Kalimat al-Mutafalsif

I have two sets of readers. One that is quite technically competant and I'm learning from, the other that's not as into computers, that just gloss through for my more life applicable posts. This is aimed at those that are in, or would like to be in the first group (not saying only they can read it, but this is gonna be a decently geeky post).

So, I love my desktop. She's a gorgeous machine that is awesome for games, and even better for coding. I've got the better part of a Terabyte of disk space in her, and I've made an investment in keeping all my work and backups connected to her. When I'm home, this is amazing. I've got a frickin huge display for having tons of windows open. If I need to relax I can use Cedega to crank out my favorite games (assuming they don't have native Linux builds). But, big question, what if I'm not home? Traveling? Or... god forbid... on campus for classes? Therein lies SSH!

For the uninitiated SSH is a secure shell that in essence puts you at a terminal on whatever computer you're connected to, whereever in the world it may be. So if I'm on campus I may not have my gorggeous 4.6 million pixels of display to work on, but I do have command line access to my desktop (and hence, all my work). This has saved my butt more times than I can count. Oh, and its encrypted, which never hurts.

So that's the basics, but who cares if you can only get a command line?! I mean, what good can someone possible do without graphics? Well, for one, I love the Command Line Interpreter (CLI). I'm less distracted by fancy things, and I learn more keyboard shortcuts, great for productivity.

But sometimes you just wanna do nothing. Or maybe you need to check up on your buddy list and don't have AIM Express (worried about a friend today, and I was in this situation). The package I found was BSFlite. My solution was to SSH to my home machine (where I have install rights), wget the tarball from sourceforge, and make. That's it. 100% fool proof installation and I was able to browse my buddy list immediately.

Note: Yes, obviously these images have been doctored. I was messing around with options so they were quite confusing, and I've put things that go together, together. Also, in the buddy list, one guy specifically would not like to find his screen name on there, so I've removed it. Top picture is the commands, next is a conversation (with me mommy) and finally an unsorted (ok, meaning sorted alphebetically, not by status) buddy list.

Ok, why stop there? I also use IRC a ton, so I wanted an IRC client as well. (Ok, in all honesty this client has been on my system for a long time, but that doesn't make for a good story). What I found is IRSSI which is an awesome command line IRC client.