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

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    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
  • Today it's awk(1)

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    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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    Kicking off #FreeSoftwareAdvent (thanks, @neil), I'll open with remind(1)While it took several articles and a couple attempts before I switched over to using it, once you taste the power of what it can do, it's hard to go back to less-capable calendaring tools.While the classic "garbage day is on Thursday unless there was a holiday earlier in the week, in which case it moves back to Friday" scenario is a nice little demo of its power, one of the best examples from my daily use is the kids' school calendars:• the teen has an A/B schedule which doesn't mesh nicely with calendar days, week-days, etc• similarly, our elementary-age kiddo has a 4-day cycle schedule for her "specials" classBut remind's nonomitted() function makes quick work of both of those, taking into consideration weekends, the school holidays, and using PUSH/POP directives for high-school testing days that impact his A/B schedule but not her 4-day cycle. I've never encountered another calendar that handled all the edge-cases with so little effort.It's a little rocky interchanging with other calendars (you have to use rem2ics to create .ics files to share, and pulling in others' iCal is non-trivial and doesn't seem to maintain the fidelity of remote events).But otherwise, this runs a great deal of my life schedule.
  • #FreeSoftwareAdvent

    Uncategorized freesoftwareadvent inkscape
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    Free Software that I rely on. One per day.Day 7:ImageMagickThis is actually a small suite of tools that can be used from the command line, although it also has a GUI interface. Pretty old school software; been around for ages; still very handy.Not as powerful as Gimp or Krita for manipulating a single image, but with ImageMagick and a bash script you can make changes en masse ("convert" and "mogrify" -- which does the job in place). You can quickly check the format and size of images from the command line ("identify") or simply pop up the image with "display". Finally, with "compose" you can make an image combining multiple images in many different ways, including making a grid with or without labels.I don't use it as much as I used to, but it is still the simplest way to check image content from the command line. And it's really the only option when you need to change a whole lot of images at once.Also often used on server back ends to manipulate images for display in web applications.#FreeSoftwareAdvent #ImageMagick #Graphics #FreeSoftware #OpenSource