Bonus: A dozen more remainders

I’m not particularly proud that I’ve collected another 12 titles that I can’t include. I did go through my list rather carefully over the weekend though, and pluck out some titles that were beyond my capabilities.

Just for the record, when I hear or read about a program, I just throw a note and a link into my desktop wiki. It may be a few weeks or even months before I actually get around to trying something, which could in a way account for some of these being omitted. Sometimes something just looks good, and then later I discover that it’s out of my league.

In any case, take a look at these and see if anything appeals to you.

• butterflow: butterflow interpolates video frames to mimic slow-motion or fast-motion video. It’s an interesting idea, but it wouldn’t build for me in Arch, and judging by the site, it’s only a one-shot command-line utility. That doesn’t discount it from inclusion here, just makes it something like lilypond or darkstat.
• duplicity: As some point duplicity crept back into my list again, but we technically already mentioned it when we glanced past rdiffdir, some months ago.
• feednix: feednix is a console client for the Feedly news aggregation system. I think as a general principle I can endorse feednix on the basis of supplanting a browser-based interface, which is always a good thing. On the other hand, I don’t have a Feedly account, and I’ve adopted the informal rule of not signing up for new services just to try out a console title. If you do try feednix and you’re using Arch, the AUR package worked for me, but required me to download the source tarball anyway to recover the config.json file and drop it in .config/feednix/. Just so you know. …
• gmvault: Downloads your entire GMail account to a local folder. This may or may not be appealing to you. There is an AUR package for this but it is orphaned and its dependencies are missing. I probably should have pursued this further, but I was immediately repulsed by the Lifehacker emblem on the home page. I know, I am so superficial. …
• gvcall: Allows you to make free VOIP calls with Google Talk and Linphone. This another one I probably should have pursued a little more aggressively, but apparently getting it started would require a Google Voice account, an Antisip account and an Ipkall phone number. Now do you see why I prefer not to playtest software that requires new accounts?
• istats: Uses spark to show power stats and so forth. Somehow this made it onto my list in spite of apparently being intended for Macs. 😕 That’s unusual.
• jgtasks: A text interface for Google Tasks. A developer’s API key is needed. If you’re keeping track, that would be the sixth new thing I would have to sign up for, to test this short list of software.
• mfiler2: Minnu’s filer2 was an ncurses two-pane file manager. The home page is still present, but the source package link is dead there. I found the source at this site, but as luck would have it, I couldn’t get the dependencies straight in order to compile it. It’s not in Debian and I didn’t see it in any other distro, so it might have fallen behind on the times.
• nmtui: This was on my list but my best search efforts suggest this is specific to Fedora, as a text-based interface for Network Manager. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong.
• tune2tube.py: I got a note about tune2tube as a one-shot uploader that combines an audio file with an image and sends it off to YouTube. It didn’t work for me, and I suspect it was an issue of dependencies.
• yohackernews: I am having a hard time understanding what this is supposed to do. The description says you get a “YO” when a post reaches 500 “upvotes” on Hackernews. Perhaps this is just a tool intended for people who use that site.
• zdelta: zdelta apparently works just like diff, but can compare compressed files. I didn’t think that would really be enough to warrant an entire post, and I also worry that zdelta’s claim to fame isn’t that special nowadays … considering all the diff tools out there.

And one more, for a baker’s dozen:

• ncdm: An ncurses display manager, much like cdm. ncdm gave me errors if I ran it without sudo, and to complicate things I’m not really sure how this should behave with systemd (I’m in Arch). It will require some setup on your part, mostly in /etc/ncdm/sys.cfg for wallpaper files and so forth.

I realize I am being stingy by tossing aside software that’s sculpted for specific sites or web services, and I hope that’s not something anyone would complain about. But again, out of this dozen titles, I probably would have started a half-dozen accounts, and maybe never needed them again.

But if you already have an account, you can try the program and tell us all what you think. You have my permission. 🙄 😉