[PART FOUR] IT’S TIME TO TAKE THOSE BROWSER-BASED SERVICES YOU USE AND MAKE THEM WORK IN LITTLE PROGRAMMES SO YOU CAN DO WHAT YOU WANT WITH YOUR LIFE/COMPUTER.
As far as I can tell, you kiddies use the Internet for reading blogs, writing blogs, checking your email and fckbk. A big part of this Internettage involves you talking to one another on various chat platforms. I guess not very many people use things like MSN or AIM anymore because your favourite web-based applications have chat functions built in to them. This is to be expected – the fewer programmes you can have installed on your system, the better.
One thing that is annoying about this, however is having to have a bunch of tabs open in the browser that you use to access all of your contacts at once. I find it unlikely that you have all of the people who you talk to on fckbk in your Gmail chat – but you might.
Anyway – for my Debian installation that I am trying to maintain without the use of any GUI (graphics) I need to be able to chat with a bunch of people. Because Gmail won’t work in my text browser, I had to use other tools to be able to chat to people. I chose Finch as my solution. Finch is the non-graphics version of Pidgin, a multi-protocol IM client. It looks like this:
Those are my GMail chat contacts (some of them). To get that to happen in Finch or Pidgin (or Adium, I guess – Adium is the OS X version of Pidgin) make your account settings look like this:
You can have all of your other contacts from MSN etc in here but I don’t because fuck them.
Go on, whine about it.