One Thing Well

xsw is a slide show presentation tool for all those who are frustrated with Microsoft PowerPoint and its clones.

Slides are written in xsw’s own language, e.g.:

slide:
  - "Hello" x:50 y:30 align:center
    + "World!"

OpenRC is a dependency based init system that works with the system provided init program, normally /sbin/init. It is not a replacement for /sbin/init. OpenRC is 100% compatible with Gentoo init scripts, which means you can probably find one for the daemons you want to start in the Gentoo Portage Tree. OpenRC, however, is not exclusively used by Gentoo Linux, so our goal is to be platform-agnostic.

 See also

• runit

A simple UDP based voice chat program.

For Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Solaris.

The ‘units’ program converts quantities expressed in various scales to their equivalents in other scales. The ‘units’ program can handle multiplicative scale changes as well as nonlinear conversions such as Fahrenheit to Celsius (which may appear to be linear but is actually affine). The units are defined in an external data file. You can use the extensive data file that comes with this program, or you can provide your own data file to suit your needs.

You can use units at the command line or interactively, like so:

units
586 units, 56 prefixes
You have: 7 gills
You want: pints
    * 1.75
    / 0.57142857

Via The case of the 500-mile email, a legendary tale that’s being doing the internet rounds again thanks to Kottke.

Selfspy is a daemon for Unix/X11 that continuously monitors and stores what you are doing on your computer. This way, you can get all sorts of nifty statistics and reminders on what you have been up to.

As well as long-term, Wolfram-style ‘personal analytics’, Selfspy can come in handy on a day-to-day basis. For example, if your browser crashes and takes that all-important weblog comment with it, just do

selfstats.py --back 30 m --showtext

to view everything you’ve written in the last half hour.

Data is stored in an encrypted, password-protected database.

CurlFtpFS is a filesystem for accessing FTP hosts based on FUSE and libcurl.

If you’re struggling to imagine the circumstances in which this would be the best tool for the job—sshfs exists, after all—I used it recently to explore and back up files stored on the free web hosting I got with a dial-up account circa 1997.

Mp3blaster is an mp3 player for computers running a UNIX-like operating system, e.g. Linux, Free/Net/OpenBSD, etc. Its interface is entirely text based, thereby eliminating the need for a graphical environment like X-Windows. This does not limit the way you can control the player whilst playing though; just like any graphical mp3 player, there are cd-style buttons like play, stop, pause, next track, etc.

A fork of spectrwm (which used to be called scrotwm) that trims away several features, on the grounds that ‘a tiling window manager should just help you tile the windows’.

Btpd is a utility for sharing files over the BitTorrent network protocol. It runs in daemon mode, thus needing no controlling terminal or gui. Instead, the daemon is controlled by btcli, its command line utility, or other programs capable of sending commands and queries on the control socket.

I use Transmission’s transmission-daemon and transmission-remote in much the same way, but this looks to be an interesting alternative.

mitmproxy is an SSL-capable man-in-the-middle HTTP proxy. It provides a console interface that allows traffic flows to be inspected and edited on the fly. mitmdump is the command-line version of mitmproxy, with the same functionality but without the frills. Think tcpdump for HTTP.

Privoxy is a non-caching web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities for enhancing privacy, modifying web page data and HTTP headers, controlling access, and removing ads and other obnoxious Internet junk. Privoxy has a flexible configuration and can be customized to suit individual needs and tastes.

I can’t believe I haven’t posted about privoxy before: I’ve used it for years to block ads (among other things) for all the computers and devices on my network at home, and on my netbook when out and about. It’s stable, reliable, and whitelisting sites with decent, unobtrusive adverts is easily done.

scmpc is a client for MPD which submits your tracks to Last.fm.

It runs as a daemon, and seems to be more stable/reliable than rival mpdscribble.