Backing up stuff from websites.

Ok so if I'm going to give in and start being a social media whore, can I at least back up my info? I know my friend Kevin was telling me that "open websites" let you can grab all your info from their DB. I wonder how possible that is for other sites. Could I, say, back up my Twitter contacts? My google reader feeds? My delicious links? (yet to join the latter two). I can concede that these outside sources know what I'm doing and what I'm interested in and who my friends are and where I live, but I don't like depending on them to keep my data.

I should start by setting up IMAP for my Gmail account, sheesh...

What about a "rabbithole" paradigm for configuration GUIs?

You get very basic settings on the main screen, but there's a button for things a bit more advanced. The screen that follows that button has categories, and each category again has buttons for things slightly more advanced. You go as far down the rabbithole as you feel comfortable. You could have everything be configurable, but it's not a choice between a Fischer Price toy and an Airplane Cockpit.

And, and I think this is a kicker here, you save which buttons you clicked, which screens you edited. So you sortof have your own customized config GUI. It's tailored to each user for whatever they feel comfortable with.

xmsg

Made a handy little script I wanted to share.

I call it xmsg:

#!/bin/bash
"$@" | xmessage -file -

Now, you can put xmsg before any program whose console output you want, and it'll show up in a (albeit archaic looking) dialog box. This is useful when you want to know the console output of something just with the Alt-F2 run dialog, and you don't want to bother opening an actual console.

Put it on the PATH so you don't have to put the whole path to the script, you can just type "xmsg" followed by your command into the Alt-F2 menu (or a console if you want). Quick example:

xmsg df -h

Will give you a nice popup telling you how much space you have on each mount. Now wasn't that more convenient than having to open a console?

How it works (in case a little education can come of this).

"$@" represents all arguments to the script after the name of the script itself. So, this just runs the command you put after xmsg. This pipes to xmessage. xmessage generally makes a dialog with whatever you give it as an argument, but if you say "-file" it will read from a file. If you give "-" as the file, it will read from standard in, which in this case is the output of "$@".

The quotes, btw, on "$@", are because of Bash's annoying quoting rules. Not using them will, I am told, cause arguments with spaces to retokenize.

Twitter

I'm only announcing my Twitter usage here for now because I got a great quote from my friend Tim, and it won't fit in Twitter's max characters:

"dude, twitter is perfect for you. you send out a message to no one in particular. If anyone wants to listen, then you're talking to them. You do that without the internet."

I guess if you want to follow me:
http://twitter.com/orblivion

I suppose I'll be extra cool and get identi.ca soon.