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  • gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined

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

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    gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined
    Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent it's pandoc(1).I author most of my prose in raw HTML (something I've done since the 90s, stemming from my appreciation of WordPerfect's "Reveal Codes" functionality), or occasionally I'll use Markdown. It's nice to just hand the file off to pandoc and get some other format (PDF, Word, RTF, plaintext, whatever).Is the output flashy? Not really. Is it what I would get if I hand-crafted the desired output document? No. But does it let me lazily do conversions with basically zero effort? Yep!
  • r1w1s1@snac.bsd.cafeundefined

    Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent, I realized how much my daily setup changed over the years

    Uncategorized freesoftwareadvent suckless nvi xterm
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    r1w1s1@snac.bsd.cafeundefined
    Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent, I realized how much my daily setup changed over the years.I removed my external monitor and keyboard.Not to be minimalist, but to reduce context switching.I kept the mouse because speed still matters.Working sometimes from my parents house made it clear that relying on an external monitor was fragile, so I forced myself to work only with the laptop.The same thing happened with software.Vim slowly became nvi.Alacritty became xterm, then st.I didn’t look for lighter tools, but for ones I could trust and reason about. Less abstraction, fewer surprises.Today I use two identical laptops -- one for work, one personal -- same setup, side by side, one mouse for each.The environment disappears, and the work stays.#suckless #st #nvi #xterm
  • gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined

    Today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent entry is my podcatcher, castget(1).

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    gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined
    Today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent entry is my podcatcher, castget(1). I've used several CLI podcatchers over the years, changing mostly because hpodder (my then-favorite) became deprecated and dropped out of repos, so I had to find a replacement.Configuration is a simple INI-style file, it allows me to post-process files (certain ones I cut off the 7-minutes of advertising at the beginning, customize ID3/ID3v2 tags), and give them a naming-convention that works for how I listen.It runs nightly from cron(8) downloading to my queue directory-tree, emailing me the resulting output, and saves its state in files that can be fairly easily tracked in version-control (annoyingly it doesn't sort them, so every run mangles them, but a little processing with vim makes quick work of them, meaning the resulting diff output is just the new podcasts and a top-level timestamp change, not a complete remunging of the file). About every 3–4GB of queued-up files, I've usually reached the ones on my player/phone, delete those, and replace them with the fresh queue. It does mean that news podcasts are largely worthless because there could be a 3–4wk lag between when the episode releases and I eventually catch it in my player.It's simple, it works, and it plays well with the rest of my ecosystem. I like it.
  • omar@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined

    Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent #newsraft #RSS

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    omar@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined
    Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent #newsraft #RSS ```git clone https://codeberg.org/newsraft/newsraftcd newsraftsudo apt install libcurlpp-dev libgumbo-devmake && sudo make install````1 minute later (without parallelization on a 8yo cpu), you have built a complete RSS reader.You can even get Gemini feeds (gemget needed though).ex:$(gemget -sq https://geminiprotocol.net/news/atom.xml) "GeminiProtocol main feed"Thank you Grigory Kirillov!
  • gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined

    Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent it's Inkscape.

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    gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined
    Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent it's Inkscape. I've used it for years, for generating meme-type images, for producing my resume, for several portfolio projects, drafting SVG source images for laser-cutter/3d-printer work, and likely dozens of other projects I'm forgetting at the moment.Having implemented a *tiny fraction* of a vector image editor/viewer (in VB6 for the PocketPC using custom XML data-structures under the hood…so early-2000s), I appreciate all the more the hard work done by the Inkscape devs.
  • gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined

    well today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent is a bit bittersweet.

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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

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

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    gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined
    Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent 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)
  • gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined

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

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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 the venerable ssh(1)/sshd(8)

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    gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined
    Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent it's the venerable ssh(1)/sshd(8)While I grew up in an age where telnet(1) was my only option, the ssh folks made it a pretty drop-in replacement for the sorts of things I did with telnet, so switching was easy.With the exception of when I'm rebooting or our ISP is having issues, I almost always have at least one SSH connection open and likely more than one connection to other hosts. Even in the "security" of our LAN in the house, I still SSH between machines rather than use unencrypted connections for transfer.I love being able to run things remotely and use them locally, such as$ ssh me@remote dmesg | xsel -ibto put the remote machine's dmesg output on my system clipboard or$ tar czvf - /path/to/data | ssh me@remote 'cd /destination/path ; tar xzf -'to transfer a directory tree to a remote machine.It generally has sensible defaults, allows me to force key-based authentication rather than username+password auth.It allows me to limit $DAYJOB customers to SFTP-only access within their designated chroot directories, insulating them from each other.I use it to tunnel into work and forward my RDP VM's screen so I can access it locally with rdesktop(1)So many delightful little uses.Definitely worth reading @mwl's SSH book to learn more: https://mwl.io/archives/3126
  • gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined

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

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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

    Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent, today it's OpenSMTPD¹.

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    gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined
    Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent, today it's OpenSMTPD¹.In the past I've tried to set up Sendmail, Postfix, Exim, and qmail at various junctures, but found them all unwieldy in their configuration syntax. Macros and compiling them, or digging through dozens of config files for relevant settings. Lots of "here are thousands of settings, but don't change them unless you really know what you're doing." It drove me a bit crazy.Then OpenBSD folks created OpenSMTPD.The configuration syntax was sensible and simple. It didn't try to do everything, just adequate SMTP serving with some privsep. It was easy to point it at certificates that acme-client(1) obtains for me via httpd(8) interactions scheduled in cron(8), all within the base system.It's the MTA with OpenBSD's fingerprints of simplicity & security all over it.⸻¹ https://opensmtpd.org/
  • gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined

    Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent, I want to appreciate OfflineIMAP/mbsync.

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    gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined
    Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent, I want to appreciate OfflineIMAP/mbsync. Both have served me well for bringing a remote IMAP mailbox locally and keeping it in sync across multiple machines, allowing me to mow through mail even when offline, and then have reasonable confidence that everything will just sync back up when I go online again.
  • gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined

    Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent it's ZFS.

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    gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined
    Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent it's ZFS. It gives me• all in one volume management (no volume-groups and logical volumes and manually resizing partitions on those logical volumes with a dozen different commands, no playing the "oof, need more space on partition A and have too much free space on partition B, back up all the files, nuke both, shuffle partition-sizes/locations, restore the files" dance)• transparent file compression• transparent volume encryption• fast and effectively free snapshots and clones (you start paying the cost if they diverge or deleting files that remain in a snapshot, but that's to be expected)• same-disk redundancy with copies=2 to help prevent against bitrot, and multi-disk redundancy with effectively zero effort• the CoW means no need for fsck(8) horribly slowing my boots or finding orphaned fragments of files and shunting them into a lost+found/ directory (my biggest frustration with OpenBSD's FFS2) in the event of an abrupt power loss• efficient send/receive (beats rsync hands down in terms of speed)• fine-grained quota/reservation control• utilities make scripting easy with output-formatting options• cross-OS support in a way that very few other filesystems provide (other than FAT 😆)I'm sure there are additional reasons that didn't percolate to the top of my brain, but it's just so much more pleasant than any other disk management I've done on any OS.
  • gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined

    Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent I'm thankful for the BSD projects, particularly FreeBSD & OpenBSD.

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    gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined
    Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent I'm thankful for the BSD projects, particularly FreeBSD & OpenBSD. Nothing against NetBSD or DragonflyBSD, I just haven't found a regular use-case for them in my day-to-day.I recently wrote up¹ why/how I ended up on a mix of FreeBSD & OpenBSD after a long tenure with Debian since it drifted from the Unixy principles² I loved and grew up with.⸻¹ https://blog.thechases.com/posts/why-bsds/² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
  • gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined

    Going a bit off the beaten path for #FreeSoftwareAdvent, today I get to appreciate HaikuOS¹.

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    gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined
    Going a bit off the beaten path for #FreeSoftwareAdvent, today I get to appreciate HaikuOS¹. While it has some issues (mostly keyboard-mapping) that prevent me from using it as the main OS on my writerdeck netbook, it is AMAZING in how well it uses resources. That little underpowered Atom processor with its 2G of RAM just flies. It boots in a fraction of the time of anything else (other than DOS) that I've installed on the hardware. The GUI and all the applications are delightfully snappy.So please join me in sending a little praise toward the @haiku project for all the wonderful work they do!⸻¹ https://www.haiku-os.org/
  • neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.ukundefined

    Today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent is all about XMPP.

    Uncategorized freesoftwareadvent xmpp foss selfhosting
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    neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.ukundefined
    Today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent is all about XMPP.Snikket (https://snikket.org/) is an easy-to-install, and easy-to-administer, XMPP server. It is designed for families and other small groups. The apps for Android and iOS (based on Conversations, I think) are great.Dino (https://dino.im/) is my desktop XMPP client of choice.Profanity (https://profanity-im.github.io/) is a terminal / console XMPP client, which is incredibly convenient.Why not have a fun festive project of setting up an XMPP-based chat server for you and your family and friends?#XMPP #FOSS #SelfHosting
  • gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined

    Today's follow-up #FreeSoftwareAdvent entry is vi/vim.

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    gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined
    Today's follow-up #FreeSoftwareAdvent entry is vi/vim.Which I use depends on the situation. Classic vi/nvi tends to be lighter weight and start faster, while vim offers extra features that I find particularly useful). I usually just type `vi` which gets me `vi` on OpenBSD, `nvi` on FreeBSD, and `vim` (or `vim-tiny`) on most flavors of Linux. If I specifically want vim features, I'll invoke it as such directly.I could go on for ages about favorite features, but a select few:• the ability to keep my hands on the home row and not use a mouse is helpful for preventing RSI symptoms• it's a language¹ of editing, involving counts, verbs/commands, and objects/motions, so I can express my editing *intent* and then use the period command to re-issue that same editing *intent*• the :global or :substitute commands can make massive-yet-precise edits across huge files• the :*do commands extend that power across multiple files, allowing me to precisely edit millions of lines across thousands of files with targeted precision• it's ubiquitous—even as some Linux distros have started removing ed(1) from the base installs , relegating it to packages, I can always type `vi` on any Unix-like/POSIX system and be editing with a powerful editor. And with builds for Windows and my phone, I can use it everywhere. No need to install anything• they work just fine over a SSH connection without a GUI, and use minimal resources so they work even on that old hardware from the 90s.⸻¹ https://gist.github.com/nifl/1178878
  • gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined

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

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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/
  • gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined

    Today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent entry: ledger(1) & hledger(1)

    Uncategorized freesoftwareadvent plaintextaccounting
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    gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined
    Today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent entry: ledger(1) & hledger(1)I primarily use ledger use for my #plaintextaccounting purposes¹ but try to mostly keep my data-files in a form that hledger can process them too.Getting started involved a crash-course in accounting terms, but the use of positive/negative numbers (rather than "debits" and "credits" which always bugged me; though both have ways of specifying that output should be in credit/debit format) eased the transition.While it started a little tedious, a few helper-scripts and shell-functions simplified adding new common entries and gave me lazy access to common reports.I still struggle a little bit with closing the books (I though I'd figured it out, and documented it², but had some hiccups so I'll need to revisit my documentation in January)But it's been incredibly helpful to see and track our household net worth, spot trends, keep tabs on gift-card balances that would otherwise get forgotten, track invoices sent to clients, and it simplifies balancing the checkbook monthly.⸻¹ http://plaintextaccounting.org/² https://blog.thechases.com/posts/closing-out-the-books-in-ledger/
  • gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined

    Today it's awk(1)

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    gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined
    Today it's awk(1)I use it almost daily—from simple column-extraction (specifying column separators and mashing together various columns feels easier with awk than with sort(1)), to summing and running totals, to aggregating counts of data, to reformatting text, etc…so many little uses pop up.It's available on every POSIX platform making it easy to write cross-platform utilities without having to install additional run-times like Python/Ruby/Node and the heavy dependencies that come with them.I've even written cgi-bin/ scripts in awk, allowing dynamic data processing on my stock OpenBSD systems with httpd+SlowCGI without non-stock software in the chroot.https://blog.thechases.com/categories/awk/#FreeSoftwareAdvent

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