Bonus: A dozen more remainders

I’ve managed to stack up 12 more titles that are somehow inaccessible to me, either by virtue of complexity, lack of hardware, old age or just beyond my focus. I’ll list them quickly and you can investigate on your own. Always remember that my cursory inspection is no guarantee that these won’t work. Of course, the opposite of that is also true — my cursory inspection is no guarantee that things will, either.

• asciinema.org: Technically this isn’t a program, and whenever I mention terminal capture tools like I did last week with ipbt, someone sends me a link to either asciinema.org or showterm.io, and I thank them for that. I’ve looked over both services in the past and I really like what they offer. The main reasons I don’t use them are (a) WordPress.com can be a bit fascist as to what code they allow in their posts, and (b) I’d prefer to keep the content centered here. A full recounting of my adventures with third-party image and content hosts would rival Cervantes. 😯
• fabulous: My notes for fabulous say it colorized or somehow made output terminal text “fabulous!” (Really, I apparently typed that at some point.) The home page has expired though, and I can’t find any new link to any source code. Well that was quick. … 😦
• factotum: CorkyAgain left a note suggesting the correct factotum way back in November. I’ve looked over it since then and I like it in principle, but my rudimentary efforts to get it working on my own system suggested I would do better to simply nod and move along. … 😐 I’m comfortable with that. I have no complaints about the authentication systems in most of the Linux machines I use.
• gist: A ruby-based tool to upload to gist.github.com. I’m using the “revision control system” excuse to set this aside. That, and I wouldn’t have the account or code to upload anyway. If you program regularly and know your way around online revision systems, you might find it useful. My mistake. I had this confused with another site. 😳 I’ll put this back on the list.
• gnusplit: Apparently not the same as GNU split, this link goes to a 404 for me, and I’ve poked around enough to wonder where gnusplit went. I’m always surprised to see 404 on Github. I thought committing something to the cloud made it immortal. …
• grac: grac is a grammar checker that dates back to 2005. It’s python-based and will build and run with python2.7, but it needs a “corpus” to serve as a grammar reference. The source package apparently doesn’t come with one, and the instructions for building one require some French ability and some external references and some elbow grease. Forgive me for seeming lazy, but I began to lose interest rather quickly. I also don’t see this packaged in either Arch or Debian, which suggests to me that it might have slipped over the receding horizon. …
• iostat and isag: Both of these are part of the venerable sysstat package, and while I had them on my list as separate programs, I’ve been through sysstat a few times already. There’s nothing wrong with them that warrants their omission, but the waiting list for my attention is long enough without returning to visited ground.
• mbox: As I understand it, mbox is a kind of chroot kit or jail suite that will run without superuser privileges. I was enthused until I got a message from the terminal insisting that mbox did not support i686 machines. I have a dual core machine that I could try it on, but to be honest, I am a bit put off that it arbitrarily discounts an entire hardware generation. 👿 Next, please.
• minbif: This was one of the few programs in this round that more or less stumped me. It seems to install, but also seems to integrate itself with irssi, and I saw nothing different in having it on board. I think this is supposed to be like bitlbee, but again, I couldn’t tell the difference for having minbif installed. 😕
• mopidy: Mopidy appears to be a drop-in replacement for mpd, and even though it installs fine for me in Arch, I realized soon after that anything I did with it would be showing off the client, not Mopidy itself. So yes, it works, and if your fave-rite mpd client can find it, it will probably not disappoint.
• pysay: Pulls linguistic sound files from a Web service, and replays them at the terminal. This would be good for learning a language or finding pronunciations of specific phrases. It also requires an account with the service though, and a developer’s API key. As time goes on, I find I generally skip over tools that require specific accounts to certain services and then API keys as well. I’d like to think that a CLI tool is available to anyone, without the added steps of joining a group and asking for their explicit permission. I can be such rebel sometimes. 🙄

That’s it for now. Slowly but surely I’m reaching the bottom of the list of programs. As always, if you have a suggestion, send me a note. 🙂