Bath Tub, Rubber Keyboard, Ratpoison and Opera //at 22:23 //by abe

I recently noticed that a very good way to safely read webcomics in the bath tub is an old laptop with a big screen (e.g. a IBM ThinkPad A-series like my 15” A31 which has a nice 1400×1050 resolution), a water proof keyboard, the screen-alike, keyboard only driven (hence the name) window manager ratpoison (other keyboard driven window managers like wmii or awesome probably will do as well as ratpoison) and a good keyboard driven web browser which can bind or by default has bound a key to follow <link rel="next" ... /> tags.

Like Opera. Opera has bound the space bar to scroll one page down and if you reach the bottom of the page to go to the next page as labeled in the link tag. Additionally the full screen mode is helpful, too.

Or the dream browser of all Emacs addicts, Conkeror, which has bound the function browser-follow-next to ]]. (Conkeror packages will hit Debian Experimental quite soon.)

Or the GNOME feed reader Liferea which has bound Ctrl-Space by default to scroll down the content by one page and if you reach the bottom of the content go to the next unread item.

With that equipment I can read my favourite web comics like Questionable Content (whose content seldomly is questionable :-) or Ozy and Millie (Think of a mixture of Calvin & Hobbes, Peanuts and Kevin & Kell) in the bath tub without drying my hands before reading the next comic or fearing water or health damage by the combination of water and computer. I just press one or two keys on the keyboard floating over my lap and have a good time.

BTW: I’ve got a blue, non-branded one (packaging reveals it as “AirTouch Keyboard”, probably manufactured by SanChuan Electronics, China) with swiss-german layout from ARP Datacom (whose website offers no permanent links and insists on session cookies *puke*), but those from Keysonic or from ROCK seem to be very similar — nowadays they are also available in illuminated, miscellaneous colors and wireless, but only IP65, probably because of the necessarily accessible battery compartment.

But this kind of having fun still has optimisation potential: non-flexibel water-proof keyboard (IP67 recommended, so those IP66 keyboards and mice recently posted at UF LOTD are probably not tight enough), flat screen mounted above the bath tub, etc. ;-) Or maybe a completely water proof laptop if such thing exists — Does it?

One more note: In Debian Sid and Lenny recently a new tool called keynav has been added, which allows you to control the mouse quickly using the keyboard only. So with Sid or Lenny, I don’t even need an waterproof mouse or trackball if an application insists on mouse usage. ;-)

Dilbert.com became even more better //at 16:07 //by abe

nion argued about the new Dilbert.com website now using flash instead of GIFs and I responded that it’s not as bad since Dilbert.com now also officially offers RSS feeds — without Flash.

It looks as if Scott Adams got more responses from nion type people since he divides the feedback to the new Dilbert.com site into three groups: Those who are angry about flash and bloat (mostly techies and linuxers), those who are fine with the design and features, but angry about the slowness due to overload and those who are fine with the design and features and ignore the speed. I’m in none of these groups.

But Scott Adams valued the feedback and responded especially to the first two groups of critics with something for which he couldn’t have found a better URL:

http://dilbert.com/fast

With this pure Dilbert, nion should now be happy again. I still prefer the RSS feeds though.

Dilbert.com changed - to the better //at 13:00 //by abe

nion argues about the new Dilbert.com website now using flash instead of GIFs.

Well, he hasn’t looked right: Dilbert.com offers now flash and static images. And the last ones are now much easier than ever to view or fetch, because Dilbert.com now has RSS feeds. Ok, at the moment, the feed seems broken respectively empty, but I have the last week of Dilbert comics in my feed reader. In colour!

Additionally Dilbert.com is opening its archive. (The link to the blog post currently broken, too.) Back to 2001 is said to be available now, the reminder is in the works

The new Dilbert.com site worked fine yesterday but seems to have some problems today. But I expect that they will fix that soon. :-)

Noticed it btw. because the inofficial Dilbert feed from tapestry included a broken image yesterday. (Works fine now, but no new comic in that feed today…)