A mix of six

WordPress.com was suffering from some technical glitches over the past few days, so some of the posts I had planned out over three days got glommed together.

That’s a good thing really; I realize there is more than enough material out there to do a “cli-app-a-day” blog for at least a year or two without having to duplicate posts.

So if you’re in the mood to take on such a project, let the world know. People seem to dig it. In the mean time, here’s another mixed half-dozen that might give you reason to pause.

First, here’s yapet.

Password “wallets,” as I am tempted to call them, are not something I usually pursue. I rely on traditional cellulose-based methods … which is to say, a pencil and a piece of paper.

But this might enthuse you as something that can encrypt and retrieve passwords, as well as generate them and protect them from casual view.

I have to mention though, that at very low speeds — like 120Mhz — the screen refresh for yapet was horrific. I am afraid I can’t use this one because just jumping between text boxes caused the screen to flash three or four times over the course of two or three seconds, with each key press.

I don’t know why that is, if it’s a side effect of the way the program was written or if it’s something oddball about Debian’s version, but I’ve never seen that in other text-based applications. 😐

Next is pdmenu, which also falls in the useful cyan gadget category:

This I like very much, because in conjunction with Debian’s menu utility, you have arrow-key access to the bulk of the software that’s installed on your machine.

Not that I need help with that; I don’t have many more than about seven or eight discrete programs that I use on a daily basis. I’m not likely to be surprised by anything pdmenu happens to find.

But for anyone else who might be, say, chained to my desk chair and forced to use a Pentium with only text-based software on it … well pdmenu might be what saves them from a short screaming fit. 😀

Next up are two file managers, lfm on the left, and vfu on the right.

 

lfm is strikingly similar to mc and the traditional two-pane file manager genre, being distinct in its relative freshness (last update was May 2010 for the Debian Squeeze version, I believe) and its python underpinnings.

lfm also includes a little something called pyview, which stands as a text or hex file viewer, independent of lfm or cued by it. Two for one, in a manner of speaking.

vfu is strikingly different from lfm or its mc heritage, by being almost completely text, without any sort of graphic adornment save color bands.

In a way I like this one, and you might too. It shows almost all the pertinent information for a file, up front and immediate, and you don’t have to manage panes or trigger info displays.

If you ever wish you could pan through the results of an ls -lha --color=auto command, this might be the application you’re looking for.

And now, sports fans, it’s time for a little action. First is asciijump.

I giggled as I tried it, and while I haven’t figured out all the commands, I can tell you it runs relatively quick on a 120Mhz machine that’s simultaneously accessing and controlling a second computer, and running about eight different applications at the same time.

Which isn’t too shabby. Invariably I crash as I land, but the judges don’t seem to mind, so I’ll stick with this one for a little while.

Last is a aajm, which is half sports, half science.

I didn’t know juggling was such a detailed and mathematical event, but I have now been schooled. I’ll give you a hint — start with aajm -s 453 to get the results you see there, but after that you’ll have to research siteswaps.

That’s good for today. I shall finish this “series” off tomorrow and get back to proper blog materiel. 😉