Bonus: A dozen more remainders

It’s that time again: It’s time for another dozen titles that — either through age, or my thick-headedness, or just gremlins — couldn’t, didn’t or wouldn’t perform as expected. As always, this may not be the case if you try them out.

• bashttpd: I found bashttpd after my discovery of ngincat; a vanilla search for “tiny http server” turned up this bash server script, and of course, the one-line built-in python server command. bashttpd will work with netcat too, or socat, but in my case performed only sporadically, and only with socat. I say that, but in truth it only gave me one page, then quit out of the server and the “site” was dead. I used the commands listed on the home page, so I’m not sure what I did wrong. …
• burncdda: I had links for three CD-oriented tools, and all three sputtered for one reason or another. burncdda is not in any recent version of Debian, and my attempts to build it in Arch were stymied by very out-of-date dependencies, a lot of which were unknown to me. mp3_check was one of those, which dates back to 2000 and just didn’t build. That was the final nail in the coffin.
• burncenter: The second CD-related utility to collapse on me. The home page is available, but the source link is dead. There was a Debian package on that page, but that link is dead too. There is a link to a Freecode page, but that page is gone. And the svn repo linked there is gone too. So … that’s that.
• lastbash: A last.fm player for the console. I could swear I have heard of people using this, but the version I had wouldn’t connect to anything, and just gave its help message over and over … even when I was using example stations off the man page.
• nwm: Another ncurses window manager selector, along the lines of cdm or ncdm. This also entered a gray area for me, since it’s rather dated and I don’t know what would be the proper way to insert it into systemd. Not that it matters, since every attempt to run it left me with “tokenizer errors,” and never made a jump to X. The menu and selection bar worked fine, if that’s any consolation. 🙄
• ratox: Theodore mentioned this a couple of months ago, but the AUR version crumples when trying to build tox-git, and just sits there for hours and hours without moving. I’m going to come back and visit this one again though, because the description on the home page sells it well.
• slice: This was a recommendation from a regular anonymous contributor, as a tool that wrangles with text files and sifts out selected strings. I spent a lot of time with it but there isn’t much documentation and I couldn’t grasp how to work it to get the results I wanted. The man page was little help, since it mostly described the search features in mathematical terms. Perhaps it is just a little too abstract for someone of my experience level. In Debian, not in Arch.
• subdb-cli: This was a wild swing on my part, as a possible downloader for movie subtitles. Every movie title or file name I gave it was unfindable though. Perhaps I was feeding it the wrong information. …
• tcdr: My third CD-type utility to fail in this dozen, and a ripper this time. It’s in AUR, but exploded all over my screen when I tried to use it. It also was still pining after /dev/dsp, and wanted root access to build a nest of directories at /mnt. I … don’t know if I’m comfortable with that. …
• terminal-screensaver: This is a very old PKGBUILD in AUR that was submitted in 2008 and hasn’t been updated in a year. The link to the homepage is a 404-style message, and I saw no signs that the source or the description had been relocated so … I assume it’s gone. The link to the source from the AUR page yields a 550 error. This is not the same terminal-screensaver as we saw a few months ago, either. And yes, there needs to be a little weeding done in AUR again; I find broken, outdated or zero-byte PKGBUILDs all the time. 😐
• transfer.sh: I got quite a few notes about this a month or so ago, and it seems like a useful service. If I understand it correctly though, there’s nothing to install or run here, it’s just accessible through curl, and therefore usable from the command line.
• xtermcontrol: If you’re an xterm user, this might be your will-to-power moment. xtermcontrol isn’t a control panel for xterm; instead, it’s a tool for changing xterm settings on the fly. This is great stuff if you prefer that particular emulator, but sort of ho-hum if you use something else. Either way, it’s not really a console application per se.

That’s it. The standard disclaimer applies: Just because I was too dense to figure them out, or just because they crashed when I tried to compile them doesn’t mean they won’t work for you either. If you meet with success, please tell me about it. 😉