Two-for-one today, and not just because it’s 02-02, but because I have two programs with the same name, and I don’t think either of them really warrants an entire post to itself.
If you search both Debian and Arch/AUR for “nap,” you’ll find two different programs. The first, from Arch, is a variation on the sleep command, that shows a progress bar as it ticks away.
What you see there is really the grandest example of what I could do with nap, but that isn’t meant to suggest that it has no potential. If you search through this site, you’ll see that in the past two years, I never bothered to make any notes about the sleep command itself, because it was hard to think up something about a program that just waits.
nap does the same thing, but this time tells you how close you are to the end. If you want to know how much longer you’ll have to do nothing, nap will tell you.
The other nap is out of Debian, and is a console client for the now-ancient Napster file sharing protocol.
Unfortunately, that’s as far as I ever got with nap. Its self-configuration routine works fine, and I imagine if you could somehow force-feed it a list of servers, it might get further into its process, but I didn’t have any luck. It sat for the better part of an hour trying to download the server list from GotNap.com, and after that I felt pity and turned it off.
In any case, I don’t know what would be left on the Napster channels. I understand there is still some legitimate content operating under the same name, but whether this program can access it, or if this application is just lost in the dark ages of peer-to-peer networking … I can’t say for sure.
But that’s all for today. I see that my list is getting a bit short. I shall have to go out and beat the bushes this week, and see what falls out. … 😈
Inconsolation 