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  4. Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent it's lynx(1).

Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent it's lynx(1).

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  • gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined

    Today in it's lynx(1). Which is amusing because it's been scheduled for today on my calendar since the beginning of the month, but @neil chose to share links(1) today as well, for many of the same reasons. 😆

    It's been around for decades—I used it to browse gopherspace (and maybe WAIS?) in the 90s via a 1200 baud dial-up connection to a shell account and later the nascent WWW when it arrived.

    Sadly, ClownFlare, Google, and anti-AI-bot/scraper tech has made many formerly-accessible-with-lynx sites now inaccessible, some blocking by User-Agent, some blocking due to the lack of JavaScript support.

    But it has the right amount of usability and friction, so I can use it from my command-line-only writer-deck netbook to do a little research or read some HTML documentation, without getting sucked into the modern web.

    My custom configuration puts it in Advanced mode (no help-bar at the bottom), specifies vi-key-bindings, a custom color-scheme, uses links-and-form-fields-are-numbered making it easy to jump to them, and text-fields-require-activation so I don't get stuck in text input boxes when using j/k to scroll up/down in the document.

    I also have a couple shell wrapper-functions to invoke lynx on particular URLs (Wikipedia, dictionary/thesaurus/rhyming resources, web search, etc) with the CLI arguments filled in.

    I also have mutt configured to show text/html messages in lynx (either using `lynx -dump` and the internal pager, or using `m` from the attachments menu to view it interactively)

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Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent it's lynx(1).

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  • gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined

    well today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent is a bit bittersweet.

    Uncategorized freesoftwareadvent firefox
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    gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined
    well today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent is a bit bittersweet.Back at the beginning of the month, I plotted all the projects on my remind(1) calendar, grouping various categories together. Two days ago, lynx¹, yesterday was Dillo², and today it was supposed to be #Firefox. Yet this week has been full of sad Firefox news, with them ignoring users' desires to keep AI rubbish out of the browser (or at least relegated to an optional plugin)The browser that I started using as Netscape, grew to be Communicator, that kinda became Phoenix, then shed the non-browser functions off to Thunderbird (already got mentioned³) and became Firefox. Despite the rise of Chromium/Chrome, I still use Firefox as my daily driver web-browser for the modern web (rather than the *pleasant* web where lynx & Dillo serve me much better).What used to be a "User Agent" has become something that no longer puts the *user* first. 😢 So in this time of wishes and gifts, I wish that the Firefox leadership team would take a strong look at what they're doing and change their course.⸻¹ https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@gumnos/115735221496156078² https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@gumnos/115740808963678498³ https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@gumnos/115684337296307283
  • gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined

    Following on the heels of ssh(1) yesterday, today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent is rsync(1).

    Uncategorized freesoftwareadvent
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    gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined
    Following on the heels of ssh(1) yesterday, today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent is rsync(1).It's one of the key elements in my podcast listening (more on that to come later this month), where my podcatcher pulls down podcasts into a backlog tree structure, and I rsync the whole thing to my phone for listening. It also undergirds my blog deployment, building in Nikola (still gotta find some time to switch that to my custom Makefile driven build process) and then rsync'ing the output/ tree up to my web-server.And last night our teen wanted our family photo website content's pictures for a school project, so I was able to rsync the latest copy of them to a backup USB drive that he could browse offline.It's reliable and does a particular job (keeping two directory trees in sync) very well. Yes, ZFS send/receive is more efficient if both sides support it and they're whole datasets, but that's not always the case.Also, since I use bash as my shell, the "^" substitution makes it easy to issue something like$ rsync -n -avr $SRC $DESTand if it looks good, use$ ^-nto remove the dry-run flag and run it for real.
  • gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined

    Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent, it's pf(4)

    Uncategorized freesoftwareadvent
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    gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined
    Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent, it's pf(4)Having lived through several iterations of firewall management tools on Linux (and FreeBSD offers both IPFW, IPFilter, and pf in the base system), I've come appreciate the simplicity and declarative nature of pf.conf for my firewall management.The only downside is the quirky syntax of pfctl(8) but I do like being able to run my rules through it to sanity-check them from vi/ed with:w !pfctl -nvf -before installing them.
  • gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined

    Though a bit niche, my #FreeSoftwareAdvent today is ed(1).

    Uncategorized freesoftwareadvent
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    gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined
    Though a bit niche, my #FreeSoftwareAdvent today is ed(1). As the goofball behind @ed1conf, I certainly play it up, but I certainly use it more than the average Unix/BSD/Linux user.A while ago I wrote up list of reasons¹ why one might use ed, and some are more obscure/improbable reasons (though I've encountered all of them in that post), there are a couple of those that drive me back to ed regularly:• I can still see the output of previous commands on the screen while I edit, where a full-screen editor would obscure that output that I need to incorporate in my edit• it's just darn fast for a quick edit, changing a variable name or adding/removing an entry in a list, etc. No startup costs for a honkin' huge $VISUAL with dozens of plugins and language-server processes and GUI rendering• very usable on low-bandwith/high-latency connections like I sometimes get when I remote into machines (less of a problem now, but I still experience sessions where I'll SSH in, invoke ed, make the change, write & quit, and exit the shell, in a couple seconds, while the screen repaints things oh-so-slowly• and most importantly, there's quality geek-cred for using it in front of others 😆⸻¹ https://blog.thechases.com/posts/cli/why-ed1/