Web Browser Galore

So relatively little to do with anime today, but recently I went looking at a new (well, new to me at least) web browser called dwb. It's a browser reminiscent of luakit, uzbl, etc. and so there is fairly little to be seen when actually using the browser. It has support for tabs, has a status bar, and aside from that, has the web page. There are of course the other general sort of features that any normal browser has (history, bookmarks, etc), but there are a number of minor differences in comparison to my preferred browser of choice (which is luakit).

For one thing, instead of using numbers to follow links, it uses letters. It's a small difference, but that means you don't need to move up or to your keypad to follow links, but just keep typing on the normal keys. Another fine addition is the availability of changing the keyboard shortcuts and settings within the browser without any real hassle (though you need to keep an eye out for conflicting shortcuts). With that said, luakit might be more flexible since you can actually define everything yourself, but for a simpler user such as myself, the convenience is welcomed.

Of course, the real browsers you should be using would have to be chromium/chrome. This is not without justification, and although luakit/dwb/uzbl/firefox/etc are all usable for your general searching, I find a particular plugin available for chromium/chrome to be a requirement for my manga reading needs.

I'm sure many of you have heard of it, but it's called "AllMangasReader" (allmangasreader.com) and I think it's a great plugin. It supports a variety of websites (even a number of ones with different languages) and gives a small number of perks to reading manga on those sites as well. Most sites display manga page by page, but the plugin does the convenient thing and combines them all into one page (continuous pages separated by chapters) which I find to be much more streamlined and not quite as jarring to shuffle between pages. Of course, there are websites like kissmanga.com that already do that for you, but with the plugin in hand, your range of websites can increase.

Not only that, but the plugin keeps a consolidative listing of the various manga from said various websites so you don't have to keep track of them. When the site updates with a new chapter, you get a spiffy notification that can be clicked to bring you straight to the latest chapter OR the chapter that you haven't read yet (because it also keeps track of what chapter you last read). It works rather well as a running list of the stuff you have read, though you can't export it to MAL or anything. It's one of the few plugins that I always get, whether in Windows or Linux. If only there were a userscript alternative TT-TT. Unfortunately there don't seem to be any userscript alternatives that provides the great consolidated list that AllMangasReader does, nor do they give updates (at least not the ones I looked at).

All in all, my current default browser remains as chromium, though I still keep firefox, luakit, and dwb because I can spare the space, and hopefully one day they too will have something spectacular (I'm really wishing for a userscript), but until then, luakit/dwb will have to be used as just generic stuff (both are lightweight :D).

To sum up this post, I did nothing all week except find a neat lightweight web browser to play around with, and I still use chromium for a single plugin.

A Slow Wait

So it's been about two weeks (the last post should have been later in the week...then it would be a bit more even, but meh it's still an average of one post per week) and it's time for another post. Eventually I'll be posting videos, though that may or may not happen before I replace my laptop's fan hopefully during the Thanksgiving break. In the meantime, I made a very simple opening sequence (terribly simple) that I am planning on adding to all of my videos and I might add thumbnails to the youtube previews if I split up the videos into different categories (which I might not do). I also found some catchy background music, which is always nice.

So, eventually videos will be posted sooner or later depending on whether I want to post one with the bad humming of my dying fan or wait for the new fan and hope it's better. Worse case, I might just buy a USB microphone and with any luck, the distance will lower the humming from the video. I know that I can edit the audio separately and lower the humming, but that is a lot of effort and time xD.

I recently rewatched all of Tenchi in Tokyo which was fun and recently found a CLI anime watchlist for linux. It's called Anigrate (http://anigrate.glacicle.org/) and supports importing lists from aniDB and MAL. If you have the knowledge, you can also set up a server to display some of your anime watching statistics. It doesn't seem to work correctly with some anime titles that have characters not available in ASCII, but I imagine that it's a simple fix (I only wish I knew how to fix it myself). With that said, I'm kind of poking around and looking for anything that might help someone with limited python knowledge, such as myself, to fix the issue. Aside from that, it's perfectly usable as a personal watch list and might be convenient for keeping a local track of what you watch, though unfortunately it doesn't automatically record what you are watching. With that said, I slightly recall seeing a script for MAL and linux somewhere that has a feature like that, though I will have to search for that script again before saying anything definite.

I'm not exactly sure how this blog is going to work since I didn't actually think of what I would be doing with the blog except for posting any scripts that I might happen to make or something of that nature, but I suppose eventually I'll think of something. Until then, I hope whoever reads this happens to find something useful from my random banters.