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a man slumped on his desk, from 'The Sleep of Reason Produces
      Monsters'

Oblomovka

Currently:

some ublick; browsing with vim

Okay, here’s my penance for missing a day’s blogging: I wrote a couple of ubiquity commands. They’re not very clever, and it’s more scratching my itch than yours, but they do a couple of things that are useful in my own obsessive areas. The first, state-code will tell you the two-letter US zipcode abbreviation for a US state name (ie Georgia == GA, CA == California). This lets me fake understanding the electoral-college-speak that now replaced ordinary conversations in my favourite discussion areas online. (“So, O’s best gambit if FL and OH are lost with this bounce is to secure the Kerry states, and secure NV and CO”).

Slightly less topical, yet also less parochial, is country-code, which will switch you between English country names (“Germany”, “Serbia”) and the official ISO 3166-1-alpha-2 two-letter abbreviation (“DE”, “RS”). I use two-letter country names to categorize global digital rights news in my delicious feed. God knows what filthy use you put it to, but when you do, you can use this command to help you.

Both country-code and state-code live over here, on my ubiquity page, or you can grab the source from state-country-code.js. They’re embarrassingly easy code examples to follow, so hopefully they’ll inspire you to futz around with building your own ubiquity commands, which really is fun.

Also fun is Vimperator, which I think I linked to back when it was just funny — a Vim-like interface to Firefox. Now I’m actually finding it kind of useful, which scares me almost as much as it should scare you. Its keybindings clash a little with Ubiquity sometimes, otherwise I would now be living in a total command-line-Amish lifestyle online. Also dangerous by the same author, Muttator, bringing mutt/vim like keybindings to Thunderbird with the hubristic motto “All mail clients suck. Mutt just sucks less. This one just sucks less than Mutt.”

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petit disclaimer:
My employer has enough opinions of its own, without having to have mine too.