of open windows, viewing them individually and finding the right one in Exposé can be tricky. The order in which Exposé windows seem to be arranged in Snow Leopard remains a mystery to me. However, you can arrange the windows alphabetically if you hit Command+1 while in Exposé. Pressing Command+2 groups similar apps together in no particular (known) order.

In the screencast below, I tried to demonstrate the difference between reordering by name and by type.

Select window by name

Let’s just say that you’re working with a lot of windows and you’d like find a specific one while in Exposé. By typing the first few letters of the window you’re looking for, Exposé will refocus the highlighted window to the closest match.

In the screencast below, watch my mouse cursor as it highlights the ‘Music’ folder. I begin to type “thi” and the highlight jumps to wrap around Things. Press Enter to select that window and exit Exposé.

Quit and hide apps

Notice that now, even in Exposé, the Dock is still in view. If you left-click on any dock icon, a contextual menu will pop up to provide you with options to quit, hide, keep in Dock, open at login and show in Finder.

In the same vein, you can also quit an app while using the Application Switcher. Press Command+Tab and hold the Command key. Hit the Tab key until you reach the app you want to quit then press the Q key, still holding on the Command key. The app in question will quit without interfering with Application Switcher.

In the screencast below, I’ll demonstrate how both of these methods look like when they are performed.

Only show windows from current Space

As I said above, Spaces is another friend all for mutitasking. Alas, a caveat — when invoking Exposé in Snow Leopard with Spaces activated, all windows from every Space is shown. To make Exposé display only the windows from the current Space, a little Terminal magic is required.

Launch Terminal then copy and paste these commands in one at a time and hit Enter after each one.

defaults write com.apple.dock wvous-show-windows-in-other-spaces -bool FALSE

killall Dock

To restore Exposé back to its original settings:

defaults delete com.apple.dock wvous-show-windows-in-other-spaces

killall Dock

So there you have it, 6 useful tips to help you manage Exposé and multitask more efficiently. I hope that they come in useful.

If you have any more Exposé tips, feel free to add them in the comments section.

Image credit: James the photographer