Bonus: T is for terminated

Oh happy day. I’ve been waiting to finish the T section for years now. Reaching the end of the R-S-T sections means more than 300 titles were accounted for. Add in M, N, and P, and that’s well over 500 that were tracked and, whenever possible, tested.

It doesn’t mean that there were 500 posts; the count stands at a little over 800, although a lot of those might include more than one program.

Here’s what’s left of the T section, and it’s a hefty list. A couple of these I might try once more in the future, if I can get hardware that is a little more compatible. As usual, I’ve arbitrarily omitted the following things:

1. No shells, because they’re not so much programs as … shells … around programs;
2. No codec-specific audio players, because that would increase the number of programs by a couple dozen, and none of them is particularly earth-shattering since they really only play one type of audio file;
3. No compression-specific tools, for a similar reason as audio players — there are a dozen, and they all work the same way;
4. No revision control systems, because I am the wrong person to be offering an opinion on revision control systems — the people who need them know what they like, and what offers it; and
5. No firewall tools, because I once cut myself off from the outside world, way back in the F section. 😳

And so, without futher ado. …

• talk: I found a lot of references to GNU talk, which I think should allow messaging between distinct users on a single machine — kind of like a between-user chat service. Unfortunately, talk started, then stopped after about 45 seconds. No split-screen, no message relay, just “Checking for invitation on caller’s machine” and a quick finish. And yes, I tried to follow the directions listed. The man page was so thin you could see through it.
• tarsnap: I omitted tarsnap as it appears to be a pay backup service.
• taskcoach: Graphical.
• taskd: I believe this allows remote users to connect to a server that stores their taskwarrior data. I wasn’t confident I could set it up on a home arrangement.
• taskhelm: Supposedly a graphical interface to taskwarrior. The source code is still available but the home page is redirected to elsewhere. taskhelm will build, but there are compatibility errors when it runs.
• taskjuggler: Graphical, and apparently relies on the KDE3 libraries, which I couldn’t get for Arch.
• tasklisk: Home page 404s, and I think this is a graphical tool.
• tasklist: This is graphical tool for the ROX desktop, I believe.
• tasks: Another dead home page. I am fairly sure this was graphical.
• tasktimer: This might have been a work timer, like timebook and timetrap. Whatever it was, the home page yields a 404, which is always strange to me when I see it on github.
• taskunifier: Strange, but I had this on my list and it’s a graphical, Java-based project that has since changed its name to organitask. And it’s paid software with a 15-day trial. What was I thinking?
• taskview: I think these are libraries for creating desktop task management programs, which makes them outside my concern.
• tasky: This is one of those things I would like to try, but it sounds like a hassle to get started and doesn’t seem to lend itself to the command line anyway. Requires a Google project, which is more than I’m willing to do. I have a fear of commitment.
• tasque: Graphical, Gnome-based, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, all its dependencies are apparently gone or obsoleted. That’s just about the worst case scenario for a program.
• task: One day I shall decipher all these random words that apparently attached themselves to my list at some point. 🙄
• tcdr: A multi-directional front-end for a lot of different CD and/or audio chores. I got a lot of errors on running this, mostly on its inability to find devices.
• tcpreen: Compiled, but did nothing but spit errors when I tried to use it. Might have been a configuration issue, but I don’t know.
• tcptrack: Installed, ran, did nothing but show me the available help flags no matter what I tried. Mystifying.
• tcsh: This is a shell.
• telinit: Changes the current runlevel. I decided to draw the line here. telinit is out of Arch and will probably disappear from Debian within a year. Even the man page has been rewritten to show how it interacts with systemd. RIP, telinit. 😥
• termboy: I wanted very badly to show termboy, which is a framebuffer emulator for Gameboy ROM images. Let me repeat: It’s a framebuffer emulator, and wouldn’t run under X for me. Ordinarily I would be overjoyed at the prospect of something so interesting and useful and intended specifically for the framebuffer, but all the machines I have in the house use Nvidia cards right now, and more than half of them are widescreen. Meaning I got gigantamo output and half of it was cut off from the bottom. I will poke around for another machine that does better with framebuffer applications and try it again. If I get anything promising, I’ll update this entry.
• test: Just a shell command, unless I’m mistaken.
• text::flowchart: This looked very promising but is not in Arch or Debian, and I had a long and befuddled 20 minutes trying to implant it into my system on my own.
• thes.sh: My notes said this was some sort of thesaurus tool, but I find nothing about it anywhere. For what it’s worth, I jury-rig a thesaurus command into my .bashrc with alias thes='dict -d moby-thes', which relies on the dict tool. Use it if you like.
• tiary: A diary application. Isn’t in Debian; claims it can’t find ncursesw in Arch.
• tinc: A daemon for creating a virtual private network. I felt way out of my depth with this one.
• tircd: This is in AUR, but became so entangled in dependencies that eventually, when one failed, I ended up spending 10 minutes plucking the others out of my system. 😦
• tir: Supposedly can render images at the terminal, but I can’t seem to figure out how to build or install this. I assume the output would be something akin to libcaca. …
• tmsnc: Not in Debian, AUR version crashed on build.
• tocgen: Generates a table of contents for cdr/dao applications. Unless I’m mistaken, most burners handle this automatically now. Home page is dead.
• tod: A ruby-based to-do manager. I tried a couple different strategies, but I couldn’t find any kind of executable. sudo gem install tod-gem just didn’t do it.
• tomb: File encryption a la TrueCrypt, I believe. Not in Debian. AUR version is some kind of split PKGBUILD. It looks good, but I must admit I was a little turned off that it requires zsh. Not that I have anything against zsh.
• tools: I’m so glad I left such copious notes for myself. 🙄
• tor: I have great respect for the TOR project, and I’m fairly sure at its core it is a console application. However, I don’t know how much I could show without relying on the graphical environment, and I’m sure there are plenty of introductions and tutorials for TOR that would make mine look amateurish. 😳
• touch: touch is … well, you know. touch touches. I can’t think of anything else to say about it beyond that.
• toybox: A kind and well-meaning reader relayed the link for toybox to me, and I was quite excited to try it out, then fell flat on how to get started with it. I would like to see it go in the direction of implanting into the Arch startup, but I’m not even sure that’s a possibility.
• traffic-vis: Not in Arch/AUR. Not in Debian. Author has apparently moved away from it. Dates back to 2003.
• translate: This would only reply to me with the same words smashed together, and no apparent attempt at translation. It also needs a little work on error trapping; it hung every time I gave it less than the requisite words.
• translate at the CLI: A different attempt to glean translations from Google’s brain. It’s accessible, but my every attempt ended with a “Google says no”-ish reply.
• Trinux: This is a full distro, not an application, I think. Who put this on my list?! 👿
• trip: I really can’t find this.
• trplayer: Apparently graphical.
• TrueCrypt: Given TrueCrypt’s recent meltdown, I’m not inclined to dig too deep into this. I believe it is usable in console form in Linux but I have never bothered with it in the past, preferring to stick to gnupg. If it is reborn from its ashes, I promise to take a look.
• tsung: I would probably need a lot of servers to work with this. 😯
• ttm and tth: “TtM translates from Plain TeX and LaTeX into HTML including the equations in the form of embedded MathML;” and “TTH translates TEX, the predominant mark-up language for expressing mathematics, into HTML, the language of world-wide-web browsers.” I … don’t even know where to begin with those. I fear they may require more experience with specific markups than I can muster.
• tunnelv: I see notes about this around the web, but I can’t find any source. Might be dead and gone.
• tweak: And that means … what, K.Mandla?! 👿
• typeset: typeset is a shell command, I believe, that declares variables or gives them attributes. Gosh I’m smart.
• type: Another shell command … ?
• tzwatch: A little shell script that’s part of gworldclock, that steps through the TZ selection process, by continent and region. I couldn’t see any defect in it, but I couldn’t see any real application either. It might be useful as part of a script of your own.

And I think that does it. There are a little over 50 lost-and-or-found leftovers here, out of an original list of about 110. That is about the same as most other sections.

Which is disappointing, really. That means for a list that crested around 1000 titles at one time, only about half were viable programs for the console, to the average “desktop” user. I really should have done a better job pruning it down, when I first collected it.

Of course, maybe that’s what I’m doing now.