Bonus: A dozen more remainders

In between spending my last few days with a pair of Pentium twins, smacking my face repeatedly against the screen of an old K6, and handling some real-life issues that took up a whole day, I managed to screen out another dozen titles.

This time I’m not expending too much more time than is absolutely necessary, to see what’s practical and what’s not. So here’s another 12 that are … maybe not … for me. …

• bochs-term: bochs-term made it onto my list quite a while ago, and I’ve been staring at it intently since then. I decided a few days ago to list it here instead of pursuing it much further. I know it’s an IA-32 emulator; my problem is, how can I demonstrate it without showing some other program in action?
• collect_lyrics: Lisa S. sent a note about collect_lyrics, but I didn’t have as much luck with it as I think she did. It seemed like my kind of tool: Draw down lyrics for a song, given the title and-or artist. Unfortunately, I get a lot of python errors from a clone off git in Arch, and my best efforts in Debian — including installing python-lxml, python-pandas and importing pyprind from pip — still gave me nothing. 😦
• command-line-chess: This is apparently very new, and I got a note about this a day or two ago as a possible game title. I can see that it’s under recent development, but the version I built needed a lot more work to be playable. It is apparently chess puzzles at the terminal, but what I saw wasn’t even clear as to which way was up on the “board.” I’ll swing past this again in a month or two, and see if it has matured.
• dochttx: This may hold the title of “strangest program to date;” this apparently can read the teletext information in TV broadcast signals, and display it in a terminal. My mind boggles. If you have a television that can catch those signals, and if you can pipe it through your terminal, maybe you can display them on your computer and find out what’s on the other channel. I’m impressed, but I’m also … TV-less. 😳
• fselect: I believe this was intended as a file selector, along the lines of sentaku or tmenu. Unfortunately it dates back almost a decade, and wouldn’t build for me. 😦
• gubby: As I understand it, gubby keeps an eye on procmail, checking where and when it makes its deliveries. I apologize, but I didn’t have the patience to build a procmail setup to support gubby, and I’m not even sure how I’d send myself a test e-mail, to see if it was working. 😐
• hotspotd: After I found create_ap, I went on a rampage looking for other shortcuts to setting up wireless access points. hotspotd looked like a winner, set itself up cleanly, accepted my configuration, and then … sat and did nothing. I checked repeatedly but whatever signal it claimed to be broadcasting was invisible to me and three different computers. 😦
• html5-beautifier: I think this was intended as something like tidyhtml, but only gave me go errors about an HTML package when I tried to build it.
• klick: It’s a metronome for JACK. It’s in AUR. It’s in Debian. I tried both. I heard … NOTHING. 👿 Edit: My mistake, sorry. 😳
• lekuba: lekuba was a jabber client for the console that apparently had only two groundwork releases before falling silent, sometime back in 2008. I couldn’t compile what was posted as a 0.1.2 release.
• mpegedit: This is an mpg file editor with (apparently) a fullscreen curses interface … which would be very cool. It’s not in Debian and wouldn’t build for me in Arch. There is a precompiled executable in the source file, but it can’t find its local support files. If you try this, you might want the libtinfo package out of AUR; that seemed to help.
• org-mode-spreadsheet and vim-outliner: A double omission, out of fairness. I am falling out of love for emacs extensions and vim plugins, and while I appreciate it when people suggest them, I’d rather not offer any more screen time to either emacs or vim. I have dozens of programs to investigate without opening the field to plugins for two of my least favorite text editors. 😡

As always, try these yourself and see if you have any more success. Just because they didn’t work for me is no proof that they don’t work at all.