YJL

More than a year ago, I wrote a post about how to view local PDF file. To be honest, I never actually used that script, I have a bookmark for viewing PDF online for very long time even before I wrote that script. I dont download PDF when I need to open a PDF file, just directly view it using Google Docs Viewer.

If you are a Firefox user, itd be great to know the keyword and %s in bookmarks. Keyword of bookmark allows you to access the bookmark by just typing it in address bar, %s in bookmark URL will be replaced with the string you put after the keyword when you open a bookmark using address bar.

To show you how to use bookmark, first, create a bookmark with URL as follows:

https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=%s

and set keyword to gdv.

Next, find a random PDF link online and type in the following text in address bar:

gdv[Space]http://example.com/foobar.pdf[Enter]

Google Docs Viewer will show you the document if its not get blocked. I have seen one or two websites actually blocks Google Docs Viewer.

You can have embedded version with the following URL, which has less controls:

https://docs.google.com/viewer?embedded=true&url=%s

For me, as a fan of Pentadactyl, after I yank a URL of PDF, I just type in:

[o]gdv[Space]http://example.com/foobar.pdf[Enter]

If you are smart, you should have learned you can set some keywords for your most visited bookmarks with single letter or two. You dont need to go through your bookmark bar, you just type the keyword and press enter.

Press ;d to get the hints if links are PDF, DOC, etc.

I have known Justin.tv for years, but only recently I started watching StarCraft II gaming streams. I was bored, no blogging, gotta find something else to kill time.

Just like every websites, the stream pages have too much stuff. When you just want to watch the stream and to chat, thats all. But you get a lot of stuff you dont need, that wastes browsers resource to keep them.

Yes, you can pop out the stream and chat. However, you dont want to pop them every time you want to watch. Why not just a simple URL, bookmark it, and you can get the stream and chat? Moreover, sometimes, I open two streams and one YouTube video from my subscriptions. I need something simple.

Therefore, I started writing this Clean Justin.tv Viewer, here is a screenshot to get you the idea of what I was thinking:

The viewer is seen at bottom right corner. My window manager is dwm, I switched to it only for a couple of days. The web browser is Firefox with Vimperator. Everything is as cleanly as possible. You dont see the window title bar because of dwm, you dont see space waster of browsers toolbars. The only unnecessary thing you can see is the statusline of Vimperator.

At first glance, it looks like a normal Justin.tv embed, move your mouse over below the logo, you should be able to see the controls.

I like the chat box overlays the video and I can hide the bottom bar to make the video as largely as possible.

A commenter mentioned in this post a image viewer I hadnt heard before, Geeqie. It was forked from gqview. It is not in Gentoo packages, but it is easy to compile. The version I used is 1.0beta2.

It is really fast and most important feature is Raw image support. With feh, I have to use UFRaw to convert raw images into jpeg format. But its okay for me because I dont view raw image often, well, I dont view other images often, either. The only problem with Geeqie is it has too many features ( :-) ) I do not use, especially those editing functions.

Here is a screenshot of it:

You can see another good feature in the filelist of the screenshot, it merges images with same main filename and different image file types. Its a nice feature, I think.

The other thing I noticed when I was configuring it, a word showed up, Win32. I dont know if it is really supporting Windows, I didnt dig in.

Anyway, I will keep Geeqie on my system just for the raw images. Feh is still easier to use since I am usually in $ prompt or MC, I only need to run feh . or use F2 menu to bring up feh.